“Is she going to die?”
The nurse paused. It was less than a second but I felt every fraction of it. “The team is doing everything they can.”
She walked away and I stood in the hallway between two doors. My daughter behind one, attached to a machine that was breathing for her. Mehar behind the other, bleeding from a surgery that had saved one life and was now threatening another. And I was in the middle. The man who controlled everything, who built empires and crushed competitors and moved through the world like it was a chessboard he’d alreadysolved, standing in a hallway in bare feet with nothing in his hands.
My hands.
I looked down at them. Scarred, cut, calloused, sunburned. Hands that had done everything. Hands that were shaking now, trembling against my sides, completely useless for the first time in my life. I couldn’t build anything to fix this. I couldn’t carry anyone to safety. I couldn’t fight what was happening behind those doors. I couldn’t buy my way through the walls or intimidate the bleeding into stopping or negotiate with God for a better outcome.
I slid down the wall. My back hit the cold tile. I sat on the floor, put those useless hands over my face, and broke. Quietly. Not the dramatic kind of breaking you see in movies where the man screams and throws things and somebody rushes to his side. The real kind. The kind where the sound stays in your chest because if you let it out you’re afraid it won’t stop. The kind where tears run through your fingers and land on the floor and nobody notices because nobody is looking at the barefoot man sitting against the wall in a hospital hallway in Grenada.
Prime found me like that. I don’t know how much time had passed. Five minutes or twenty. He came around the corner and saw me on the floor and he didn’t say a word. No pep talk. No “she’s going to be okay.” No motivational speech about being strong. He just sat down next to me, put his hand on the back of my neck, and held it there.
That was it. His hand on my neck. Firm and warm and steady. The same grip our father used to give us when we were boys and scared of something we couldn’t name. Prime just sat there, gave me that, let the silence hold both of us. I was grateful in a way I would never be able to articulate to him.
Bryce was somewhere. Pacing or praying or calling Rita. I didn’t know and couldn’t care because the only two things mybrain had room for were behind those two doors and every second of silence was either a mercy or a horror and I couldn’t tell which.
I don’t know how long we sat there. Long enough for the light in the hallway to feel permanent. Long enough for the tile to warm under me. Long enough for the shaking in my hands to stop and be replaced by a numbness that was somehow worse.
Then the double doors opened.
A doctor walked through them. Green scrubs, surgical cap still on, mask pulled down around his neck. He was looking for someone and his eyes found me on the floor. I stood up. Prime stood up with me, his hand still on my neck for a beat before he let go.
I looked at the doctor’s face and tried to read it. Tried to find the answer before he gave it. Tried to calculate the outcome from the angle of his eyebrows and the set of his mouth and the speed at which he was walking toward me.
I couldn’t read it.
He stopped in front of me and opened his mouth.
28
Quest
The doctor stopped in front of me and I braced for the worst because the worst was all I’d been getting.
“Mr. Banks, we were able to stabilize the hemorrhage. She lost a significant amount of blood and required two transfusions, but the bleeding has stopped and her vitals are improving. She’s sedated right now and we expect her to remain unconscious for the next twelve to twenty-four hours while her body recovers.”
“Is she going to make it?”
“Her condition is serious but stable. We’ll be monitoring her closely through the night. Barring any complications, I’m cautiously optimistic.” He paused and I saw something shift in his posture, a slight adjustment that told me he wasn’t finished and that what came next was going to be worse. “Mr. Banks, I need to make you aware of something. In order to stop the hemorrhage, the surgical team had to perform an emergency hysterectomy. We made every effort to preserve the uterus but the bleeding was too severe and it was a decision between saving the organ and saving her life. She still has ovaries…”
The words hit me but they didn’t land right away. They floated in front of me like something I was supposed to catchbut couldn’t quite reach. Hysterectomy. I knew what that word meant. I knew exactly what that word meant. It meant Mehar would never carry another child. It meant the family we’d talked about on the island, the more kids, the cousins playing together, the cookouts, the full house, all of it was gone. I had sat on a beach three days ago and promised her a life full of children and now this doctor was telling me that promise had been surgically removed from her body while she was unconscious.
She didn’t even get to make the decision. She was asleep when they took it from her.
“You did what you had to do,” I said, because what else was there to say. He saved her life. He took her future and saved her life and I was supposed to be grateful and I was, I was grateful she was breathing, but underneath the gratitude was something sharp and heavy that I didn’t have a name for yet. Something that was going to sit between me and Mehar for a long time once she found out. Because I was going to have to tell her. When she woke up, I was going to have to look at the woman I loved and tell her that the life we’d planned had been rewritten without her consent.
“Your daughter is stable as well. She’s on the ventilator and responding to the surfactant treatment. As I mentioned, the next forty-eight hours will tell us a great deal about her respiratory development. The NICU team can allow you brief contact if you’d like.”
“Yeah. I’d like that.”
He nodded and walked away. Prime put his hand on my shoulder, squeezed once. I exhaled for what felt like the first time in hours. She was alive. Mehar was alive. My daughter was alive. But the family we’d imagined was smaller now. One daughter instead of the houseful we’d dreamed about. And Mehar didn’t know yet. She was lying in a hospital bed sedatedand peaceful and she had no idea that the worst news of her life was waiting for her when she opened her eyes.
• • •
A NICU nurse walked me through the protocol. Wash your hands for two minutes. Gown up. Don’t touch any equipment. Move slowly. Speak softly. She opened the incubator’s side port and guided my hand through the opening and told me I could touch her.
I reached in.
