Car Crash Neglect Christmas Divorce novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Maddy

On Christmas morning in the NICU, Doran returns the ultrasound picture, Claire names her daughter, and Dean cuts her cards and tells her the house is his.

By six on Christmas morning, my daughter's oxygen number had stayed above ninety for eight hours.

I sat beside her incubator in a wheelchair with a blanket over my knees and watched the number on the monitor.

She was so small that the hospital hat came down over her eyebrows.

A tube ran into her nose, and a tiny sensor was taped to her heel.

I put one finger through the porthole, and her whole hand closed around the tip of it.

"Hi," I said. "I'm your mom. I'm sorry I'm late."

"Claire Gruber?"

A woman in a puffy coat and a Santa hat stood in the doorway with a duffel bag and a thermos.

She had a short black bob and had clearly not slept either.

"Zelda," I said, and my voice broke in the middle.

She crossed the room and knelt on the tile and put both arms around me and the wheelchair together.

"The nurse called me at midnight," she said into my shoulder.

"I would have been here at one, but my car is a liar. Where is he?"

"Who?"

"Don't be cute. Where is your husband?"

"I told him to leave."

Zelda sat back on her heels and looked at me.

"Say that again, slowly."

I told her all of it, in the quiet voice you use around a sleeping baby.

I left nothing out, and my voice stayed level until I reached the part about the key.

By the end, Zelda was standing up with her fists at her sides.

"I'm going to put that man through a wall," she said.

Then she noticed the incubator and lowered her voice.

"I'm going to do it quietly."

"Please don't. I need you to help me with something else."

"Anything."

"I need a lawyer."

Zelda didn't blink.

"My cousin does family law in Dublin. She's mean, and she'll be awake. I'll call her now."

"Not yet." I looked at the baby. "First I want to give her a name."

"You have a name?"

"I've had three on a list for a month. Dean said he didn't care, so I never picked."

"What are they?"

"Madeline, Eleanor and Wren."

"Madeline," Zelda said immediately. "Maddy. She looks like a Maddy."

I watched my daughter's hand curl around my finger.

"Maddy Gruber," I said.

"Not Albrecht?"

"Gruber. That's my father's name, and it's mine."

The nurse at the desk wrote it on the card at the foot of the incubator in green marker.

It was the first time I had smiled in two days.

"Ms. Gruber?"

The voice came from the hall.

A man in a gray hoodie stood just inside the door with a sandwich bag in one hand and a paper coffee carrier in the other.

His jaw was dark with stubble, and he had clearly worked a double and not slept.

It took me a second to place him without the navy jacket.

"Doran," I said.

"I was off at seven last night, and I came back this morning. Hope that's not strange."

He held up the bag.

"I went back to the tow yard. The car was still there."

Inside the sandwich bag was my ultrasound picture, a little bent along one edge.

The drop of blood on the corner had dried to a brown dot.

I took it from him with both hands.

My daughter had her fist against her cheek in the picture.

In the incubator beside me, her fist was still against her cheek.

"Thank you," I said. "You didn't have to."

"I told you I would."

He set a coffee on the shelf by Zelda, and another by me.

"The decaf is for you. The nurses said no caffeine if you're pumping."

"I'm not pumping yet."

"You will be."

Zelda looked at him, and at me, and at the coffee, and raised both eyebrows.

"I'm Zelda," she said. "I'm the friend with the bad car."

"Doran. I drove her in."

"Then I owe you a dinner."

"You don't." He glanced at the incubator, and his face did something quick and careful. "Is she okay?"

"She's Maddy," I said. "Maddy Gruber."

"Hi, Maddy." He didn't say it to me. He said it to the glass. "I'm the guy who held your mom's phone."

He reached into his hoodie pocket and took out my phone.

"I didn't look at anything," he said. "It rang a lot. I turned the sound off around midnight."

The screen showed forty-one missed calls and a column of texts.

Every one of them was Dean's.

I scrolled down with my thumb and read the last three, one after another.

"Where are you?"

"Your card isn't working at the gift shop. Did you lock it?"

"I turned it off. You've been hysterical for two days. You won't see another dollar until you apologize to Brandy."

Zelda read them over my shoulder and made a very small noise.

"He cut off your cards," she said. "While you were in the NICU."

"The cards were on his account."

I heard how steady my voice was.

"I never saw the statements. He said he handled the money."

The phone buzzed in my hand with another text.

I read it, and I turned the screen so Zelda and Doran could both see it.

"The house is in my name, Claire. Come home when you're done being dramatic."

Doran looked at the screen and then at me.

"You don't have to answer that today," he said.

I watched Maddy's heel under its little sensor, rising and falling.

"I'm not going to answer it at all," I said. "I'm going to answer it with papers."

Zelda was already dialing her cousin.

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