while I stayed behind with Felix in my arms. I run a convulsing hand along his hair. I touch the bristle of his face. I lick my thumb and wipe at a swatch of fluid above his eye. I press my lips to his forehead and cry.
This is not the way I want to remember him, here on this aseptic bed with tubing stuck into his arms and throat and nose; pieces of tape plastered to his face; the machines’ grating beeps and bleeps, reminding me that if it weren’t for them, Nick would already be dead. The appearance of his face has changed, and suddenly I realize that this is not my Nick. A terrible mistake has been made. My heart leaps. This man’s face is covered with contusions and is swollen so that it’s no longer recognizable, not to me, not to his hapless wife, another woman who will soon be informed her husband is dead. They’ve brought some other man into this room—mistaking him for Nick—and his wife, this poor man’s wife, is now wandering the monochrome hospital halls wondering where he is. Perhaps he, too, is a Nick, but my Nick is somewhere else with Maisie. I stare at this torpid body before me, at the bloodstained hair, the pale, ductile skin, at the clothing—Nick’s clothing, I thought only moments ago, but now I see it’s an insipid blue polo shirt that any man could wear—that’s been pruned from his body. This is not my Nick; I know this now. I swivel quickly and scurry through the curtain partition to find someone, anyone, so I can proclaim my discovery: the dying man on that hospital bed is not my husband. I stare a completely bemused nurse right in the eye and demand to know what they’ve done with my husband.
“Where is he? Where is he?” I beg, latching on to her arm and joggling it up and down.
But of course it is Nick. Nick is the man on that hospital bed. My Nick, and now everyone in the whole entire hospital is looking at me with pity, feeling thankful that they’re not me.
When I’m done they lead me to another room, where Maisie sits on a hospital table beside my father, fervently filling him in on the fundamentals of her ballet teacher, Miss Becca: she’s pretty, she’s nice. The hospital staff has told me Maisie is fine, and yet there’s a great wave of relief that washes over me at seeing her with my own eyes. My legs buckle at the knees, and I latch on to the door frame, telling myself it’s true. She really is fine. I’m feeling dizzy, the room orbiting around me as if I am the sun and it is the earth. Felix is there in my father’s grip, and in Maisie’s hand is a lollipop, cherry red, her favorite, which dyes her tongue and lips bright red. There is a bandage on her hand—just a small laceration, I’m assured—and on her face is a smile. Big. Bright. Naive. She does not know that her father is dead. That he is dying as we speak.
Maisie turns to me, still bubbly from an afternoon at ballet. “Look, Mommy,” she says, “Boppy’s here,” which is her nickname for my dad, and has been since she was two years old and couldn’t enunciate her r’s or her g’s. She sets a sticky, lollipop-coated hand on his, one that is three times the size of hers. She’s completely indifferent to the tears that plummet from my eyes. Her thin legs dangle from the edge of the examining table, one of her shoes lost in the maelstrom of the crash. The knee of her tights is torn. But Maisie doesn’t mind. One of her pigtails has come loose, too, half of her corkscrew curls trailing her shoulders and back while the rest is held secure.
“Where’s Daddy?” she says, squinting her eyes past me to see if Nick is there. I don’t have it in me to tell her what’s happened to Nick. I envision her sweet, innocent childhood thwarted with three words: Daddy is dead. She stares out the door frame, waiting for Nick to appear, and I see her pat her tiny stomach and tell me she’s hungry. So hungry she could eat a pig, she says. A horse, I nearly correct her for the erroneous cliché, but then realize it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore now that Nick is dead. Maisie’s eyes are hopeful, her smile wide.
Until they aren’t.
A Code Blue is announced over the loudspeaker system, and at once the hallway is a flurry of activity. Doctors and nurses go running by, a crash cart getting shuttled down the linoleum floors. It’s loud, the wheels thunderous against the floor, the items in the cart rattling in their metal drawers. At once, Maisie cries out in fright, bounding from the table and dropping to her knees, gathering herself into a ball on the floor. “He’s here,” she whines, and as I, too, fall to my knees and gather her into my arms, I find her shaking. My father’s and my eyes meet.
“He followed us here,” Maisie cries, but I tell her no, that Daddy isn’t here, and as I fold Maisie into my arms and stroke her bedraggled hair, I can’t help but wonder what Maisie means, He followed us, and why, in a matter of seconds, she’s gone from being hopeful of seeing Nick to scared.
“What is it, Maisie?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”
But she only shakes her head and closes her eyes tight. She won’t tell me.
BEFORE
Clara stands before the kitchen sink in a striped crewneck T-shirt that surges at the center. Our baby. The shirt has a stretchy look to it, like spandex, so that it lies smoothly over the bump. From the back, you wouldn’t know she was pregnant. Her dark denim jeans hug tightly to her curves, that stretchy elastic panel that holds our baby in place hidden beneath the extended length of the T-shirt. But from the side is a different story. From Clara’s side, where I stand watching, completely hypnotized as she scrubs a Brillo pad along the surface of a frying pan, wiping away bits of cooked-on egg, her midsection swells to an unreasonable expanse, bumping into the sink. Red Tabasco sauce trails along the banded stripes of the T-shirt, over the hump that is always in the way.
Soon her maternity shirts will no longer fit.
We’ve begun to guess that she’s got a linebacker tucked away inside her womb, a pro boxer, a budding defenseman for the Blackhawks hockey team. Something along those lines.
Clara sets down the Brillo pad and rubs at the small of her back, arching from the weight of our baby. Then she picks up the pad and gets back to work on the frying pan. A haze of hot air rises from the waterspout and into the air, making Clara sweat. These days, she is always hot. Her legs and feet swell like a middle-aged woman fighting the ugly effects of gravity, ripe with edema, so that she can no longer stuff her feet into her shoes. Along the armpits of the striped T-shirt, the blue begins to yellow with sweat.
But still, I stare. My Clara is exquisite.
“Jackson,” I say as I force my eyes away from my wife and gather the breakfast dishes from the table: Maisie’s unfinished cereal bowl, my clean plate. I dump the crumbs into the trash can and load the dishwasher with the bowl and plate, a spoon.
“Too trendy,” Clara replies, eyes never swaying from the frying pan or the hot water that falls into the stainless-steel sink from a faucet I’ve recently replaced. Our home, a turn-of-the-century Craftsman, is incessantly a work in progress. Clara wanted a newer home; I wanted one with character, personality. A soul. I won, though oftentimes—my evenings and weekends consumed with fixing things—I wish I hadn’t. “He’ll forever be one of three Jacksons everywhere he goes,” she says, and I relent to this, knowing it’s true.
I try again. “Brian,” I say this time, knowing I haven’t met a Brian in recent years who was younger than twenty-five. My Brian will be the only Brian who’s still a kid, while the rest are thirtysomething, balding businessmen.
She shakes her head. “Too conventional,” she says. “Might as well call him William or Richard or Charles.”
“What’s wrong with Charles?” I ask, and peeking at me with her grassy green eyes, Clara smiles. Charles is my middle name, given to me
