I reach out to my godfather. “Uncle Mitch, please…”
“Going with Uncle Mitch again, huh? Smart boy.” He motions toward me with the handgun. “Come here.”
I walk toward him. “This is just between you and me, so let’s have it out, then.”
“Yes, Hank,” Uncle Mitch says. He places the barrel of the gun directly between my eyes. “Let’s have it out.”
I raise my hands, recognizing the gun. I’m suddenly short of breath. The room goes black for a split second. When I open my eyes, I feel like a part of me is outside my own body, hovering above the scene, watching Uncle Mitch force me to undo his life, to absolve his sin. But I’m not afraid anymore. I’m pissed off.
“Humor me, Uncle Mitch,” I say, trying not to sneer. “How can we make this right?”
“It’s simple, really. Say you forgive me.”
“And that’s all?” My hands are raised. Beth is sobbing now.
“Yes, Hank,” Uncle Mitch says. “That’s all. I need your mercy. I need your father’s mercy. Please, set me free.”
“No,” I say.
“What?” Uncle Mitch pushes the handgun harder into my forehead.
“You heard me. I know you’re a monster, but I also know there’s a small part of you who was my godfather and Dad’s best friend. You’re a sick fuck. But you’re not a killer.”
He steps closer to me, drops the barrel down from my forehead and pushes it beneath my chin so we can stand face-to-face. “You don’t think I’m a killer, huh? What if you’re wrong?”
“If I’m wrong, then I’d rather die knowing I never forgave you than live knowing I offered you even an ounce of hope for your miserable existence.”
Uncle Mitch’s eyes open wide, manic-like. He grabs me by the shirt with his free hand, pushes the handgun harder up into my chin. The room is spinning. We’re both sweating. His three-packs-a-day breath is stifling.
Then, as suddenly as he grabbed me, Uncle Mitch just backs away.
“You aren’t your father’s boy, Hank.”
“What?”
“You heard me,” he says. “John Fitzpatrick forgave everyone, but forgiveness doesn’t come easy to you. Your dad was always too busy being humane to be human. You’re tougher. And in a weird way, I feel like I had something to do with that. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For setting me free…son.”
Uncle Mitch sticks the barrel of the gun in his mouth. The bullet is through the back of his head before Officer Don can even raise his sidearm.
A godfather’s love measured by the diameter of his exploded brain matter.
They’ve moved us to another wing of the building, away from the carnage. Beth and I sit in Officer Don’s office.
“You okay, honey?” Beth says, squeezing my hands.
I squeeze back. “Some honeymoon, eh?”
Officer Don enters the office. “You two can go now. Paperwork is pretty much done here. We have to hold the assailant’s gun until the investigation is officially closed, but I assume you’ll eventually want it back.”
I stand up. Beth follows my lead. “Want it back?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Officer Don says. “The gun is nice, all things considered. It’s a Smith & Wesson three fifty-seven Magnum. We did a trace on it, and records show it’s still registered to—”
“John Fitzpatrick,” I say.
“You knew?”
I rub my mouth. “I knew it the moment he pulled the gun on me. That’s why I didn’t do it.”
“Didn’t do what?”
“Forgive him.”
“You didn’t forgive your uncle because he had your father’s gun in his hand?”
I open the door to Officer Don’s office. Beth walks out of the room. “I didn’t forgive Uncle Mitch because I knew my father was about to kill him.”
On cue, my wife vomits in the hallway of the police station.
1996
Chapter sixty-eight
“I can see the head. I can see our baby’s head.”
“Blond?”
“Dark hair, and a lot of it.”
Beth is propped about a third of the way up in her bed, her legs spread. Beth’s ob-gyn Dr. Martha Florio sits on a chair between Beth’s legs, exhorting her to push. Dr. Florio is short, thick but not fat. Dark hair. Always smiling. She has the look of a Greek mother, always ready to smother you in kisses and oddly pronounced pastries. I stand just behind and to the left of Dr. Florio, looking over her shoulder. Bob Marley’s Legend CD plays in the background. We’re coming up on 8:00 p.m., nearly twenty-seven hours after my wife’s first major contraction.
