“Good,” I say, for lack of something better. “Do you need me to—”
“My mom can handle it. She’s out getting more supplies right now. She’ll help me.”
“I’ll help you too,” I say. “Seriously. I’m all done with finals. I have almost two weeks off.” I lean forward and put my hand on hers.
She’s feeling such despair that it makes my chest hurt.
“I don’t know anything about babies, but I’m here for you, okay?” I gasp against the pain.
She pulls her hand from under mine, but her eyes soften slightly. “Thanks, C.”
“I don’t think I ever told you how much I admire you for how you’re handling all this,” I say.
She scoffs. “Which part? For the way I lied to everybody about who the father is? For the way I put all my hopes in a silly vision? For how stupid I was to let it happen in the first place?”
“Um, none of the above. For going through with this, even though you’re scared.”
Her lips tighten. “I couldn’t give him away to some stranger, not ever knowing what would happen to him.”
“That’s brave, Ange.”
She shakes her head. Maybe not, she says in my head. Maybe he would have been safer away from me. With a human family. Maybe he would have been better off. Maybe I’m being selfish.
The baby starts making a grunting noise, twisting in the blanket he’s wrapped in. He opens his eyes, golden like hers, and starts to cry, a thin, reedy-sounding wail. The sound sends a prickle down my spine. I jump to my feet.
“Do you want me to hand him to you?” I ask.
She hesitates. “I’ll page the nurse.” She presses a button on the frame of her bed.
I go to the side of the bassinet and look in. He’s so tiny. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so small and new. I’ve never even held a baby before, other than Jeffrey, I guess, and I don’t remember that.
“I don’t want to break him,” I confess to Angela.
“Me either,” she says.
But we’re saved by Anna, who comes into the room a few steps ahead of the nurse. She sweeps right in and lifts the baby, cooing, holds him to her shoulder, but he doesn’t stop crying. She checks his diaper, which is apparently fine. This is clearly a relief to Angela.
“He’s hungry,” Anna reports.
Angela looks tense. “Again? He just fed like an hour ago.”
“Do you want to try to nurse him again?” the nurse asks.
“I guess.” She holds out her arms, and Anna gives her the baby; then Angela looks at me like, Sorry to be rude, but I’m about to flash my breasts here.
“I’ll be … out,” I say, and duck into the hall. I head down to the gift shop and buy her some yellow flowers in a vase that’s in the shape of a baby boot. I’m hoping she’ll think it’s funny.
When I get back, Anna’s holding the baby again, and he’s quieted down. Angela is lying with her eyes closed, her breathing shallow. I set the flowers on the windowsill and gesture to Anna that I’m going.
She nods, but walks with me to the door.
“Do you want to hold him?” she whispers.
“No, I’m good to look and not touch. He’s beautiful, though,” I say, even though that might be a stretch.
She gazes down at him with adoration in her eyes.
“He’s a miracle,” she says. Her eyes flicker over to Angela. “She is frightened now. It was the same for me. But she’ll understand, soon enough. That he’s a gift. She’ll realize that she’s been blessed.”
The baby yawns, and she smiles, readjusts the blue cap on his head. I inch toward the door.
“Thank you for being here,” she says then. “You’re a good friend. Angela is lucky to have someone like you.”
“Tell her to call me,” I say, unnerved as usual by the steady intensity of Anna’s dark, humorless eyes on me. “I’ll be around.”
When I get in the elevator, I hold the door for a couple with a baby dressed in what looks like a pink jumpsuit with ladybugs embroidered on the feet. They’re both—the mother in a wheelchair with the baby in her arms, the father standing behind her—focused entirely on the baby, their bodies turned toward her, their eyes not leaving her tiny face.
“We’re taking her home,” the father tells me, proudly.
“Congratulations. That’s epic.”
The orderly who’s pushing the wheelchair looks at me all suspicious. The mother doesn’t even seem to hear me. The baby, for her part, thinks that the elevator is the most fascinating thing, like, ever. She decides the appropriate reaction to this wonderful magic box that takes you somewhere different from the place that you started in is a sneeze.
A sneeze.
You’d think she’d recited the alphabet, for all the excitement this action stirs up in her parents.
“Oh my goodness,” says the mother in a high, soft voice, bending her face close to her baby’s. “What was that?”
The baby blinks confusedly. Then sneezes again.
Everybody laughs: the mother, the father, the orderly, and me, for good measure. But I’m watching the way the father puts his hand gently on the back of his wife’s shoulder, and how she reaches up briefly to touch his hand, love passing between them as simply as that, and I think, Angela won’t get this. She won’t leave the hospital this way.
It makes me remember a quote from today’s exam. From Dante. Midway upon the journey of life, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.
I know what he means.
13
A SUNDAY SCHOOL LESSON
“A glory sword is more than a simple weapon,” Dad’s saying. “I have talked about a sword being an extension of your arm, imagining that it’s part of you, but a glory sword is more than a metaphor. The glory is part of you; it grows from the light inside you, that energy, that connectedness to the power that governs all life.”
We’re on the deserted beach again, because he decided that place is less distracting for us to train than my backyard in Jackson. It’s dusk. Christian and I are sitting near the waterline, our toes buried in the sand, while Dad gives us a mini lecture on the composition of glory and its many uses.
And here I thought I was on spring break. We’ve been training every day since we got back to Jackson. At least today we’re hitting the beach.
Dad continues. “There is nothing, not on earth, or in heaven, or even in hell, that can overcome that light. If you believe this, then the glory will shape itself into anything that you need.”
“Like a lantern,” I say.
“Yes. Or an arrow, as you’ve also seen. But the most effective form is a sword. It’s quick, and powerful, sharper than any two-edged blade, piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”
Now he’s gone all poetic on us.
I remember how Jeffrey reacted to the idea of a glory sword. “What about a glory gun?” I ask. “I mean, this is the twenty-first century. Maybe what we should really be trying to shape is a glory semiautomatic.”
“Which would require you to create what, a glory stock and barrel, a firing mechanism, glory gunpowder, glory shells and bullets?” Dad questions, his eyes amused.
“Well, it sounds dumb when you put it that way. I guess a sword is good.”
Dad makes a face. “I think you’ll find the sword more useful than anything else. And tasteful.”
“An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age,” I joke.
He doesn’t get it, but my geekiness makes Christian smile, which counts for something.
“Why?” Christian asks suddenly. “Why would a sword be more useful, I mean?”
“Because the enemy uses a blade as well,” Dad says, his eyes serious. “Fashioned from their sorrow.”
I sit up straighter. “A sword made of sorrow?” I try not to think about Christian’s vision, about the blood on my shirt, about how scared I am, like every minute, that what he’s seeing is my death. But I haven’t worked up the courage yet to ask Dad for his interpretation of the future.