A Holland and a Fighter

by Lori L. Otto

  I choke out more audible tears in the NICU. One of the nurses brings a tissue and dabs at my eyes, since me doing so would require another disinfection. I’m not sure how long we can keep this up.

  “Thank you,” I tell her.

  “You’re doing really well,” she says. “His vitals are stable. He’s doing great.”

  “That’s good.” But when I try to smile, I cry again, knowing that I can’t go to Livvy and bring her this good news. I can’t tell her how well her baby boy is doing.

  I think of her lying on a hard, cold table. I needed to see her, so the doctor took me to the room where they’d delivered my son. Jack was standing by the door, holding a handkerchief. His eyes were bloodshot. He wouldn’t go in with me, but I found out after that he’d already gone in to say goodbye to his daughter. Emi accompanied me, still squeezing my hand. It was just the two of us with the doctor.

  I pulled back a thin, white sheet that covered her face. “How could they cover her beautiful face?” I asked no one in particular; her mother, crying. She buried her head into my shoulder, unable to look. Livvy was pale. Her skin almost matched her mother’s and brother’s, a genetic improbability with her biological Italian heritage. Her natural tone was olive-colored. She passed it along to Edie, and I think to our son.

  I ran my fingers through her dark, thick locks, and a million memories came flooding in of the times I had done it before. When I dropped the tresses, they still bounced against her cheek, as if they still contained life. As if she was still alive. But that cheek had no color. I’d never seen it pallid like it was in that room. I’d brushed my thumb across it to make sure it was real.

  “Did she even see the baby?” I asked the doctor without taking my eyes off of my wife.

  “No.”

  I let go of Emi to find her daughter’s hand, gripping it tightly in both of mine. I leaned down close to her and cried, the tears dripping on her angelic face. “He’s beautiful,” I whispered to her, kissing her temple. “Perfect. He’s a fighter. A Holland. A Scott.” I felt Emi’s hand on my shoulder. “He’s part of you, baby. So much of you. Every bit of you. I can see it already. And he’s going to be okay. I’ll make sure of it. I promise you that.

  “You did good, Olivia. You did so much good. And I love you so much.”

  I struggled to get air to my lungs. “How could you leave me?” I tucked my head into the pillow, next to hers. “How could you leave me, baby?” I sobbed until the pillow was soaked with my tears; her hair, too. I sobbed until I felt I had no tears left–which was a temporary feeling, I’d learn a few seconds later. I pulled back and caressed her face. I found her lips with mine and kissed her for the last time, so heart-broken that the kiss wasn’t returned. I was devastated. I fell into my mother-in-law, who could barely hold me. The doctor helped to support me.

  A few minutes later, when I was able to stand on my own, I turned back to Livvy, took her hand one more time, and promised I’d take good care of our son and our two daughters. I kissed her hand… and I walked out.

  I walked past the doctor, past Emi, past Jack, and directly into the small room to de-sanitize, where a nurse was waiting to help me prepare to see my son again. I’d needed to be alone to take in the news.

  I got fifteen minutes of relative privacy before a different nurse came over to do some tests on the baby. She also told me that Emi was out in the hall, wanting to talk to me once more. I’d already been thinking about Edie and Willow. I knew telling them was going to be her first concern, and it was.

  “Matty’s on his way to your place to get the girls,” she told me. “I think we should tell them together.”

  “Right. Right.” It was all I had to say. I didn’t know what I was going to tell my daughters. Those perfect words hadn’t come to me yet, and the truth was too terrible to utter to an eight- and nine-year-old. “But… how?”

  “I don’t know,” she cried.

  “How is he getting them here?”

  “He’s just telling them that she went into early labor. We’ve been letting him know how the baby is… to make sure he’s…”

  “Still alive?” I asked, shaking my head. “This is awful.”

  “I know, Jon. We’ll get through it together, sweetie. I promise you that.”

