The Cactus
by Mark Harris
Cary noticed the Echinopsis the first week he began jogging through Beverly Hills. It caught his eye because he had grown several of the same variety. The cacti had flowered, and so had his fortunes. Then Margo left and took them with her, confirmation that his luck had run out once more.
He’d bought the cacti for the balcony of his second floor apartment to celebrate the start of a new career in stunt work. A month later he met Margo, a life coach with a growing list of entertainment wannabes. They were both rising, behind-the-scene players in Hollywood, working to sustain the fantasies of moviegoers and the dreams of hopefuls struggling to break into the business. Until everything went to shit again.
When she walked out, he thought of buying new cacti to replace the ones she’d meanly appropriated. But it had taken a year for those to flower, and he didn’t have the heart to start over again. He was sure they would wither under Margo’s care. In their three and a half years together had she even watered them half a dozen times?
The Beverly Hills succulents were clustered together in a cracked pot by the driveway of a McMansion with towering front doors and faux Doric columns. The house was too big for its lot and the multi-stemmed, columnar cacti had outgrown their container. Cary couldn’t tell whether the owners had left the pot for the gardener to replant or just abandoned it.
He stopped to catch his breath and peer through the dark curtained windows for occupants of the house. Whoever lived there remained hidden. He’d started running again to vent his anger at Margo, yet crossing the city line from West Hollywood into Beverly Hills only fueled it. The metal-gated driveways, the “Armed Response” signs for security services, warned that he was an intruder in this neighborhood. The foot tall Echinopsis kept him returning anyway. He varied the times of his run, hoping to encounter someone to ask about the cactus, but the only person he ever saw descending the marble steps was the mailman.
Every time he passed the house, he imagined the dormant cacti blooming on the balcony outside his bedroom. Although he didn’t think of himself as a thief, the cacti were too beautiful to be left to die. What harm could come from snatching the pot? Would anyone even notice it was missing? And if they did, what would they do? Summon a Beverly Hills cop to investigate? Still, he hesitated--until the morning he discovered a realtor’s For Sale sign casting an ominous shadow across the plants.The sign brought him to an abrupt halt. He stood there, sweat-soaked, breathing heavily, contemplating his options.
He wasn’t about to grab the clay pot in broad daylight and run with it back to his apartment. Wiser to wait till nightfall. All day he felt heady with anticipation. It was the same intoxication he’d felt doing stuntwork, the mix of excitement and fear, a leap into the unknown with only faith in himself and the future to rely on, a confidence he hadn’t felt since Margo left him, and in truth, for a long time before.
He sat at his desk in the Venice insurance agency where he worked now, unable to concentrate on the forms on his computer screen. When his career in stuntwork collapsed, he started selling insurance. If life had taught him anything, it was this: hope for the best, but protect against the worst. He could wax poetically about home break-ins, fires, earthquakes, mudslides, all the hazards of living on a fault line in southern California. You could never have too much insurance. All cacti had spines. He kept imagining everything that could go wrong that night: a patrol car passing by, barking dogs waking the owners, a neighbor peering out the window.
Too distracted to focus, he left early to buy two large terra cotta pots and the special soil mixture he used before: 60% pumice, 10% peat, 20% Supersoil, 5% sand, and a few lava rocks for the bottom of the containers. He set his alarm for two in the morning but couldn’t sleep. Impatient to set off, he dressed in dark pants and a black hoodie—it’s what burglars wore, didn’t they?— and left the apartment at one. Crossing Sunset Boulevard, he drove slowly toward the house on Oxford Way. At 1:30, the windows were dark, the house at least 50 yards from the nearest streetlight. He turned down Lexington Road and parked. No cars passed, no private security guards, no police looking to ticket vehicles without a residential parking sticker. Exiting the Honda, he quickly approached his prize. When he lifted the plants, they were heavier than he anticipated. He cradled the pot and strode rapidly to the car, expecting at any moment a window to fling open and someone to yell “thief.” But he seemed the only witness to his crime. He placed the cacti carefully in the trunk, wiped the dirt from his hands, and drove away to his own applause.
As soon as he reached his apartment, he repotted the Echinopsis in the two large terra cotta pots. In the morning he placed the repotted plants on his balcony, with its perfect southeastern light. Margo would have thought his theft harebrained, as reckless as the actions that destroyed his movie career, and baseball hopes before that—what she called “self-sabotage”—but his late night burglary boosted his confidence and renewed his hope in the future.
