I Mourned My Son for 36 Years, Then the Doctor Smiled

The clock over the delivery bed says 4:52 p.m. and my phone is on 9%, buzzing in my coat pocket like a trapped bee. I don’t answer it. The room smells like iodine and that hospital soap that never really rinses off, and my daughter Nell is squeezing my fingers so hard my wedding ring cuts into the skin. There’s three nurses in blue moving around us like they’ve done this a thousand times.

Nell is twenty-seven and this is her first baby. Her father, my husband Garrett Hollis, was supposed to be standing right here. At seven this morning he called from home and said migraine. Garrett has never had a migraine in his life. What he has never had is the stomach to walk into St. Agnes Women’s Center again, not since March 9, thirty-six years ago, when I gave birth to our first child in this building. A boy. Garrett told me he lived forty minutes.

I never held him. I was bleeding too much, they put me under, and when I woke up it was all over. Garrett said he had him cremated and scattered the ashes on Grand Lake by himself, to spare me. There’s no grave. No photo. Only a date me and Garrett never talk about, and a green tackle box in our garage he has never let anybody open. Not even me.

Right now the doctor, Dr. Tobias Arrendale, catches my granddaughter and lifts her up, slick and furious and perfect. He clears her nose with a little blue bulb syringe and grins behind his glasses. That’s when I see his left hand. The pinky bends inward at the top joint, exactly like Nell’s. Exactly like my father’s. “Family thing?” I hear myself ask. He laughs. “Couldn’t tell you. I’m adopted. Born right here in this hospital, in March. They said I wasn’t supposed to make it.”

The room goes quiet in my ears. Nell is crying, the baby is crying, and I’m just staring at that finger. Very carefully, I ask if he ever saw his birth papers. He nods while a nurse wraps my granddaughter in a striped blanket. “Only one signature on the release,” he says. “The man who gave me away.”

Then he says it, the name from the bottom of that page. Garrett Hollis. My husband’s name, coming out of a stranger’s mouth. Tobias doesn’t know who I am. He only sees my face go white and my hand slip out of Nell’s, and he tells a nurse to get me a chair…

I don’t sit. I walk out into the hallway with Nell calling after me, and a nurse named Delphine follows with a paper cup of cherry Jell-O, like that could fix anything. I plug my dying phone into the charger behind the nurses’ station. Eleven missed calls. All Garrett.

I call him back. Before I say a word, he asks, “Is it the Arrendale boy on shift?”

That’s how I know. Not from the pinky. From my husband knowing the name of a doctor he has never met.

I drive the 23 miles home to Broken Arrow with the heater dead and the dashboard reading 41 degrees. Garrett is on the back steps with the green tackle box on his knees. At sixty-eight he looks like a man who has waited thirty-six years for one phone call.

“Open it, Marlys,” he says.

Under the lures there’s a tiny hospital wristband, pink and blue stripes gone gray. BOY HOLLIS. 6 LB 1 OZ. Under that, photographs in a rubber band. A little boy with a scar down his chest, blowing out three candles. A young man in a white coat, his crooked pinky wrapped around a diploma.

Our son was born with half a heart. That’s how Dr. Wendell Kast put it, a tired man who smelled like menthol cigarettes. One surgeon in Little Rock might try, for more money than we’d earn in ten years. We had no insurance. I was in intensive care after two transfusions, and nobody knew if I’d wake up.

Then a couple from Fort Smith came to the hospital chaplain. They had lost three pregnancies. They had money and a cousin at the children’s hospital in Little Rock. They would pay for every surgery if they could adopt him.

Garrett had one night. His mother, Opal, sat with him in the cafeteria and told him I couldn’t survive losing a baby slowly, in a week, in front of my eyes. That it was kinder if he was simply gone.

So Garrett signed. Two days later, he brought me a stack of papers “for the cremation,” and I signed them too, crying, without reading one line.

I want to throw the tackle box into the yard. I want to hold him too, and that’s the worst part. Both feelings sit in my chest like two strangers on a bus.

“There were no ashes,” I say.

“There were no ashes.”

The Arrendales sent one letter a year through the chaplain. One photo, one line. He’s walking. He’s reading. He wants to be a doctor. Eleven years ago Garrett drove to Tulsa and watched the medical school graduation from his truck with the engine running. He never got out.

When Nell chose St. Agnes, he checked the staff page every night for a month. That’s why he stayed home today. He couldn’t look at his son and lie to my face in the same room.

At 6:10 the next morning, I go back with the wristband in my pocket.

Tobias is in the hallway, charting on a tablet. I hold out the faded band and tell him what I was told, the forty minutes, the lake, the ashes. He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then he takes out his wallet and, from behind his license, unfolds a copy of his original birth record. Under mother: Marlys Hollis, 27.

He took this job because it was the last place I was ever near him, he says. He hoped one day I’d walk past.

“I thought you just didn’t want me,” he says. His voice cracks in the middle, the same way Nell’s does.

I cover his crooked pinky with my hand and cry in front of a vending machine and a janitor who pretends not to see.

Three weeks later, Tobias comes to Sunday dinner in Broken Arrow. Nell puts the baby, Junie, in his arms and makes him hold her through the whole pot roast. Garrett barely talks. When Tobias leaves, Garrett walks him to his car, and through the kitchen window I watch my husband hold out his hand and my son stare at it a long second before he takes it.

I haven’t forgiven Garrett. Some days I think I will. Some days I can’t stand the sound of his truck in the driveway. But this March 9, there’s no silence at Grand Lake. There are five of us on the dock, a baby in a yellow snowsuit, and for the first time in thirty-six years I say my son’s name out loud, and he turns around and answers.