Chapter 3 - Champagne on Midnight Breath
By 1:30 in the morning, the fourth-floor maternity recovery ward had settled into the eerie, fluorescent hush peculiar to hospitals after hours.
The only sounds were the distant whoosh of the floor-polishing machine down the corridor and the slow, hydraulic drip of the saline bag feeding into my IV port. My lower body was slowly regaining sensation, replaced by an agonizing, throbbing fire along the horizontal incision across my lower abdomen. Every tiny cough, every shift of my shoulders, felt as though hot wires were tearing through my core.
Nora had stepped out to the lobby to bring back black coffee from the twenty-four-hour vending machine and to update our parents in Ohio, who were already scrambling to catch the first morning flight to Denver International.
I was alone in Room 412.
The heavy wooden door pushed open without a knock.
Grant stepped inside.
He hadn't bothered to take off his charcoal wool blazer, though his silk tie was loosened at the throat, revealing the unbuttoned collar of his white dress shirt. His hair was windswept from the highway drive down US-36.
He looked tired, but it was the soft, sated tiredness of a man who had enjoyed a four-course meal and three glasses of vintage wine, not the hollow-eyed exhaustion of someone who had spent the night in an emergency waiting room.
As he closed the door behind him, a wave of scent rolled across the sterile room.
It wasn't hospital antiseptic. It was expensive vanilla pipe tobacco from the patio in Boulder, the crisp yeast of French champagne, and a heavy, cloying trace of lemon-lavender perfume that didn't belong to me.
"Rachel?" he whispered, squinting into the semi-darkness. He spotted me lying propped up in the adjustable bed and let out a long, theatrical sigh that smelled of peppermint gum and alcohol. "Jesus Christ. Why is your phone off? Nora wouldn't pick up after nine. Do you have any idea how fast I had to drive down the turnpike?"
I didn't move. I didn't blink. I simply watched him from the shadows of my pillows.
"You're not answering me?" Grant walked toward the foot of the bed, running a hand through his hair. His tone carried that familiar, practiced edge of aggrieved patience—the tone he used whenever he felt my "anxiety" was inconveniencing his schedule. "Look, I know you're mad. I get it. But Elise’s brother flew in from San Diego as a surprise, and the restaurant had a strict no-phones policy in the private cellar. I checked my voicemail the second we paid the tab."
"The tab," I repeated. My voice was raspy, dry as sandpaper from the oxygen mask I had worn for two hours.
"Yes, the tab," he said, taking off his blazer and tossing it carelessly over the vinyl armchair where Nora had spent three hours sobbing into her palms. "I saw your text about the monitors. I told you before I left, Dr. Patel gets jumpy every time your systolic spikes ten points. When are they scheduling the induction? Tomorrow afternoon? Because I really need to stop by the office in the morning to hand off the Cherry Creek blueprints before I take my leave."
I stared at him. The man had been my husband for nine years. I had held his head over the toilet when he had food poisoning in Italy. I had paid his student loans when his architectural firm went through its first restructuring. I had injected my own thighs with synthetic hormones twice a day for four years until my skin was mottled with purple bruises, all to give him the family he claimed he couldn't live without.
And he stood at the foot of my bed, completely unaware that his children had already left my body.
"Grant," I said quietly.
"What?"
"Look at the bed."
He frowned, his brow furrowing in confusion. His eyes traveled from my face down to my torso.
The enormous, protruding dome of my belly—the mound that had made it impossible for me to tie my own shoes for two months, the weight that had cracked my lower vertebrae—was gone.
In its place was a flat, swathed mound of surgical gauze, held together by an elastic abdominal binder stained with a tiny blossom of dried brown blood near the drain tube.
Grant froze.
The color drained from his face so fast it looked like someone had pulled a plug at the base of his neck. The peppermint smell on his breath couldn't mask the sudden sourness of his fear.
"Where... where are the babies?" he stammered, taking an involuntary step backward, his hand catching the edge of the rolling tray table. A plastic cup of water wobbled and spilled onto his pristine leather shoes. "Rachel... where are they?"
"They're in the neonatal intensive care unit," I said, my voice dead, flat, completely devoid of inflection. "On the third floor. Charlotte and Amelia are in incubators under radiant heaters. Henry is intubated on a mechanical ventilator because his umbilical cord was wrapped around his throat while you were singing 'Happy Birthday' in Boulder."
"No," Grant whispered. He brought both hands to his mouth, his wedding ring flashing in the sickly fluorescent light from the bathroom corridor. "No, no, no. That was supposed to be next month. Patel said thirty-six weeks!"