§
Three weeks afterwards, he met Sheila. She telephoned the insurance office from her cell phone, and he answered the call. Though she was a client of his agency, they’d never met before. His office was only a mile away, so he arrived immediately.
She was standing on the curb on Amoroso and Lincoln, her unruly red hair as tangled as the wreckage of her red Mazda Miata, which had just been broadsided by a Lexus SUV. A quick assessment of the damage told him the car was unsalvageable.
“Wow, that was fast!” she exclaimed when he introduced himself. She seemed surprisingly buoyant in the face of disaster.
“We do our best,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Not even a nose bleed.” She shrugged to indicate the improbability of it. “I loved that car, but I guess our time together is over.”
“It’s why you have insurance.”
“Great insurance! You showed up faster than the tow truck.” She flashed a dazzling, gap-toothed smile. He quickly looked away. It had been a long time since anyone gushed at him like that.
The officer who responded to the accident approached to get more information. Meanwhile, his partner was shoving the female driver of the Lexus into the back seat of their patrol car.
The cop studied Sheila over the top of his notepad. “She’s lucky she’s in one piece.” He nodded toward the other driver. “Her blood alcohol level measured .20. That’s criminal negligence… She must have been drinking all afternoon.”
“The world’s a dangerous place,” Cary said.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
The flat beds finally arrived and cleared both cars from the intersection. The police drove the DUI to the station, and he was left alone with Sheila. “Can I take you to a rental agency?” he asked.
“I don’t know if I want to drive again tonight,” she said, perhaps more shaken than she appeared.
“I’ll be happy to drive you home then,” he said.
“I’d appreciate that.” She smiled again in gratitude.
“Maybe you should get something to eat first, something to settle your stomach…” He surprised himself with the offer.
“I didn’t know that was in my policy,” she laughed.
“We’re a complete service agency.”
“In that case, I accept. Lead on, Sir Galahad.”
He took her to Lula’s Mexican Cocina, whose Cadillac margaritas with Grand Marnier he always liked. He ordered one for each of them. Sitting across from her in the tiny booth, he found it difficult to avoid gazing into her sea green eyes. She didn’t look away.
“You look familiar,” she said.
“Maybe you saw me at the office.”
“No, I bought my policy over the phone. Were you ever on TV? The movies?”
He felt himself blushing. “As a matter of fact, I did work in movies for a time. But you never saw my face. I was a stunt man…” He looked up from his drink. “Doubled once for Tom Cruise.”
“Shut up!” she laughed.
“It’s true. He was feeling sick that day. Ruined my shoulder hanging from a ledge for him.”
“You really are Sir Galahad,” she said admiringly.
He looked down at his glass, embarrassed. “And here I always thought it was just bad luck.”
“No such thing! Bad luck, good luck, they’re just names for things we can’t explain.”
“Well, my life could use some explaining. It’s been a little rocky lately,” he confessed.
“Tell me,” she encouraged.
He ordered another round of the Cadillac margaritas to make it easer to recount his streak of misfortunes. “It started in my second year in college when I crashed into a fence chasing a home run ball I should’ve given up on. A futile gesture. We lost by ten runs anyway.”
“I like people who don’t give up.”
He took another sip of his margarita to avoid her gaze. “Unfortunately, I tore my rotator cuff crashing into that fence. The surgeon promised my shoulder would be even stronger when he repaired it. He never mentioned how I’d hit. After the operation I couldn’t catch up to a fast ball any more and the coach didn’t wait around until I could. He gave my scholarship to a better prospect.”
“His loss,” she said.
“Maybe, but other coaches felt the same. No college was willing to give me a scholarship, so I dropped out…then a friend suggested stunt work. He said anyone willing to run into walls for a baseball was crazy enough to leap from rooftop to rooftop or ride a motorcycle through flames. He was right. I loved it—the planning, the preparation, the satisfaction of a perfectly executed stunt. Then one day I hung too long from that second-story window ledge and wrecked my shoulder for good. Only 70% mobility now.” He raised his right arm to demonstrate.
“Tom Cruise should be filled with gratitude.”
“I’m still waiting for his get-well card.”
She reached across the table and took his hand. “Well, I’m grateful,” she said.
Impulsively he raised her hand to his lips.
“Maybe you should drive me home now,” she said.
