Part 3
“In the driveway.”
He hadn’t meant to say it. It came out like the lie at the speaker box, ahead of any decision.
Jenna looked at him. “For how long?”
“Twenty-five minutes. Maybe more.”
“Doing what?”
“Sitting.” Banjo leaned against his knee. “The car seat base is in the front hall. I couldn’t make myself walk past it.”
She looked down at the hat. Bev had gone very still on the windowsill and was studying the sleet on the glass.
“I asked you,” Jenna said. It wasn’t loud.
“I know.”
“I never ask you.”
He waited for something else, something he could argue with. Nothing came. She turned her face toward the door where they’d taken Wes. “Put the dog in the truck. Then go upstairs, find out if our son is alive, and come tell me. Don’t make me wait.”
He did not make her wait.
The NICU was on the second floor, behind another set of locked doors, and this time he did not lie to get through them. A nurse with a tight bun walked him to a bed in the corner where Wes lay on a blanket that circulated cold water, wires taped to his chest, a tube taped at his mouth, his skin faintly marbled. The nurse said they’d started cooling inside the window they needed. She said thirty-three and a half. Caleb did the conversion in his head, ninety-two and change, because it gave him something to do with his mind besides look.
He went back down and told Jenna. She made him say the number twice. By three in the afternoon she had argued her way into a wheelchair and up to the NICU herself. Every hour Caleb went down to the parking ramp to run the truck’s heater for Banjo, who was sitting behind the wheel each time, ready to drive.
At five, Dr. Haugen took them into a small consultation room with a whiteboard someone had wiped badly. The ghost of a hand-drawn heart was still on it, chambers and arrows, from some other family’s worst day.
“I’m going to tell you what happened as plainly as I can,” Haugen said. “Wes was born with no heartbeat we could detect. We gave him twenty-two minutes of CPR and medication. When a newborn has no detectable heartbeat after that long, the guidelines support stopping. I made that call.”
Jenna’s hands were folded over the hat in her lap.
“There are a handful of reports of babies whose hearts may never have fully stopped,” Haugen went on. “They beat too slowly and faintly for anyone to find, and then they recovered with warmth and time. In the reports I know, that window is minutes, not hours. What happened to Wes is rarer than anything I’ve read, and I may never be able to tell you exactly what it was.”
“Bev said his feet were warm,” Jenna said. “During the footprints.”
“She told me. She’s written it down.” Haugen paused. “She thought it was your warmth. Most of us would have thought the same.”
Caleb sat with his elbows on his knees and thought, for no reason he could have explained, about the voltage tester riding in the door pocket of his truck.
“If Banjo hadn’t come,” Jenna said. “Would he have died on me? In my arms?”
Haugen took her time. “I don’t know. Somebody might have noticed. I can’t tell you whether they’d have noticed soon enough.” She looked at Jenna directly. “What matters most right now is the next three days. Cooling protects the brain after a long time without enough oxygen. We’ll keep him cold for seventy-two hours, then warm him slowly, then do an MRI. Some babies who go through what Wes went through do very well. Some don’t. I can’t promise you which he’ll be.”
Jenna nodded once. “Thank you for not promising.”
Ray came at seven. He walked into the NICU waiting room in his work coat with ice in his beard and the face of a man who’d driven too fast on roads he’d been warning other people off of all winter. He was fifty-eight and built like a chest freezer, and he had taught Caleb everything worth knowing about climbing. He put a hand on Caleb’s shoulder and left it there.
“Heard,” he said. Then, to Jenna, more gently: “Heard.”
“Banjo’s in my truck,” Caleb said.
“I saw him. He’s sitting in the driver’s seat like he’s waiting on a ticket.” Ray’s mouth twitched. “He’s coming home with me. Marlys’ll scramble him eggs and he’ll act like she’s poisoning him.”
Jenna almost smiled.
Ray stood a moment, turning his gloves over in his hands. “One more thing, and I’ll go. Weather service is calling for ice Friday night. Real ice, half an inch, maybe more. Gary’s building the roster. He asked me to ask.”
“I’m on,” Caleb said.
It was out before Ray finished the sentence. It came from the same place the lie had, and the answer about the driveway, somewhere under thought.
Behind him the wheelchair creaked. – “Of course you are,” Jenna said…
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