The Baby He Would Not Take Home

Over the next two days I thought it was going to be all right. I did. I let myself believe it. Brynn was wrung out but she lit up when June nursed. Cole brought a car seat, still in the box, and set it in the corner of the room, and I thought, there, see, he bought a car seat, this is a man getting ready to take his family home.

The box never got opened.

On the third morning I came back from the cafeteria with coffee and I heard them before I saw them. Not yelling. That was the thing that scared me. Quiet. Cole was sitting in the vinyl chair by the window and Brynn was in the bed with June asleep on her chest, and Cole was talking in that low flat voice of his, the voice he used when he had already decided and was just informing you.

He was saying they were too young. He was saying he was not ready to be chained to a kid for eighteen years. He was saying Brynn could put her up for adoption if she wanted, there were agencies, people drove around looking for babies like June, and it would be a clean thing, better for everyone, and he had already looked into it.

Brynn was crying without making noise, the tears just running down into June’s blanket.

And then he saw me in the doorway with the two coffees, and he did not even lower his voice. That is the part I come back to. He did not have the decency to be caught. He said, Nora, good, talk sense into her. We are not doing this. We are not taking it home.

It. He called her it.

I set the coffees down because my hands had started to shake. I said, Cole, that is your daughter. And he said, no, she is a mistake, and mistakes are not the same as daughters, and I need you to be an adult about this for once instead of acting like everything is a church play.

I had spent thirty-four years being an adult about everything so that he would not have to be. And in that hospital room I finally understood that it had never once worked. It had only ever taught him that there would always be me, standing behind him, to catch what he dropped.

So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I caught her.