§
The first time Sheila visited his apartment she raised the blinds in every room. “You need to let the sunshine in. No one thrives in gloom.” Then she opened the sliding doors to the balcony and discovered the Echinopsis. “Wow, these are really beautiful. You must have been growing them a long time.”
He wanted to explain their provenance, but their relationship was too new, too uncertain. Instead, he tested the soil with his fingers. “Needs watering,” he said. “The more light they get, the more you need to water. If you take good care of them, they reward you with magnificent flowers.” He pointed to the tiny buds just beginning to appear on the plants. “It won’t be long now. Most cacti bloom once a year, but an Echinopsis can flower multiple times.”
“I’m eager to see,” she said, throwing her arms around him.
A month later she moved in, replaced the blinds with curtains, recovered his drab gray couch in coral, and repainted each of the beige rooms a different color—daffodil yellow, cornflower blue, and moss green. A beautician who spent her days making plain women glamorous, she had a gift for beautifying everything she touched. She viewed life the same way she did the women who came to her salon: whatever their flaws, with the right hairstyle, the right makeup, they all could be beautiful.
It was this gift, he thought, that explained how she’d survived the losses of her own childhood. The evening they packed up the last few possessions in her Venice apartment, they strolled along the beach and she told him about her parents. When she was four, her mother walked out the door one day and disappeared forever. Her father drank to numb the pain and lost one job and then another until finally alcohol and despair defeated him.
When she was eight, he sent Sheila to stay with an aunt one evening, closed the garage door, and turned on the car engine. She recounted all this as matter of factly, emotionlessly, as if it had happened to someone she barely knew.
“That must have been so painful,” was all he could say.
She stopped a moment and gazed at the slate gray ocean as if hoping her memories would recede with the ebbing tide. At last she turned to him. “They could barely take care of themselves. How could they take care of me too? What’s the point of brooding about it? You can’t change what happened. I don’t like talking or thinking about it, but I thought you should know.”
Her lack of rancor made him ashamed of the resentment he harbored for his own vicissitudes, which paled compared to hers. She exemplified what Margo preached to all her clients: no matter what circumstances you faced, you controlled your own fate. But where Margo used her philosophy to castigate his faults, Sheila saw his failures as a sign of his resilience, his ability to keep bouncing back. It terrified him to think he might fail again and lose her.
One night, as they were lying in bed watching the 11 o’clock news, a female newscaster appeared in front of a burned-out house to report a fire that killed a mother and father and their two young children. Glancing at Sheila, Cary noticed tears running down her cheeks. In the four months he knew her, he’d never seen her cry. His first reaction was to protect her from the pain that stirred her tears. He searched for the remote. “I see enough tragedies at work. We don’t need to watch more at night.”
Sheila stayed his hand. “But look how loved they were.” She pointed to the neighbors placing cards and flowers in front of the charred home. “That’s so beautiful.”
“You always find the best in everything,” he said.
“It’s because I’ve known the worst.”
He held her while she wept. Behind her on the TV, another reporter, illuminated by the alternating red and amber lights of an ambulance, described a four-care pileup on the 405. Cary muted the sound. “We should get married,” he proposed.
She wiped her eyes with the collar of her T-shirt. “I’ve been wondering if you’d ever ask.”
A week later they went to Santa Monica City Hall. A few friends witnessed the brief ceremony. Sheila wore a white pantsuit, ruby blouse, and white headband to bind her rebellious curls; Cary the dark suit he kept for weddings and funerals. She carried a bouquet of peonies, lillies, and roses he’d carefully picked out. Two of Sheila’s friends from the salon threw rice at them as they descended the steps of City Hall. A colleague from his insurance office clapped him heartily on his damaged shoulder as he reached the street. “She’s quite a catch,” he marveled. “You’re a helluva lucky man, my friend.”
The sudden twinge in Cary’s shoulder made him wonder how long the luck would last.
§
When you were hitting or pitching well, you never risked your streak by changing bats or gloves or chewing gum. It was the same performing stunts. Who knew what slight misstep could ruin your future? The day Cruise decided at the last moment not to drop from that ledge, Cary had to abandon his usual habits. So he stuck faithfully to the routine that had brought Sheila into his life. Every morning he’d go out to the balcony and tend the cacti, watering or fertilizing them as needed with concentrated tomato food or bone meal. Three mornings a week he still jogged north of Sunset, although careful to avoid Oxford Way where he’d stolen the Echinopsis. He’d return in time to kiss Sheila goodbye before she left for her salon. Then he’d shower, eat the same Cheerios for breakfast every day and drive to his Venice office where he was selling more insurance than ever.
