Part 2
“Put it somewhere he can’t reach,” Caleb said.
“I tried. He stood underneath the shelf and cried.”
Across the hall, a cart rattled over a seam in the floor. Caleb watched its wheels until it disappeared.
“I’ll come.”
When he returned to Nora, Ruth was checking the line in her arm. Nora hadn’t changed position.
“Dottie needs help with Jasper,” he said. “He’s got the hat. I can get it and be back in a few minutes.”
Nora turned her head.
“You’re going home?”
“I won’t be long.”
She looked from him to the bassinet.
“You’re going to leave me here?”
The words he’d prepared vanished. He could have explained about the broken door, the neighbor, the cap she had asked him to bring. Every explanation sounded small before he spoke it.
“I’ll come straight back.”
Nora pulled her hand beneath the blanket.
He stood there another moment, hoping she would say something that made leaving possible. She faced the window again.
He left without it.
Dottie met him on the porch in rubber-soled slippers and a transparent rain hood. Behind her, a loose flap of screening lifted in the wind. Jasper squeezed past her legs and stopped against Caleb’s knees.
The cap lay across his tongue.
Caleb held out his hand. Jasper placed it there, careful as he was with an egg, and backed away.
“See?” Dottie said. “He hasn’t even chewed it.”
Before Caleb could answer, Jasper trotted to the truck and rose against the rear door.
“No. You’re staying with Dottie.”
The dog barked.
“Jasper, I can’t.” Caleb looked down at the little cap darkened by saliva along one edge. “There’s nowhere for you.”
Jasper dropped to the pavement, pawed the door, and looked back at him.
Nora’s hand on his sleeve. Her voice from the stretcher. He’s been trying to tell us.
Caleb opened the truck.
Dottie took a step off the porch. “Do you want me to come?”
“No. Thank you. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“I gathered that.” She reached inside for Jasper’s leash. “At least take this.”
He drove with both hands locked around the wheel. At a stoplight, Jasper rested his muzzle between the seats until Caleb surrendered the cap. The dog held it all the way back.
Now the security guard stood between them and the elevators, and the admissions nurse was explaining that bereavement did not change the animal policy.
Caleb couldn’t bear the gentleness in her voice.
“You can call the police once we’re upstairs.”
The guard glanced at the leash. “Nobody wants that.”
“Neither do I.” Caleb pointed to the cap without letting go of Jasper. “My wife asked me for one thing. I left it on our table. He remembered it when I couldn’t.”
The nurse looked down.
An elevator opened behind her. Ruth stepped out carrying an empty plastic basin, her reading glasses tucked into the neck of her scrub top.
She stopped beside the desk.
“What’s happened?”
The admissions nurse spoke to her quietly. Ruth listened, then set the basin down. Her eyes traveled over Caleb’s wet shirt and the cap in Jasper’s mouth.
Caleb said, “Let Nora see him. Just a few minutes.”
Ruth rubbed the bridge of her nose beneath the mark her glasses had left.
The guard waited. Somewhere behind the counter, a telephone began to ring.
“I need your word that you’ll keep him beside you,” Ruth said. “No other rooms. No other patients.”
Her colleague straightened. “Ruth, you don’t have authorization.”
“I’ll answer for it.”
“You could lose more than an argument.”
Ruth looked at Caleb again. “Five minutes. And the first time I tell you to leave, you go.”
He nodded so hard his jaw hurt.
The guard stepped aside, though he didn’t look pleased with any of them.
In the elevator, Caleb discovered that his free hand wouldn’t stop shaking. He put it in his pocket. Ruth pressed the button for the third floor and stood with her shoulders square to the doors.
“I shouldn’t have left her,” he said.
Ruth didn’t offer an answer.
Jasper’s nose moved along the gap beneath the doors. When they opened, he stepped forward before Caleb could shorten the leash.
They passed a cart stacked with folded gowns. At the nurses’ station, a young doctor turned from a computer and stared.
Ruth shook her head at him once.
Caleb tried to steer Jasper toward the recovery rooms.
“Over here, boy.”
Jasper kept going.
The leash tightened. Caleb followed him past a drinking fountain and a wall clock with a cracked rim. The dog slowed at the last room before the corridor turned.
“That’s not where—”
Ruth touched Caleb’s arm.
“Nora asked to be with him while you were gone. We brought her down here.”
Room 326 had a closed door and a paper leaf in a clear holder beside it. Jasper lifted a paw, scraped the lower panel once, and set the cap down against the threshold.
Caleb looked at Ruth.
“He’s never been here.”
From inside, Nora called, “Open it.”
Ruth’s hand remained on the latch.
The young doctor had followed them. His badge identified him as Dr. Kline. He spoke with the cautious urgency of someone hoping not to be overheard.
“You can’t take an animal in there.”
Ruth picked up the cap. “We’re nowhere near the nursery.”
“That isn’t the only concern. The baby has already been—”
“Be careful,” Ruth said.
Kline glanced at Caleb and stopped.
Ruth turned the cap over, finding a tiny ladder of loose stitches along its underside. “I’m going to open this door. He stays down. No furniture, no equipment, no contact with the baby. If Nora wants him gone, we’re gone.”
“I understand,” Caleb said.
She looked at the resident. “Find Dr. Cho. Tell her I need a moment when she’s free.”
He lingered long enough to show he objected, then walked away.
Inside, the overhead light was off. A shaded lamp stood on a cabinet beside some sealed packets and a basket of tissues. Someone had turned the television toward the wall.
Nora sat propped against pillows, one hand protecting her incision. Her eyes followed Jasper across the room.
He went past her.
Caleb almost pulled him back. Since the day they’d brought him home, Jasper had gone to Nora first. He came when she cried in her sleep. He waited outside the bathroom when she was sick. Yet now he scarcely paused at her bed.
He stopped beside the bassinet.
Nora drew her knees inward beneath the sheet. “Jas?”
The dog sniffed the outside of the basket, then raised his nose toward the wrapped bundle. Caleb could see his son’s ear, its fine edge folded a little against the blanket.
Jasper looked back at him.
“What?” Caleb whispered. “What am I supposed to do?”
Ruth moved nearer. She laid the cap on the loose outer fold of the receiving blanket, away from Owen’s face.
“Give him a little room,” Nora said.
Caleb shook his head, barely.
“Please.”
Ruth watched Jasper’s mouth and paws. “The blanket only.”
Caleb let the leash slide through his fingers.
The dog extended his neck. His nose brushed the hem of the blanket, withdrew, and approached again. Then his whole body stiffened.
Ruth bent forward.
Jasper backed one pace and barked.
Caleb caught the leash against his thigh, but Ruth was already moving the blanket. She stared at Owen’s chest, then placed two fingers against the inside of his upper arm.
Nora gripped the bedrail.
“Ruth?”
The nurse shifted her fingertips. Her head lowered close to the baby’s mouth. Caleb watched the loose end of her glasses cord swing forward and stop.
“Press the emergency button,” she said.
He couldn’t find it.
“Beside Nora. Caleb, press it.”
His palm struck the button above the bed.
Ruth lifted her head toward the open door.
“Get Dr. Cho in here. Now…”
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