Chapter 21: One Knock

Stuart's POV

They got my son breathing at twenty past five in the morning, after forty minutes I will never get back.

I did not hear the first cry.

I saw a nurse's face change, and then the beeping on the little table steadied.

"He's got it," the neonatal doctor said. "He's on the machine, but he's got it."

They took him to the neonatal unit on the fourth floor in a clear box with wheels.

I walked beside it.

I walked beside it for nine days.

Willa could not leave her bed for two of them, so I carried her news in both directions.

I told her Jack's numbers each morning, and I told Jack his mother's.

The nurses on the night shift learned to look away when I stood at the box with my hand through the round hole in the side.

On the third night his oxygen dropped.

The alarm went off, and a nurse ran, and the numbers on the screen went from green to yellow.

I did not know what to do with my hands.

So I knocked.

I tapped the clear plastic once with one knuckle, the way I had tapped a bedroom door every night for three years.

"Goodnight, Jack," I said.

The numbers stopped falling.

They hung in the yellow for a moment, then climbed.

The nurse looked at me, and she looked at the screen.

"Do that again," she said.

I knocked once more.

"Goodnight, son."

The green came back and stayed.

I sat down on the stool and put my forehead against the box, and I cried in front of four strangers.

None of them said a word.

At three in the morning I fed Flora.

She was in the nursery beside the unit, in a clear crib, and she had been awake for an hour, furious.

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