It was nights when he worried that it might all come crashing down again. Often he would wake in the darkness in a cold sweat from a recurring nightmare from his stunt days of jumping off a skyscraper without a parachute or diving off a cliff into a bottomless abyss. To keep from disturbing Sheila, he would throw on a sweater and slip out onto the balcony to still his fears.
One night when he couldn’t sleep, Sheila put on her robe and joined him on the balcony. She stood behind him and massaged his neck. “What’s keeping you up? Is your shoulder bothering you again?”
He didn’t want to burden her with his dark thoughts. The cacti he’d bought to celebrate the start of his career in stuntwork hadn’t prevented it from ending. Though the new Echinopsis had restored his luck, he worried that stealing it somehow tainted the good fortune it brought, that eventually there would be retribution for his theft.
“Don’t you ever worry about the future?” he asked.
“Sometimes, but you have to deal with whatever curves life throws you.”
He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her toward him. “Curves like these?” He slid his hands down her hips.
“You have no trouble handling them.”
“Everything should be this easy.”
She pulled away. “What if my curves expand?”
“What do you mean?”
“I think I’m pregnant.”
The suddenness of it was like a gust of wind in the chill night air. “You sure?”
“I havent’t taken the test yet, but I know my body.”
“You really want a child right now?” He felt a stab of fear. Why alter their present happiness?
“It’s one way to shape the future. I know you’ll make a great father.”
He groped for a response. Though they’d talked about having children, he’d always imagined it years away.
“I know it’s sudden,” she said. “It was a surprise to me too.”
He was too stunned to absorb the news.
“You don’t have to say anything right now,” she said. “Just love me. And love the child we’ve made together.”
He took her in his arms and held her. The warmth of her body reassured him. “Of course I will,” he said.
§
The Echinopsis blossomed, and so did Sheila. The flowers were incredibly intricate with several layers of petals, each layer a different hue of pink or white. Sheila‘s complexion radiated the same beauty. The flowers only lasted a few days, but Sheila continued to bloom. The more her body swelled, the more radiant she became. Her flame red hair seemed to deepen in color; her pale skin glowed. Lying naked beside her in bed, he felt dizzy with happiness. He would place his lips on her pillowy belly and whisper to the son they’d created together—he was certain it was a boy—and wait for the baby to respond.
“What are you whispering?” she asked one night.
“That’s between us. Father and son.”
“What if it’s a girl?” She insisted the obstetrician not tell them the sex of the child.
“Then it’s between father and daughter.”
“Tell me,” she said. “You know I don’t like secrets.”
“I have no secrets from you. You know everything about me. What haven’t I told you?”
She sat up suddenly in bed. “Only you would know that.” She waited.
It seemed a ridiculous trifle to withhold, but he was ashamed of what he’d done, a rash act in a troubled time. It was not the way he wanted her to see the father of their child.
“I was a different person before I met you. I can’t even remember that person anymore.”
She wrinkled her face, not quite believing him, but let it pass. “Well, I’m very happy that you’re the person who replaced him.”
§
Two weeks later Sheila woke up to discover blood dripping down her leg. Her obstetrician, Dr. McKenna, met them in the emergency room. He asked Cary to remain in the waiting room while he examined her. When he finished, he invited Cary back into the examining room. Sheila was sitting up on the bed, pale as her hospital gown. He took her hand.
“We have a complication,” the doctor said, fingering the stethoscope dangling
from his neck. “Both your wife and the baby are at risk.”
The doctor was younger than the surgeon who’d operated on his shoulder, not that long out of medical school, Cary guessed. He spoke quickly, as if trying to reassure himself as much as both of them. Sheila had a rare condition called placenta previa: the placenta covered the opening of the cervix, which could lead to massive internal bleeding.
Cary tried to take in everything he was saying, but all he could focus on was the blood on the sleeve of the doctor’s white coat.
He tightened his grip on Sheila’s hand. “If you’re in that much danger, maybe we should terminate the pregnancy.”
Sheila looked to the doctor.
“This is a serious complication, but it’s manageable,” he said. “We just need to take the right precautions.”
“Meaning what?” Cary tried to quell the fear flooding his body.
“I want your wife to remain in the hospital so we can monitor her until the baby’s ready to be delivered.”
“If that’s what’s necessary,” Sheila said.
Cary felt the old ache in his shoulder as she squeezed his hand.
