The Night My Mother Answered The Wrong Knock

What We Almost Lost

Somewhere around four in the morning, with both babies finally asleep and Sara drifting off under the hum of the monitors, Eric and I stepped out into the hallway to let her rest.

“I’ve wanted to call you a hundred times,” he admitted, leaning against the wall with his eyes half closed. “Every week for eight months I picked up the phone and put it back down because I didn’t know how to say I was sorry without it turning into the same fight all over again.”

“I did the same thing,” I said. “I just never told anybody.”

“Mom’s been quietly buying two of everything since April,” he said, shaking his head. “Two sleepers. Two bibs. A whole spare bag packed in Sara’s closet since before either of us would admit we missed each other. She never said a word about it to either of us. She just kept getting ready for the day we’d need it.”

“She got her wish tonight,” I said. “In the worst possible way.”

“Or the only way that was ever going to work,” Eric said. “I don’t think either one of us was going first on our own, Laurie. It took Thelma showing up early and scaring both of us half to death to finally get us in the same hallway again.”

We stood there a while longer, not saying much else, just being brother and sister again in the plainest sense of the word, and I thought about that sixty acres of ground our father spent his whole life on, and how small it suddenly looked measured against a hospital hallway at four in the morning with both our daughters asleep twenty feet away from each other.

“We’ll figure the farm out,” I said. “Together this time. However makes sense for both our families.”

“Together,” Eric agreed. “I’m done doing this the other way.”