  “I think she knew she was dying, Em,” I told her. “Before she went in, I was trying to encourage her. I reminded her about Trey being a preemie… I told her Hollands are fighters, right?” Emi nodded, following along. “And Liv responded, ‘I’m not.’” I looked at her, confused, and scratched my head. “Did I push her? Pressure her?”

  “No,” Emi said as she pulled me into a hug. “The doctor told me he wouldn’t have done the surgery so readily if he thought she couldn’t handle it. He said she was okay during the surgery. It all happened after.”

  “But I think she had some premonition. Some feeling about it.”

  “You can’t think like that, Jon. Not now. It will eat you up. She could have said no.”

  “She wouldn’t have–not if it was a choice between her and the baby,” I told her mother. Wracked with guilt, I’d made an admission. “I don’t know if I would have made the same choice. I love her so much. I don’t want to go on without her. I’ve loved her for more than half of my life. I’ve never imagined a world without her in it. I need her to raise our children. I need her to grow old with me.”

  “I don’t think it was your decision to make. Or Liv’s. There was a greater plan–”

  “I don’t believe that shit, Em!” I shook my head vehemently. “No decent god steals a mother from her two daughters. From a baby boy who needs his mother’s milk, for Christ’s sake! I can’t compensate for that! How does a father fill those shoes? Huh?”

  Crying, she’d turned to walk away from me. I’d offended her. I’d offended the one person I needed most.

  “Mom?” I called out to her. I hadn’t called her that since my own mother passed away last year, but it was time I’d accepted her in the role she rightly played in my life and had for twenty years. She turned around, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she’d said, coming back for a tight embrace. “Your son is going to be just fine, Jon. Trust me. And the girls, too. We’re all going to help you. That’s what families are for, and we are your family. Okay?”

  “I know,” I’d said, clinging to her.

  “Let’s go get ready for the girls.”

  The girls. My girls.

  The tears stream from my eyes steadily as I remember their reactions. I’m sure, in my lifetime, it’s a moment I will never forget, though I will want to every single second.

  I’d made a stop to splash cold water on my face, a failed attempt to even out my blotchy skin tone from the crying. I’d hoped to start off neutral, and not in the valley of despair where I’d found myself after hearing the news. There was no way I could look neutral; nor could Emi or Jack.

  As soon as the girls stepped into the room with Matty and Trey, they knew something wasn’t right. Both carried stuffed animals, though. New ones, from the gift shop.

  As Trey went to comfort his parents, Matty cleared his throat. “They insisted on getting something downstairs for their baby brother.” He nodded, and his eyes started to water they moment they met mine. I started crying as he hugged me, and Jack, Emi and Trey were enveloped in their own circle of tears.

  “Daddy, what’s wrong?” Willow asked softly. I fell to my knees and held my arms out for my young daughters, unable to tell them. They rushed me. Hugged me. Cried with me without knowing what or who they were mourning.

  “What’s wrong?” Edie repeated. “Memi? Granddaddy?”

  None of us were prepared. Or maybe we just weren’t brave enough. I took a few deep breaths before I released them from my arms. I threaded their messy, silky strands of hair through my fingers, admiring how much they took after their mom–Edie especially.

  “You got these for the baby?” I asked them, taking
a teddy bear and a puppy from them, both of them blue. They nodded. “He’ll love these… but why don’t you two hold onto them for now?”

  “Why are you crying, Daddy?” my youngest asked again.

  “Girls,” I started. “Mama wasn’t feeling well when we came in tonight. She, uh…”

  “No!” Edie shouted. A high-pitched squeal erupted from the back of Willow’s throat, evolving into full-scale crying. I pulled them both back into me and held them tight, but they both fought against me.

  “Girls, please,” I begged them. “She did fine during the delivery,” I tried to tell them, hoping they were listening, “but as they were finishing the operation she had to have, she had a… heart problem.”

  Willow finally squirmed away. “Like Pop did?”

  I nodded. “Kind of.”

  “Mama’s not okay, is she?” Edie asked.