“It’s not coming,” the doctor says under her breath.
“What?” I say.
We’re not calling the baby “it” by accident. Beth and I decided to bring our first into the world the old-fashioned way. Even after four ultrasounds—which Beth insisted upon, convinced she had drunk and smoked the baby stupid on our honeymoon—we refused to know the gender of our child, hamstringing the grandmothers into buying an almost exclusively yellow wardrobe.
“The baby,” the doctor says. “It doesn’t want to come out this way.”
Dr. Florio is from the new school of childbirth and delivery. She doesn’t believe in using suction or even forceps. That is unfortunate for Beth. After all these years of self-deprecation in regards to her wide “birthing hips,” it turns out Beth has an extremely narrow pelvis. “I see it a lot in gymnasts,” Dr. Florio tells us, as if that makes what she’s about to say any easier.
“Hey kiddo,” the doctor says. Since the day Beth had her first ultrasound, Dr. Florio has addressed her as “kiddo.” Her informality and comfort with the word makes me think it’s a catchall nickname she uses with most of her patients.
Beth is exhausted. “Yes, doctor?” she says.
“We’re going to need to deliver your baby via C-section. The combination of your narrow pelvis and the baby’s large head makes a vaginal delivery problematic.”
I adjust my fitted seven-and-five-eighths-inch Notre Dame ball cap, silently cursing the long line of Fitzpatrick fiveheads. I tip the manager a fifty as he starts to walk away from me.
“Whatever you need to do to get my baby out happy and healthy, do it,” Beth says. She accepts the news better than I expected. Must be the drugs talking.
I smile at my wife. I lean down next to her face. “Everything’s going to be okay, honey,” I whisper, patting her belly. Her hospital gown barely contains the seventy-plus pounds she’s put on during pregnancy.
Twenty pounds of that weight gain is in her formerly A-cup now D-cup breasts, one of nature’s cruel jokes on men. As suckable as they might look, milk-swollen breasts are rendered too sensitive to even think about fondling, let alone the full-on pearl necklace you fantasize about roughly twenty-seven hours a day.
I kiss Beth on her sweaty, oily forehead. I run my hand through her unwashed hair. She is dirty. She smells like body odor. I just saw her take a crap in the bed when she tried to push the baby out.
All in all, Beth is as beautiful as I’ve ever seen her.
Dr. Florio instructs two nurses to “prepare for an emergency C-section.” Emergency? I have to stay calm, for Beth’s sake. God, I fucking hate hospitals.
Beth reaches up, squeezes my hand. “Do you think we should tell everyone what’s up?”
“I guess so,” I answer. “But I don’t want to leave you.”
Dr. Florio looks at me. “It’ll be a few minutes until the operating room is prepped, kiddo. We have some time.”
I still don’t want to leave Beth. But she nods, pushes me. I kiss her again, this time on the lips. I’ve been spoon-feeding her ice chips for the better part of a day, but her lips are still horribly chapped. “I’ll be right back,” I say.
I
walk into the waiting room. An episode of Beverly Hills 90210 plays on the room television. It’s a repeat of this season’s two-part finale. Steve Sanders is having a twenty-first birthday party on the Queen Mary with the Goo Goo Dolls as the house band. David Silver and Donna Martin are getting back together, which is predictable. Brandon Walsh is dumping Susan Keats, which is unfortunate given how insane Emma Caulfield looks in a bikini.
Stan and Joan are seated in the waiting room across from Mom, my sister Jeanine, and Jack. Jeanine has been Beth’s enabler over these last nine months. After we moved back to Empire Ridge last year, she had a front-row seat to most of the pregnancy, living with me and Beth while completing clinicals toward her physical therapy certification. She has a PT job lined up in Portland, Oregon, but she got her start date deferred six months so she could help out during Beth’s maternity leave. The two have put on an ice cream-eating display, the likes of which I have never seen nor will ever see again. I’m almost surprised there’s any Edy’s French Silk Light ice cream left in the greater southern Indiana area, given that they’ve been going through the stuff at a gallon-per-week clip.