“Good, I’ll arrange it,” Dr. McKenna said.
“It’s going to be fine,” she reassured Cary when the doctor left.
“You don’t think we should get a second opinion?”
“I know he’s young, but I believe in him. I have good instincts about people.”
He didn’t want to shake her confidence in the obstetrician, who’d been recommended by a co-worker at her salon, so he didn’t insist on consulting another doctor. Her faith in other people brought out the best in them.
§
He visited Sheila every evening in the hospital and all Saturdays and Sundays. She bore the bad food, the back pain, and the boredom with few complaints. This would all be over soon and she would return home with a new addition to their family. She even found unexpected benefits in the daytime TV she watched —ads for products that would make her a more capable mother.
Though Cary tried to remain as positive, he found it difficult to accept the precarious situation of his wife. Sheila never smoked, barely drank, was careful about what she ate, exercised regularly, and was a perfect candidate to bear a child. Yet suddenly she was on bed rest, monitored 24 hours a day, at risk of hemorrhaging at any moment. How explain this cruel twist of fate? Although he sold insurance to protect against incalculable forces like earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, he was unprepared for the irrational event that had swept down on them.
One night, after she’d endured another episode of bleeding that soaked the bed and took frightening minutes to stanch, he found her uncharacteristically discouraged. “I know they say everything happens for a reason,” she said. “I don’t know why this is happening to me. Women have babies every day without problems. Why can’t I? Tell me.”
Cary struggled for an explanation. “You know the good-luck cacti on our balcony, the ones you like so much…” he began haltingly, hands clenched in the pockets of his jeans, a penitent beside her bed. “I lied to you about them.”
“What do you mean?”
“I stole them.”
“Why? How?” She looked confused.
“They were in a pot in the driveway of an ugly house in Beverly Hills. I didn’t think anyone was taking care of them. So late one night I snatched the pot and took it home and replanted the cacti.” He glanced at her to see his own disgust mirrored in her face. All he saw was puzzlement.
“You didn’t steal the plants. You rescued them.”
“I never thought of it that way before,” he said.
“I don’t know why. How can you steal something that someone else abandoned?”
The relief he felt overwhelmed him. He shed his shoes, lay down on the hospital bed and wrapped his arms around her. The luck the Echinopsis had brought them would hold.
§
The closer Sheila came to giving birth, the more Cary started to worry again. Playing ball and doing stuntwork, at least he had some measure of control. Now Sheila and their child’s fate was in the doctor’s hands, not his. His powerlessness increased his fear. Routine was all he had to cling to. So he continued monitoring the cacti every morning, jogging the same streets on his runs, eating the same breakfast, driving the same route to his Venice office. Passing Lula’s restaurant each day reassured him. Like the cacti flowering on their balcony, Lula’s had brought them together. Their lives were interwined now; she was his good luck, and he hers.
Then one morning, driving to work on Pico Boulevard, the BMW in front of him stopped suddenly to avoid a kid skateboarding across the street. Cary slammed on the brakes and avoided hitting the BMW, but the Ford behind him rammed into his Honda. And a Prius rear-ended the Ford. The damage to his bumper wasn’t great--$1600, Cary immediately estimated—and he felt no whiplash from the collision. Still, the three-car pile-up jarred him and took a long time to untangle. When he finally turned down Main Street to pass Lula’s, he was further rattled to discover a pipe had burst, blocking the street, and he had to take a detour to his office.
Visiting Sheila that night, he ran into Dr. McKenna coming out of her hospital room. Though the obstetrican checked on her on his daily rounds, Cary rarely saw him. The few chance encounters they had, the doctor assured him everything was under control, as he hurriedly did again. “We’re watching her very closely, waiting as long as we can to operate,” he said before he rushed away. The doctor appeared to be a careful, cautious man, who trimmed his close-cropped beard every day. Cary wanted to have faith in him, yet he was bothered by the doctor’s social awkwardness and the way he constantly fingered his stethoscope.
The doctor’s quick escape and the unexpected alteration of his morning ritual alarmed him. He took them both as warning signs of impending disaster. “Luck doesn’t just happen to you; you make your own luck,” Margo kept telling him before she left. And maybe she was right all along. It’s why he’d taken the Echinopsis after all—to change his fortune. He needed to do something as bold as that again.
