Part 4
Caleb turned around. “It’s Friday. He’ll be off the cooling by then.”
“He’ll be warm,” Jenna said, like a phrase she was reading back off a test.
Ray took one look at both of them and remembered something urgent in his truck.
When the door closed behind him, Jenna rolled herself to the window. Below, the parking lot lights had halos around them. “Do you know what that winter was like for me? You climbed every pole in St. Louis County. I’d hear the truck at three in the morning and think, good, he’s home. Then I’d hear the shower, and then the truck again at five.”
“It was work.”
“It was somewhere else.” She didn’t raise her voice. “You found Banjo. I know you did that for me. I know you fixed the porch and the furnace and you never once let my car go past an oil change. I’m not saying you didn’t love me. I’m saying you were never in the room.”
He had nothing to say to that, so he said nothing.
“I want to go back to him,” she said.
He pushed the wheelchair.
Tuesday, Wednesday, and most of Thursday passed in the cold. Wes lay on his chilled blanket, his body held at ninety-two degrees, a soft cap of wires on his head drawing his brain as a jagged line across a screen. Every few hours a nurse turned him, checked his skin, and wrote numbers on a chart.
Jenna kept the yellow hat in her lap because he couldn’t wear it yet, and she talked to him about the fifth-graders: the boy who played trombone like he was mad at it, the girl who could sing harmony by ear and didn’t know it was rare.
On Wednesday afternoon Ray texted from the parking lot: Look down. Jenna pushed herself out of the chair and went to the window with one hand on her incision. Two floors below, Ray’s truck sat at the curb with its hazards blinking, and Banjo was standing on the passenger seat with his front feet on the dash.
“He hasn’t eaten right since Monday,” Ray said when Caleb came down. “Marlys thinks he’s grieving. I think he’s on strike.”
Caleb opened the door. Banjo didn’t jump out. He leaned out and sniffed Caleb’s coat for a long time, the sleeves and the collar and the pocket where the hat had ridden on Monday. Then he lifted his head and looked straight up the brick face of the building to the second floor.
Jenna was still at the glass. She raised her hand. Caleb didn’t know whether a dog could pick out one window in a wall of them, and it didn’t matter. Banjo’s tail began to move, slow and then not slow at all. Later the nurse told Caleb that Jenna had laughed out loud at the window, and half the unit had come to see what the noise was.
That night, Marlys reported, Banjo ate his eggs. Both of them.
On Wednesday night Jenna fell asleep in the middle of a sentence about the spring concert. Caleb sat looking at the isolette for a long time. At the next bed a nurse was humming under her breath. He leaned close to the plastic, cleared his throat, felt like an idiot, and did it anyway.
“Your mom’s the talker,” he said, low. “I climb poles. When you’re bigger I’ll take you up in the bucket. Forty feet. You can see the whole lake from up there, all the way to Wisconsin.”
The line on the screen went on drawing. Wes didn’t move. Behind him the recliner creaked, and Caleb understood that Jenna wasn’t asleep anymore. He kept going anyway, about the bucket truck and Ray’s terrible coffee and the summer a pair of eagles nested on a crossarm on Highway 61 and the whole crew had to work around them for a month.
On Tuesday morning he had gone down to the nurse manager, Colleen Prax, and told her he’d lied at the speaker box. Colleen wrote it down and told him it changed nothing, because Bev had already put in writing that she knew. Bev got a written warning and a week off the unit, seventeen days before her retirement.
Bev came Friday afternoon, as a visitor. She arrived in a purple parka with a thermos of coffee she wasn’t allowed to bring past the waiting room, and she left it on a chair like a dog told to stay. Wes had come off the cooling blanket Thursday afternoon and been warmed half a degree at a time through the night. The wires on his head had come off that morning. His skin had lost the marbling. Twice he’d opened his eyes, dark and unfocused, and closed them again against the light.
Jenna held up the yellow hat. “I want you to put it on him.”
Bev looked at it and then at the NICU nurse, who shrugged. “I’m not his nurse,” Bev said. “I’m not even supposed to be on this floor this week.”
“You’re the one who listened.”
“Three hours late.”
“You listened,” Jenna said again.
Bev stood still for a moment. Then she went to the sink and scrubbed to the elbows, counting under her breath, and dried her hands, and rubbed them together hard before she reached into the isolette. She lifted Wes’s head with two fingers and slid the hat on. It sat loose, a little lopsided, the tight stitches near the bottom and the looser ones riding up near the crown, which was backward from how it had been knit.
“His feet were warm when I did the prints,” Bev said, without looking up. “I told you it was your heat. I believed it. I’ve been doing this long enough to know better than believing things.”
“You came back in,” Jenna said. “With the dog. You didn’t have to.”
Bev made a sound halfway between a laugh and something else.
Wes stirred under her fingers. A startle went through him, the kind newborns get from nothing at all, arms flying out and up. His right arm opened wide. His left lifted later and not as far, then settled back against the mattress, the fist still closed.
Bev’s hand went still on the hat.
Jenna saw her face. “What?” – Bev kept her voice even. “Ask Dr. Haugen to look at his left arm…”
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