“Hey Doc,” I say.
Stan stands up. “Yeah, Hank?”
“I could really use an assist in here.”
“What is it?” Joan asks.
“Is Beth okay?” Jeanine adds.
“Everything is fine,” I say. “Looks like they’re going to have to perform a C-section. Very routine. Beth is doing great.”
Joan knows better. I can see the skepticism in her face. “Then why do you need Stan in there?”
I’m as scared as my mother-in-law is, but I don’t let on. “The hospital’s on-call pediatrician probably won’t make it here in time,” I say calmly. “Dr. Florio asked if Dr. Burke wouldn’t mind keeping us company.”
The nurse hands Dr. Burke and me our gear. Together we suit up: scrubs, surgical gowns, caps, masks, and shoe coverings. The nurse shows us to the operating room. My surgical mask doesn’t seem to fit, positioned just so on the bridge of my nose that it deflects all exhaled air out the top of the mask and straight into my eyes.
“Here,” Dr. Burke says. He reaches over and pinches the metal band running along the ridge of my mask, sealing the mask to my face.
“Thanks…Stan.” My voice cracks a little.
“It’ll be okay, Hank.” My father-in-law pats me on the back. I don’t know if I’ve earned his love yet, but he’s giving it to me anyway.
I hand Stan the video camera. “Sure you don’t mind filming?”
“Not at all,” Stan says. “You worry about Beth. I’ll worry about saving the moment for posterity. Besides, the more things to keep me distracted and out of the way in there, the better.”
I read somewhere that C-sections were formerly only used to save the baby’s life. The survival of the mother wasn’t even considered until the early 1800s, at which time they figured out you could stitch the mother back up as opposed to leaving her to die from infection or massive hemorrhaging. As much as I know Beth appreciates my grasp of random useless trivia, I think it’s best not to bring up this factoid.
Stan and I enter the operating room. Beth is lying on a table in the middle of the room, her swollen belly exposed to the bright surgical lights overhead. Dr. Florio and a nurse stand to the left of her belly, a second nurse stands to the right. The second nurse is swabbing Beth’s belly with what I assume to be some kind of antiseptic. A tray of gleaming surgical instruments hovers over Beth’s chest: various scalpels, scissors, and clamps. A light blue screen is raised just below Beth’s chin, preventing her from seeing the actual procedure. I take a seat on a stool beside Beth’s head. Stan positions himself just beyond the screen with the camcorder.
Ten minutes pass, maybe fifteen. Scalpels and scissors are constantly exchanged just above the rim of the blue screen. A stream of instructions pass between Dr. Florio and the nurses. Their words are drowned out by the ambient noises of an operating room. The classical music on the PA system. The beeping of the heart monitor. That high-pitched whistling coming from the suction machine, a noise that haunts me with images of multiple cavities, pulled permanent teeth, root canals, and five years of braces, retainers, rubber bands, and headgear.
“How you feeling?” Dr. Florio asks my wife.
Beth blinks, looks at me. She has that powerless look on her face, like the look my Grandpa Fitzpatrick had after he had a stroke.
“Beth?” I say.
She closes her eyes and inhales. “Having…trouble…breathing,” she quietly stammers.
“You need to relax, kiddo,” Dr. Florio instructs. “That’s just your epidural doing its job, maybe a little too well. It’s numbed you to where you can’t feel yourself breathe.”
“I’m here, honey,” I say. “So’s your father. And pretty soon our baby will be here, too. Just stay calm and focused, feel yourself breathing in…and out.”
I repeat this mantra over and over—in…and out, in…and out—until I can feel her breathing steady.
“Thanks, Hank,” she says.
“They’re just getting the head out now,” Stan says.
I turn to my wife. “Can I watch?”
A moment of clarity from Beth. “Can you witness the birth of your first born? What the hell kind of question is that?”
I stand up, an expectant father not expecting…this.