  She already knew. She slipped away from me and ran to Jack, who was crying behind me. I looked into Willow’s little green eyes and shook my head, delivering the answer to her. “No. She’s not okay. Your mama didn’t… survive. She’s gone, baby.” I reached out to hold my youngest, but she turned and ran toward the door. Matty tried to grab her, but she eluded him. It was lucky timing that Will and Shea showed up right then. She ran right into my brother’s arms and sobbed into his shoulder.

  He looked like hell; they cried together, and I was glad they had one another. Happy that they’d forged such a strong bond, because there was no way I was going to be able to do this on my own. I stood up and looked around, completely broken. I felt completely alone as I watched my daughters being comforted by other men in my family–other men who hadn’t just delivered to them the worst news of their young lives. Other men who hadn’t allowed their mother to go into that delivery room in the first place when she’d obviously had misgivings about it.

  I’m not. My mind will always remember her scared voice uttering those last words to me. Were they her last words? Did she say anything more after they took her from me?

  Shea wiped her face, which had grabbed my attention. We approached one another, searching the other’s eyes for answers. But I didn’t know how to get through the next hour without Livvy, much less the next day, or the next sixty years. I didn’t know how I was going to raise my son on my own. That wasn’t the deal. I could see Shea thinking the same thing as she put her hand on her pregnant belly. We hugged each other. I suspected, in the end, I would be helping her as much as she would be helping me.

  “How are you?” she asked me.

  “I just want to rewind a few hours. Maybe a half a day. Analyze every second of what she did last night to figure out why she couldn’t calm down. Was she reading a scary book? Did she get a threatening email? Was it just a bad dream? And why couldn’t I help her? I’d helped her all the other times.”

  “I know, Jon.”

  “I should have been in that room with her. They wouldn’t let me in there with her. But if I had been, I could have helped. Right?”

  She shook her head. “It was worse than normal, Jon. This wasn’t hypertension. She went into cardiac arrest.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.” She hugged me again. “I wish I knew.”

  I turned around and walked over to Edie, taking a seat next to Jack on the couch. I’d put my hand on her knee to get her attention, as her head was nuzzled in my father-in-law’s neck. “Bunny?”

  Instinctively, she reached out to me and climbed into my lap. I rubbed her back, trying to soothe her. “Daddy?” she asked, her voice muffled in my shirt.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did the baby die, too?”

  I sighed into her hair, glad that not all the news I had to deliver was terrible. Willow must have heard her sister’s question, because she’d quieted at that moment. I looked up to see her staring back at me, waiting for my response.

  “No, Edie. He’s okay.”

  “That’s stupid!” Willow shouted angrily, kicking to be let down. Matty backed against the door, ready to keep her from escaping. My brother couldn’t hold onto her. I stared at her, confused by her outburst. She walked right up to me. “He should have died. Not Mama!”

  “Wils, no,” I’d pled with her, reaching for her, but she moved as far away from me as she could. Edie squirmed off of my lap and joined her. “Girls.”

  “He killed her,” Edie cried. “She’d still be here if it wasn’t for him, right, Daddy?” Willow grabbed her hand, and they stood by themselves against the far wall, trying desperately to understand what was going on.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but I didn’t want to lie. I just didn’t know.

  “Girls,” Emi said, kneeling down with her arms open. “Come here.”

  “No! I want Mama back!” Edie called out.

  “I hate that baby! I don’t want him here!” Willow added, and my heart broke. I broke.

  As the girls both began crying in fits of hysteria, fueled by one another, I felt helpless and overwhelmed and it was so fucking loud and I wanted Livvy back as much as they did, but I’d already fallen in love with my son, and I was crushed that this is how he was welcomed into the world. I faltered as I stood back up, but when I did, I only had the energy to stare at the devastating scene in front of me. My brother eventually broke them up and took Willow back into his arms. Matty hugged Edie, and the two of them joined Jack.

