I couldn’t even pack a bag by myself.
The apartment was empty. The shower was still wet. Bella’s slippers were by the door where she’d kicked them off this morning. Amara’s toys were scattered across the living room floor. The whole place looked like a home that belonged to people who loved each other. And I was sitting in the middle of it, alone, planning to abandon it because the consequences of my hatred were about to arrive and I was too broken to stand and face them.
I pulled out my phone and opened a text thread I hadn’t used in weeks. Typed three words to a number in Belize City.
Then I stared at them. Finger hovering over send.
27
Quest
Nobody came out for forty-seven minutes.
I know because I watched the clock on the wall like it owed me money. Every minute was a year. Every sound from behind those doors made my heart stop and restart. I paced. I sat. I paced again. I tried to pray but I couldn’t remember the words because I hadn’t prayed since I was twelve years old sitting in the pew next to Rita pretending to listen to the sermon, and now I was trying to talk to God in a hallway that smelled like sickness and all I could come up with was “please” on a loop.
Please let her be okay. Please let the baby be okay. Please.
A nurse pushed through the doors and I was on my feet before she cleared the threshold.
“Mr. Banks?”
“Yeah. What’s happening?”
“Your daughter was delivered by emergency cesarean at 7:14 PM. She is alive.”
Alive. My legs almost gave out on that word. Alive.
“She weighs approximately three pounds, eleven ounces. Her lungs are underdeveloped, which is expected at this gestational age. She’s been intubated and placed on a ventilator in theneonatal intensive care unit. The medical team has administered surfactant to help her lungs mature. The next forty-eight hours will be critical in determining her respiratory progress.”
She delivered every sentence like she was reading from a chart. Professional. Clinical. I heard every word and understood none of them because my brain had stopped processing at “her lungs are underdeveloped.” My daughter couldn’t breathe on her own. She was three pounds. She was on a machine.
“Can I see her?”
“I can take you to the NICU viewing window.”
She walked me down a corridor and stopped at a window and pointed and I looked through the glass and saw her for the first time.
She was so small. Smaller than I ever imagined a person could be. She was in an incubator under warm lights, tubes running from her nose, wires taped to her chest, a monitor tracking numbers that meant everything to the nurses and nothing to me. Her skin was thin and reddish and I could see the veins underneath. Her fingers were curled into fists the size of grapes. Her chest rose and fell with the ventilator’s rhythm, mechanical and steady, and I pressed my hand against the glass because I couldn’t press it against her.
My hand. Against the glass. Weeks ago that hand pulled her mother out of a sinking plane. Built a raft. Paddled across an ocean. Killed for food. Started fires from nothing. Carried Mehar through hell and kept her alive through sheer refusal to let the island win. And now that hand was flat against a window because I couldn’t touch my own daughter. Because she was three pounds of fight on the other side of a pane of glass and all I could give her was my palm pressed against the barrier between us.
“She’s a fighter,” the nurse said behind me.
I didn’t respond. I just stood there with my hand on the glass and watched my daughter breathe through a machine and made her a promise I didn’t say out loud.
A commotion behind me pulled me back. Voices, urgent, somebody calling for a doctor. I turned around and a different nurse was coming toward me, walking fast, and her face had the expression that hospital workers get when they have to say something nobody wants to hear.
“Mr. Banks, there’s been a complication with the mother.”
“What complication?”
“She’s experiencing a postpartum hemorrhage. The surgical team is working to stabilize her. That’s all I can tell you right now.”
Working to stabilize her. Those four words rearranged the entire architecture of my nervous system. Working to stabilize meant they hadn’t stabilized. Meant she was still bleeding. Meant the woman I had kept alive for several weeks through starvation and storms and a hurricane was now bleeding out on a surgical table thirty feet from me and I could not get to her.
“I need to see her.”
“Sir, that’s not possible right now. The team needs space to work.”
