The Hospital Photo Looked Perfect, but One Wristband Told the Truth

It’s 8:20 in the morning at Mercy Regional in Salina, Kansas, and the room smells like hand sanitizer and the burnt coffee I been holding since six. The monitor behind the bed still beeps every few seconds, and two IV bags hang over my daughter like tired balloons. My blouse is wrinkled, my glasses keep sliding, and my phone is on 11%. I don’t care. After nineteen hours, my granddaughter Wren is here, pink hat, seven pounds even, asleep in Sloane’s arms.

Sloane is my only child. Corbin, her husband, is twenty-six and still looks like a high school kid in that blue T-shirt. My husband Gerald should be here too, but he’s been on a pipeline job in Wichita since August, home every other weekend. Last night he called at ten and said he couldn’t get away till Saturday. “Kiss that baby for me, Idie,” he said. Thirty-nine years married and he still calls me that.

What hurt for years was the leaving. Gerald was always on some job, always a few hundred miles off, missing Sloane’s recitals, her graduation, half our anniversaries. I told myself that’s what a good provider does. I told Sloane the same. She quit asking where her daddy was about the time she learned to drive. And this morning Wichita is only ninety miles away, and he still isn’t here.

A nurse named Rhonda takes our picture with my little camera. Corbin leans in and puts his hand on the baby, his pink parent band sliding down his wrist. He’s been checking his phone all morning and jumping every time the door opens. After the photo, Rhonda checks my visitor band against her clipboard and smiles. “Oh, you’re a Hollis too. Your husband checked in at 4:10, room 412. Is he lost?”

I laugh, because it’s a mistake. Gerald is in Wichita. Then I look at Corbin. He isn’t smiling no more. He’s staring at the floor, and the hand with his wedding ring is shaking on the blanket. “Corbin,” I say. “What’s in room 412?”

He doesn’t answer. Sloane looks from him to me, the baby still asleep in her arms, and says very quietly, “Corbin, what is she talking about?” He swallows. “Your dad made me swear, Sloane. Since July.” Then he looks at me. “There’s a woman in 412. She had his baby at 5:40 this morning. A boy…”

A boy. Born two hours and twelve minutes before Wren.

For a second nobody breathes. The monitor beeps. Somewhere down the hall a vending machine drops a can.

Sloane speaks first, and it isn’t to me. “You knew. For three months, you knew.” Corbin starts crying, really crying. He says Gerald pulled him aside at the Fourth of July cookout, showed him an ultrasound picture on his phone and begged him to keep quiet until after the babies, because Sloane’s blood pressure was running high and the doctor said no stress. “He said he’d tell you both himself,” Corbin says. “He said it was over with her.”

I set the coffee down on the tray table. My legs carry me out the door before my head decides anything.

The hallway is long and too bright. Room 412 is on the corner, door half open. I hear him before I see him, that low laugh he does when he’s nervous. Then I see it all at once: a woman of maybe thirty-six, red hair in a clip, a baby in a blue-striped hat on her chest, and my husband in the plastic chair beside the bed, his hand resting on that baby exactly the way Corbin’s hand rested on ours ten minutes ago. He’s wearing the brown Carhartt jacket I bought him at Tractor Supply last Christmas.

He looks up. All the color drains out of him.

“Idie.”

The woman looks at me, then at him. “Gerald? Who is this?”

“I’m his wife,” I say. “Thirty-nine years in March. Our daughter is down the hall. She had her baby half an hour ago. Your son has a niece.”

Her name is Tessa Molina. I read it on the whiteboard by the door, written in green marker under GOALS FOR TODAY: rest, feed baby every 3 hrs. In a voice that keeps cracking, she tells me Gerald said he was a widower. That his wife passed of cancer four years ago. That he’s been driving up from his job in Hays every other weekend since last fall.

Wichita for me. Hays for her. He just picked a different town for each of us.

Gerald stands and reaches for my arm. “Idie, let me explain, it’s not—”

“Sit down, Gerald,” Tessa says, before I can. And he does.

I want to scream. I want to throw something. Instead I look at that tiny boy, at the same nose Sloane had in her newborn pictures, and I feel something that isn’t hate. He didn’t do anything. Neither did she, not really. We both trusted the same liar.

The charge nurse, a tall woman named Lupe with reading glasses on a beaded chain, comes in because of the voices and asks Gerald to step out. He looks at me like I’m supposed to save him, the way I’ve saved him from every forgotten birthday and bounced check for four decades. I don’t move. Lupe walks him to the elevator. The visitor band on his wrist, the one he got at 4:10, is the same pink as mine.

Three weeks later, Sloane and I sit at the Cozy Inn with a sack of sliders and Wren asleep in her car seat. My lawyer, Dana Pruitt, has the papers filed. Gerald is sleeping on his cousin’s couch in Abilene. Sloane hasn’t forgiven Corbin yet, but she lets him take every 3 a.m. feeding, and he does every single one without being asked. I think that’s how it starts.

My phone buzzes. A text from Tessa, the first since the hospital. A photo of the boy asleep on a yellow blanket. His name is Ellis. “I don’t want anything from you,” she writes. “I just thought someday Wren might want to know him.”

I show Sloane. She looks at it a long time, then at her daughter, and she nods.

That night I print the picture Rhonda took. Me with my glasses crooked, Sloane exhausted and shining, Corbin smiling too hard, his hand on the baby so nobody would see it shake. I didn’t know a thing when that picture was taken. I almost throw it away.

Instead I put it in a frame on my dresser, right where Gerald’s watch used to sit. Not every smile in it was honest. But the baby in the middle is, and she’s the one I’m keeping.