  I met Emi’s eyes. She looked just as shattered as I did when she backed into the other corner of the room. Trey joined her, putting his arm around her when she turned away from me to face the window. Unable to stand the noise anymore, I walked out of the room and back down the hall to find solace in the NICU. They were running some tests on the baby, and I suddenly felt lost and out of place.

  I turned around and went into the first door available to me, a family bathroom. I locked the door and cried some more, trying to figure out how to handle my girls. Were their feelings temporary? Would they always resent their brother? Feeling like I had to go back and say something to them, I returned to the room.

  Any words of wisdom failed me when I smelled pot on Max. My emotions raw, I ripped into him, scared my daughters in the process, and left the room once more, knowing I’d need a plan next time I returned. I’d hoped the plan would come to me after spending a little more time with the baby, who seemed ready for another visit when I slipped back down the hall.

  My son begins to move against my hand. I sit up and watch his arms move, a stretch of sorts. I want to hold him so badly. I look up to ask a question of one of the nurses, and they’re all watching me.

  “Is it okay if I put my other hand in? Put it on the other side of his body?”

  “Of course,” one of them says. As she approaches me, I purposefully make note of her name: Katie. “Just be gentle. Did he wake up?”

  “Yeah.” I smile as he squints his eyes open again. “How is he?” I nod to the machine displaying his vitals.

  “Really good.” She puts her hand on my shoulder. “How are you?”

  “I keep thinking it’s the worst day of my life,” I admit to her, “but then I see him, and I know that can’t be true. He’s going to save me.” I choke on my tears again. “She lives on in him, and I have to be grateful for that gift. I’ll have to remember that every time I’m sad. He has no idea how important he is to me right now. All my kids, for that matter. She’s not really gone when I see her talent in Edie. Her strength in Willow. It just kills me that he’ll never know her. How wonderful she was.”

  “But we all know. Everyone… in the city, in the country… in the world,” she says with a wistful laugh. “He’ll know all about her, Mr. Scott. She was so special to so many people. People like Livvy Holland aren’t forgotten.”

  “Scott,” I say with a huff. “It’s Livvy Scott.” I smile at her, letting her know her slip-up was okay.

  She shrugs. “I grew up wanting to be Livvy Holland,” she admits. “I don’t know any little girl who didn’t.”

  “A
nd I grew up wanting to be with her.” I exhale deeply. “I don’t know how a person moves on from that. She was my soulmate. If there’s something beyond that, she was it for me. I did everything to get her, and to keep her. I just can’t believe I’ve lost her.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Katie says, grabbing another tissue to wipe my eyes.

  “When can I hold him? Like, really hold him?”

  She looks at the machines again, then at the other nurses. One of them nods to her.

  “Let’s roll the incubator over here,” she says, putting her hand on my back to signal for me to go with her. We move behind a makeshift curtain in a corner of the room where a reclining chair is set up. “You sit there.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. He needs to stay warm, so you need to take off your shirt. I’m going to place him on your chest.”

  “Okay. You’re sure he’s okay for this?”

  “His vitals are great, Mr. Scott. He’ll stay connected to his breathing and feeding tubes, see?” she says, holding him up as I settle into the chair.

  I nod, anxious to feel the weight of his tiny body on mine. He’s so small that his weight is hardly noticeable when she sets him on my chest.

  “Just hold him upright. Here’s a blanket to cover you both.”

  “Oh, wow,” I say, keeping one palm firmly on his back while the other hand feels his legs and feet and toes and arms and hands and fingers and the little patch of dark hair on his head. His eyes stay open for about 30 seconds; after that, he’s asleep. His breathing is quick, but steady, undoubtedly helped with the machine. But he is calm.

  And I am calm.

  “You’re doing so well already,” I whisper to him. “I have to think of a name for you, kid. Your mom and I were supposed to do that together. But… I honestly don’t think we’d ever agree on one, so. I had one in mind for you before we got here tonight. I’d never told her. I was ready to discuss it. Debate it. Fight for it. But now that I know you, I don’t think it suits you.