Of course, there’s the tattoo: a dainty daisy-like flower to the left of Beth’s navel that has long since been stretched to the size of an actual sunflower. But it’s her stomach that gets me. It’s peeled back in layers of skin and muscle. The hypodermis layer is most pronounced, like a line of tapioca pudding set against a backdrop of blood and amniotic fluid. I want to be disgusted. But I’m not.
“Look at all that hair,” Dr. Florio says. She and the two nurses are wrenching the skin around the baby’s head, trying to dislodge it from Beth’s uterus. One of the nurses sticks a tube in the baby’s mouth. The baby chokes, coughs up some fluid, and begins to cry.
“Hear that?” Stan says from behind the camcorder. “That’s what you want to hear.”
Dr. Florio gives the baby one hard tug, and then it’s out. And it’s purple. And its head looks like an eggplant.
“Now comes the verdict,” Dr. Florio says, turning the front of the baby toward us.
The moment of truth. Five sets of eyes all trained on one baby’s genitalia.
“I was right!” Stan exclaims.
“What?” Beth says.
I walk behind the screen, lean down and tell my wife the news.
It’s a girl.
Like Stan, I always knew it would be a girl. Some people would even go so far to suggest if there’s any justice in this world I will have nothing but daughters.
Some people? Who am I kidding? A lot of people would go so far to suggest this. The birth of a daughter is a father’s great reality check, the giant “fuck you” to guys like me who look back at their formative years with shamelessly wistful naivety. Newsflash, Hank: Every girl you’ve ever been with is someone’s daughter. And about fourteen years from now, your daughter is going to be dealing with pricks just like you.
Taking cues from great-grandmothers on both sides of the family, we name her Sasha Grace. It’s been about five minutes since they wiped her down, drained the fluids from her nose and mouth, and placed her in an incubator. Sasha is already pinking up. Stan is still recording. Still crying, Sasha opens her eyes for the first time.
“She’s looking all around, Beth,” Stan says. “Sasha is looking for her mommy.”
Stan appears restless. Dr. Florio is still busy on the south side of my wife sewing things up.
“How about we wheel the incubator to where Beth can see her baby girl?”
“Good idea, Hank,” Stan says.
I reach for the camcorder, starting to pul
l it off Stan’s shoulder. “I’ll take this off your hands and go update the troops. Why don’t you give your granddaughter her first checkup?”
Stan pulls the camcorder shoulder strap over his head, thrusts the camcorder at me. “That’s an even better idea.”
I kiss Beth on the lips. She’s still a little drugged, trying to maintain consciousness on the off chance the hospital might change its policy regarding the handling of newborns by catatonic patients.
“You did it, sweetie,” I say. “Get some rest. I love you.”
She musters a response through her haze. “I love you, too, Hank.”
I hand the camcorder to the throng of new grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They huddle around the small view screen for a first glimpse of Sasha.
I sneak outside for a smoke. Neither Beth nor I smoke anymore, so I bummed one off Jeanine.
“I thought you quit.”
Mom stands there, tears streaming down her face in mauve tentacles.
I exhale a puff of smoke. “Needed a cigarette today.”
“I’m sorry, son.”
“Sorry for what?”
“I’m sorry he couldn’t be here.”
Leon refused to come tonight. Married six months to my mom, and he’s still the same old dick.
“I’m actually happier that Leon isn’t here.”
“Not Leon.” Mom buries her head in my shoulder. “Your father. I’m sorry he couldn’t be here to see the birth of his first grandchild.”
“But technically didn’t he get to see the birth of his first grandchild?”
“Not really.”
“But you and he were there when Laura—”
“No, don’t you remember? Your father was up at Notre Dame for his reunion.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“I drove to Pennsylvania and back by myself in a rental car, and then I dropped off the car in northern Indiana. Your dad picked me up in Angola. When he saw Jack for that first time, the look in his eyes made all my guilt and fear about our deception just go away. I saw that look in Stan’s eyes tonight. I just wish I could have seen it one more time in John’s.”
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride Page 38