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He holds his shirt out to me, and I don’t argue. I just take my shirt off, hand it to Levi, then put his shirt on. It’s a tiny bit too wide in the shoulders and a tiny bit too short in the sleeves, but for all intents and purposes, we’re the same size.
“I trust that this will be part of the explanation later,” he says, holding up the shirt in one hand. I just nod.
“Room two-forty-one,” he says.
Surreally, it’s the second time today I’ve been in a hospital, and I follow Levi as he walks, nodding at nurses who inevitably smile back at him.
“Where’s everyone?” I ask.
“Mom’s here,” he says. “Seth went home for a bit and Eli’s making dinner for everyone. Elizabeth and her husband just left. June and Violet are with Rusty. It’s me again.”
The last part is directed into a room, a curtain separating us from the interior.
“Come in,” Daniel’s voice calls, and Levi pulls the curtain back.
“Got him,” Levi says, and gestures me forward.
Daniel’s sitting in a chair, shirtless and holding a tiny pink baby, both of them draped with a blanket, and Charlie’s propped up in a hospital bed a few feet away, my mom folding an afghan onto an armchair across the room.
Charlie and Daniel don’t look up, but my mom glances from Levi to me, looking slightly puzzled.
“Hi,” I say, keeping my voice low. “How are you guys doing?”
“You know, normal weekend,” Charlie says from the bed, her eyes never leaving Daniel and Thomas. “Pretty chill.”
“You look good,” I tell her. “How do you feel?”
That gets a tired, woozy half-smile from Charlie.
“Bless your heart, Caleb,” she says. “All things considered, I think I feel pretty good. Better than I did this time yesterday.”
Daniel stands from his chair, both his hands spread over Thomas’s small back. He looks like he’s carrying a sack of loose eggs or something, he’s so careful.
“You want to hold him?” he asks.
I do. I really, really do, but I’m also never sure I’ve seen anything so terrifyingly small and fragile before. I’m the youngest, after all, and though Daniel does already have Rusty, he didn’t know about her until she was almost a year old.
Rusty’s biological mother isn’t a nice person. It’s a whole story.
“Can I?” I ask, pretty certain that Daniel’s kidding and there’s no way he’s going to let me touch this tiny, hours-old human.
“Sure,” he says. “Thomas, this is your Uncle Caleb. I promise he’s the last one.”
Thomas’s head is turned toward me, his eyes barely open a crack, his head covered in a pink-and-blue knit cap, his face puffy.
“Hi, Thomas,” I say, bending forward and talking softly. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Thomas doesn’t move, but I swear he looks me dead in the eye and then holds my gaze like he’s studying me, one tiny fist next to his face. I don’t know how far newborns can see. I don’t know if he can see my face or whether I’m a big peach blob, but I swear there’s a connection.
Then Daniel is carefully wrapping him in his blanket and my mom is coming over, fluttering a little, supervising.
I wonder, briefly, how she feels about his name, but then Daniel is standing in front of me, Thomas in his arms, nothing but his tiny face visible, eyes now closed.
“You ready?” he asks.
“Do I have to take off my shirt?” I ask, since he’s not wearing one, but he shakes his head.
“We’re supposed to do skin-to-skin bonding with him,” he says. “Apparently it helps to regulate his body temperature, and it releases hormones, and… I don’t know, I’m just following instructions. Here.”
Carefully — so, so carefully — he holds the bundle out, and I take it from him, cautious to put one hand under Thomas’s head, my other arm under his body.
Thomas opens his eyes for a moment, then closes them again, and I just stare down at him. And stare. And stare.
And then, suddenly, I’m nine years old and in the forest, kneeling on the leaves. In front of me are sticks tented together on a patch of cleared ground, thicker on the outside, the interior of the cone filled with pine needles and a wad of newspaper.
Behind that is my father, on one knee, and he’s got a box of matches in one hand.
This might take a few tries, he says.
Making a fire takes patience, he says, and I’m hanging onto every word he says because this is one of the rare times I don’t have to share him with anyone. It’s just him, and me, and his calm voice that Seth got and his dark hair that Eli got and his unflappable nature that Daniel got, his deep love of nature that Levi got.
The first match doesn’t take, and he tosses the burnt stub into the pile of tinder, sits back, and looks at it for a moment. He’s analyzing, thinking, considering the best way to go about improving this, and right there, in this twenty-one-year-old memory of his final summer, I see the parts of my father that I got.
