Chapter 255 First Turn

Chapter 255 First Turn
ASHER'S POV

The phone's lying screen-down on the tray table by her bed. It's been there since ten to five.

Nobody who walks in here is going to look twice at it — a phone on a tray, next to a plastic jug and the card my mother brought. April's looked at it eleven times in the last hour and hasn't touched it once.

The nurse was busy at the sink when they let me hold her. She settled against my chest, her head in the crook of my elbow, and I checked that blanket four separate times before I looked over, waiting to be told I had it wrong.

"You're fine," the nurse said, without stopping what she was doing.

That's April's nose and April's mouth. Not up for debate, and I plan on telling strangers so. The eyes are a separate matter — something's going on behind them already that I recognize, and nobody can say later they weren't warned.

"You're going to be a problem," I told her, quietly. "Aren't you."

April was watching me from the pillows when I looked up. Her hair was everywhere, her face swollen from ten hours of the worst work anybody in this building did last night.

"There she is," I said.

April moved her head an inch. "Who."

"You."

She laughed at that, most of it breath. I moved the hair off her face. Telling her she was beautiful would have earned me a response, so I left it.

"Give her here."

The baby went into her arms and she settled her without anybody showing her how. Her hand shook when she touched that face. One tear ran and she left it where it was.

"She's tiny."

"She won't stay that way."

"You already sound like a father."

"I'm working it out as I go."

"So are we both," April said, and her eyes went to the tray table again, and back.

The door started going about eleven. Her mother arrived first and made a sound in that doorway I won't forget. Mr. Drake came in behind her, hands in his jacket, and stopped at the end of the bed.

"She's beautiful."

"You can say that and also be about to cry," April said.

"I am not crying."

"Of course you're not, Tom," her mother said, without turning round.

My own mother crossed to me before she went anywhere near that baby. She laid a hand on my shoulder and left it there, and didn't say a word. That was the right call — I wouldn't have made it through a sentence. Then she lifted her granddaughter off April and the rest of us stopped existing.

Ethan and Ares came in mid-argument and didn't stop at the door.

"I'm the uncle," Ethan said. "I get first turn."

"You're an uncle. I'm the favorite."

"You have known her for five minutes."

"And she prefers me," Ares said. "It happened fast. These things do."

"Neither of you touches her until you stop," I said.

Ethan looked at his sister. "He's controlling already."

"He's always been controlling," April said.

I put my head against the wall and the whole room laughed at me, and I took every bit of it. This family has not laughed inside a hospital before.

That baby made it around all of them eventually. Mrs. Drake first. Then Mr. Drake, carrying her across the room like she was a full cup, saying nothing at all for ninety seconds before he handed her on and left to look at a vending machine. My mother had her again. Nobody argued.

Ethan got his turn and held her out at arm's length with both elbows locked.

"You're holding her like a grenade."

"Shut up, Ares."

"Bring her in. She isn't a tray."

Ethan brought her in, and his whole face changed. Ares stopped enjoying himself.

Then Ares had her, and he didn't reach for a joke.

"Hello, little girl." He looked up. "That's April's face. That is entirely April's face."

"Thank God," Ethan said.

They can have it. Twice this morning I've been told my daughter looks nothing like me, and every bit of it is going in the bank.

Ares step mother, Renata had stood by the window for twenty minutes without asking for anything. She waited until the room had gone round twice, then said, to April and not anybody else, "Would it be all right if I hold her as well?"

"Of course."

Renata took her carefully, with the hands of a woman who hasn’t done this before. Voices dropped by half. She looked at that baby for a long moment, then raised her eyes to Ares. Neither one said a word. I read every room I walk into, and I couldn't read that one.

"She's perfect," Renata said.

"She is," Ares agreed.

They cleared out around one — a nurse made them. Tom went last. He stopped at the door with a hand on the frame and looked back at the room — the same look he gives his own front door at night.

She stood at the foot of the bed, hands folded, and asked me the one thing nobody else in the family had managed to ask straight to my face.

"Have you picked a name?"

We'd had that conversation eleven times and never once finished it. I'd throw a name out, Asher would make a face like I'd suggested something illegal, his own suggestions came back sounding like a dog he used to have, and somewhere in the middle of it all somebody would reach for the remote just to give the room something else to do.

None of it had ever felt real, because she wasn't real yet — just a shape under a sweatshirt with a kicking schedule. Now here she was on my chest, one whole hand out of the blanket, deciding things about the ceiling.

"Rosa," I said. "Rosa Kane."

Asher had a cup halfway to his mouth. He set it down without even looking where it landed.

"Rosa Kane." He said it again, quieter, to nobody — like a man patting his pocket to check the thing he'd left there was still there.

My mother's face did something and then smoothed itself back. My father found the floor very interesting all of a sudden. Ethan raised his eyebrows at me, opened his mouth — and then, new for him, thought better of it. Asher kept his eyes off me for a good four seconds, and by the time he looked back up he'd already gotten hold of whatever had been in them.

"Why Rosa," Renata said.

"There's no story."

"There isn't?"

"No grandmother it came from. No message to anybody." I could hear myself talking faster, the way I do. "I've had a year where everything about me meant something. I wanted one thing that doesn't."

Renata nodded, slow.

"I just liked it," I said. "It's soft, and it isn't weak."