There was no bracelet for Ben. They’d offered him one at check-in, and he’d said, “I’ll get it after she’s born.” He never came back to get it.
I held onto the sink and cried with no sound coming out. I didn’t want to wake Evelyn.
Then I washed my face, and I went back to bed, and I picked up my daughter, and I told myself: not in front of her. You don’t fall apart in front of her.
They discharged us on Saturday morning.
A nurse wheeled me out to the curb in a wheelchair with Evelyn in my arms, the way they always do. I’d imagined this moment so many times. I’d imagined Ben pulling up to the entrance in his car with the brand new car seat installed in the back, and him jumping out to help me, and the two of us buckling her in together with shaking hands.
Instead, it was my dad, helping me into the back seat of his old Buick, and my mom, who had spent forty-five minutes in the parking lot reading the car seat instructions out loud.
“We need to stop by the house,” I said, once we were on the road. “My clothes. Evelyn’s things. The breast pump. Everything’s there.”
My dad glanced at me in the rearview mirror.
“You sure you want to do that today, sweetheart?”
“I need my things, Dad.”
What I didn’t say was this: some small, stupid part of me thought that if Ben saw her, if he actually looked at her for more than two seconds, he would snap out of whatever this was. He would see her little face and remember the heartbeat and the yellow room and the notebook full of doctor’s notes, and he would fall on his knees and say he was sorry.
