“She’s taking the train from Bexley. The kids are on their way, too.”
I leaned forward to tell my cabbie the new destination and held on as he pulled abruptly to the side of the road.
“I’m glad you made it back in time,” Caroline said, her voice in my ear as the cab swung into a U-turn. “How was the trip?”
“Fine,” I replied without hesitation, and was hit by a wave of motion sickness from the car’s abrupt change in direction. “I’m glad I made it back in time, too.”
The drive to the hospital took ages, the traffic heavy, a battalion of honking New Yorkers inching along the Cross Island Parkway. Thirty minutes in, my phone battery died, and I sat back against the seat and closed my eyes. I tried to doze, but my heart thudded against my chest. An image of the boy Rory kept rising before me like a vision, a ghost.
When finally I arrived at the hospital, it was past 9:00 p.m. A bored receptionist tapped Renee’s name into her computer.
“Looks like she’s in the maternity ward,” she said. “Out of surgery.”
“Surgery?”
“C-section.” Tap-tap-tap. “I don’t see a room number. You’ll have to ask on the ward.”
But on the maternity ward, I couldn’t find an on-duty nurse, and so I wandered, peeking into rooms, pulling my suitcase behind me, with an increasing sense of worry. Where was my family? Had I missed them all?
And then at last I found her.
My sister was asleep, propped up with pillows, her face pale and calm. Caroline sat beside the bed, her two hands holding Renee’s right, her head bowed as though dozing or praying. Noni, Lily, Beatrix, and Louis sat in chairs scattered around the room. They were all asleep, breathing lightly, legs stretched before them. And there, within arm’s reach of Renee, was a small cot and inside it the compact bundle of a baby. The sight of the small, delicate head, the shock of black hair, even darker than Renee’s, delivered to me a hot shiver that moved from my center and extended out to the tips of my fingers and toes. I loved him, immediately and completely. Almost, I imagined, like a mother.
“Caroline?” I said quietly, and she lifted her head.
“Fiona,” she said. “You made it!”
I bent down to hug my sister. Since her split from Nathan, Caroline had taken to rubbing lilac-scented oil into her skin—on the pulse points, as she called them—and it gave her a lovely fragrance, as though a summer garden hung around her neck. I lingered now in the hug to enjoy it. I realized I was trembling.
“Fi, are you okay?” Caroline asked.
“Yes, yes,” I said. “Lots of traffic. Long drive.”
“Your conference?”
“Yes, it was fine, all fine,” I answered, looking to the floor.
Our voices had awakened Renee, who began to stir. She opened her eyes and said with a sense of urgency, “Where is he?”
I felt an immediate disorientation. How did Renee know? Had I mumbled it on the phone to Caroline? Was the information so dangerously compelling that it appeared on my face? In that brief moment of Renee’s waking, I accepted that already my sisters knew about Rory, and I felt only relief. Here in this hospital room, filled with everyone who had loved Joe, we would discuss what to do about his son. This was not a secret I would carry alone into the future. I began to formulate the words, to start the answer: Yes, I know where he is.
But Caroline spoke first. “He’s right here, Renee. Here’s Jonah.”
The cot was beside the bed. Of course, I realized. The baby.
And the room shook and swirled around me, the floor dropped, and into that empty space I threw Luna, her son, the house on the island. I threw it all down, away from my sisters, my nieces and nephews. Away from my mother. I threw it all into the bottomless dark, and the linoleum tiles closed up again, shielding Joe’s son from view, protecting him from us and us from him. It was a burial of sorts. A final good-bye.
Renee looked into the cot and inhaled sharply. “Oh, isn’t he gorgeous?” she said, her voice sleepy but full. She gently stroked his small head.
I leaned forward to hug Renee. “He takes after his mother,” I said.
Beatrix and Lily began to stir, each opened her eyes and issued tired half smiles. These girls. These young women. They were twenty-four years old, the age at which I began The Last Romantic. When I thought about it, which was rarely now, the blog seemed almost quaint, idealistic, innocent. What would Lily and Beatrix do with those experiences? Did they ask the same questions now that I asked then? I suspected the answer was no. They were young, fearless women. Intoxicating. Sometimes I wondered what they thought of us. Did they look at Noni, at Caroline and Renee and me and wonder about the dilemmas that had plagued us? Did they wonder why we’d worried so much about children and work and relationships? My nieces assumed that the world was designed for them, the way they wished it to be. They took, they didn’t ask. And they made it look so simple. I wondered why we had never done the same.
I was watching Beatrix: her long hair streaked with pink, a pierced nose, her cheeks high and freckled, and suddenly she locked her hazel eyes with mine. She issued a wide yawn and then winked.
And beside her was Louis—still asleep, it appeared. His mouth open, a gentle rhythm to his breath. Maybe he was faking it, but I didn’t think so. I knew what fake looked like. Someone should wake him up, I thought. Wake him up so he doesn’t miss anything. Wake him up so he knows how much we need him here.
“Hello, Skinners!” It was Nathan, holding two coffee cups, a candy bar stuck in the front pocket of his shirt. Louis startled with his father’s entry, blinked and yawned with a wide, luxuriant stretch. Nathan placed one of the cups on the table next to Caroline, and she looked up at him with gratitude.
“Noni, it’s good to see you,” Nathan said, crossing the room to hug our mother. She and Nathan had a better relationship now, after the divorce, than during his long relationship with Caroline. Now Noni could appreciate him as a scientist, a teacher, a father, rather than as the man who took from Caroline the possibilities that her life might have otherwise contained were it not for children, home, his career, the goddamn frogs. Now Nathan was simply Professor Duffy, an intelligent, middle-aged white man with a poochy belly and silvery gray hair streaking his temples. Almost like a son.
I was considering all this—Nathan and my fearless nieces and mothers and sons—when Jonathan walked through the door. None of us had seen or spoken to him during Renee’s pregnancy. He’d been traveling throughout the winter, Renee said, and would send the occasional e-mail but these contained only the barest details about his life and cursory questions about hers. He never mentioned the baby, she’d told me, or his impending fatherhood.
Standing in the open doorway, Jonathan looked sheepish, wiry and old. Older than I remembered him, his hair thinning on top so that the pale skin of his scalp reflected the yellow light.
“Renee,” he said, and it was a small hiccup of a sound.
Renee blinked once, twice. None of us said a word.
“Is that . . . ?” He approached the cot. “Can I . . . ?” He looked to Noni for a response, as though the family matriarch controlled the babies here.
But it was Renee who answered. “Yes, you can pick him up. I named him Jonah.”