The Glass I Stood At for My Son

How The Door Got Locked

Nine days earlier Lynette had sat at Brianna’s kitchen table and made what she called a plan.

Brianna was thirty-eight weeks and tired in that heavy, slow way. When her mother talked, she mostly looked at the table.

Lynette had a yellow legal pad. She wrote down who would drive, who would stay at the house, who would call who.

She wrote her own name at the top of the list of people who would be in the room. She did not write mine anywhere on it.

“It is overwhelming in there,” she said, not to me, about me. “She needs calm. She needs her mother.”

She clicked her pen twice. “You can be useful in the waiting area.”

I was twenty-four. I had been with Brianna almost three years.

I had painted the little room at the back of her apartment a soft green. I put the crib together twice because I did it wrong the first time and would not leave it wrong.

I had made every appointment I could get off work for. I sat in the plastic clinic chair holding the ultrasound pictures like they were money.

But I did not know the words Lynette knew. I did not know that a hospital keeps a list, and that the list is whatever the laboring mother says it is.

I did not know that an exhausted girl in hard labor will mostly say whatever her mother says, just so her mother will stop talking.

I did not know you could be a baby’s father and still be, on a clipboard at a county hospital in southern Illinois, officially nobody.

The call came in while I was on the route, out past the edge of the county filling a farm tank in the cold.

It was Brianna’s number, but it was Lynette’s voice. “Her water broke. We are going in. Do not speed.”

Then she hung up before I could ask anything. I set the hose back on the reel with my hands shaking and I drove to that hospital faster than she told me to.

I ran in from the parking garage in my work coat with grime still on the cuff. I had rehearsed, in the truck, every stupid thing I was going to say to my son.

I found that out at the front desk at 9:40 at night.

The woman at the desk was kind about it. That was almost the worst part.

She looked at her screen, then looked at me the way you look at somebody you are about to disappoint. She said the support person on file was the patient’s mother.

“I cannot send you back without the patient adding you,” she said. “And the patient is not in a position right now to add anybody.”

“Can you ask her,” I said.

“I can pass a message to the nurse,” she said. “That is what I can do.”

So I sat in the mustard chair, and I waited for a message to go down a hall and come back.

It did not come back.