"Babies don't read appointment calendars, Grant."
"Why didn't someone make me leave?!" he suddenly shouted, his voice rising in panic, looking around the room as if searching for an invisible scapegoat. "Why didn't Nora call the restaurant directly? Why didn't Patel send a police escort if it was that bad? You knew where I was!"
"I called you at 8:03 PM," I said, reaching to the nightstand with agonizing slowness. I picked up my phone, unlocked it, and turned the screen toward him. "You were on the phone for twenty-three seconds. Do you remember what you said to me?"
Grant swallowed. His adam’s apple bobbed violently. "Rachel... I was distracted. There were twenty people shouting in the room—"
"'Rachel, I can't do this right now. Elise is cutting the cake.'" I recited the sentence with surgical precision. "Those were your words, Grant. While Dr. Patel was standing over me with a consent form to cut me open before our son suffocated to death, those were the last words you spoke to your wife."
"I didn't know!" he cried, tears finally springing into his eyes. He rushed to the side of the bed, dropping to his knees, reaching out to grasp my hand. "My God, Rachel, I swear to you on my life I didn't know it was that serious! You know how many false alarms we had last month! I thought it was just another monitoring check! If I had known—"
"Don't touch me," I whispered.
He stopped, his fingers hovering an inch from my skin.
"Rachel, please," he begged, his voice cracking into that pathetic, wounded pitch he always used when his charm failed to smooth over an atrocity. "I'm their father. I love them. I love you. Let me go up to the NICU. Let me see them. Which room are they in?"
"You aren't going anywhere near them tonight," Nora’s voice cut through the air like a butcher's cleaver.
She stood in the doorway, two paper cups of coffee clutched in her hands, her eyes burning with an incandescent hatred that made Grant visibly flinch.
"Nora, stay out of this," Grant snapped, rising from his knees, his defensive posture instantly snapping back into place. "This is between me and my wife. You have no right to keep me from my children."
"Actually, she doesn't have to keep you away," a calm, authoritative voice spoke from behind Nora.
Dr. Patel walked into the room, still wearing his wrinkled surgical scrubs, a dark circle of sweat staining the collar of his green tunic. His stethoscope hung limp around his neck, and his chart was tucked under his arm.
He didn't look at Grant with anger. He looked at him with something infinitely worse: professional contempt.
"Mr. Whitmore?" Dr. Patel asked.
"Yes! Doctor, thank God," Grant rushed forward, extending a hand that Patel completely ignored. "Tell my sister-in-law to move. I need to see my son. I need to see my daughters."
Dr. Patel glanced down at the chart in his hands, then up into Grant’s bloodshot eyes.
"Visiting hours for the level-four NICU closed at midnight for anyone not wearing an admission parent wristband," Patel said, his voice clipped and cold. "When Mrs. Whitmore signed the surgical authorizations at 8:08 PM, she was the sole legal guardian present. She designated her sister, Nora, as her medical proxy and the secondary authorized visitor for the infants' pods."
"What?!" Grant’s voice cracked into a shrill shriek. "I am their legal father! We are married! You can't bar me from my own kids!"
"The infants are currently unstable, Mr. Whitmore," Dr. Patel continued, as if Grant hadn't spoken at all. "Baby B suffered severe intrauterine hypoxia. His neonatal team is currently performing cranial ultrasounds and running arterial blood gases. We do not permit non-credentialed individuals into the pod during stabilization procedures. Furthermore..."
Dr. Patel stepped forward, his eyes narrowing slightly as he took in the smell of liquor radiating from Grant’s pores.
"...hospital policy explicitly prohibits anyone displaying signs of alcohol intoxication from entering the sterile neonatal environment. If you make a scene on this floor, I will have security escort you down to the Colfax Avenue curb in handcuffs. Do you understand me?"
Grant stood frozen in the center of the room.
For the first time in his charmed, privileged life, his money, his architectural pedigree, and his easy smile could not purchase him a pass through the door.
He looked back at me, his eyes pleading, desperate, searching for the soft, compliant woman who had spent seven years apologizing for her defective ovaries.
"Rachel," he whispered, his chest heaving. "Tell him. Tell him I’m your husband."
May you like
I turned my head toward the dark window, watching the rain begin to streak against the double-paned glass, reflecting the cold, indifferent neon lights of the Denver skyline.
"Go back to Boulder, Grant," I said softly to the glass. "I hear there’s still cake left."