He asked the cheerful Jamaican nurse on the night ward for the name of the best obstetrician at the hospital. “Dr. Wangs the best. No question,” the nurse answered without hesitation. Two days later, Cary stopped by the hospital cafeteria at lunchtime and spottted the doctor sitting by herself, absently eating a salad and reading a paperback. He bought coffee and a turkey sandwich and nervously approached her table. The petite, gray-haired doctor lowered her book and peered at him over her reading glasses. Cary asked if he might join her. She gestured for him to sit.
He quickly introduced himself, explained his wife was a patient in the hospital, on bed rest, waiting to have their baby. “I’ve been told you have a lot of experience with difficult cases, that women with high-risk pregnancies come from around the world to have you deliver their babies.”
“I’ve been a doctor a long time,” she said. “I’ve treated all kinds of complications.”
Cary described Sheila’s condition, the severe bleeding she suffered. Dr. Wang listened attentively, asked the name of her obstetrician.
“I know Dr. McKenna,” she said. “Your wife’s in good hands. Her bleeding can be managed.”
“Yes, he told us that.”
“But you’re not convinced.”
“I want to make sure we’re doing everything we can.”
You want reassurances?” She sipped her coffee, cradled the paper cup a few seconds before replacing it on the plastic tray. “Are you religious?” she asked.
The question caught him by surprise. “No, I don’t believe there’s a God who’s aware of my existence or has any interest in my life.”
“I don’t believe that either. But there are things medicine, science, can’t explain.”
“Luck!” he uttered.
She smiled. “I wouldn’t call it that. I prefer ‘mystery,’ what the writer of this book says language and speech are powerless to convey.” She lifted her book to reveal the title: The Case for God. “I often feel that mystery, forces in the universe we can’t explain. You can call it God if you want, or luck, or fate…inadequate words really for something we don’t understand. It’s why I keep reading books like this. And delivering babies. Every birth reminds me of the uncertainty we all live with, for which there are no guarantees, no easy answers.”
It wasn’t the second opinion he hoped for.
“But you didn’t sit down to discuss religion with me, did you? I’m sorry that you caught me in a particularly reflective mood.”
She glanced past him toward the entrance of the cafeteria. “Ah, there’s your doctor now.”
Cary turned to see Dr. McKenna staring at them from behind the salad bar. He hoped the obstetrician wouldn’t see his speaking to Dr. Wang as a betrayal, an effort to replace him.
Dr. Wang picked up her book and tray and rose. “You should speak to Dr. McKenna about your fears. He’s a very capable doctor. He’ll do all he can to ensure your wife has a safe birth and healthy baby.”
Cary watched her dump her half-eaten salad into the trash and nod to McKenna as they passed. He was relieved when McKenna sat down with two nurses at another table.
Cary pushed his untouched sandwich away. His stomach was already filled with fear.
§
The 37th week of Sheila’s pregnancy, McKenna decided it was finally time to perform the C-section. He set nine in the morning for the operation. Cary awoke before dawn, drenched with sweat from a nightmare he often had, where he was running to catch a fly ball, straining to reach it, and finding his legs could barely move. To counter his dream, he went for an early morning run. Dashing home, he quickly showered, watered the cacti, and drove to the hospital. Sheila was standing by the window when he arrived, a blade of sunlight slanting across her swollen belly. “It’s a beautiful day to bring a baby into the world,” she said. He had no words adequate for the love he felt for her. He put his arm around her shoulder; together they watched the sun slowly rising above the distant ocean.
A nurse entered with hospital scrubs for him to wear so he could be with Sheila during the birth. He held her hand as the orderly wheeled her toward the delivery room. Dr. McKenna stopped him at the sliding doors.
“This is delicate,” he said. “It’s better you not come in.”
He started to protest. “The nurse said fathers could….”
Sheila squeezed his hand to stop him. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re both going to be fine.” She pulled him toward her. “You’re going to have a daughter,” she whispered. “I didn’t tell you before in case I miscarried, but now…” Her smile was as radiant as the one that dazzled him the day they met.
Cary brushed back her unruly curls and kissed her cold forehead. “I’ll be waiting for you both,” he said. He watched the gurney vanish behind the sliding doors.
There were no other fathers in the tiny waiting room, only a gray-haired man and woman, waiting for the birth of a grandchild, he assumed. The woman smiled kindly as he entered in his scrubs; the man barely turned from the baseball game on the TV screen. The Dodgers were playing the Orioles in Baltimore in an interdivisional game. He couldn’t watch. He walked downstairs to the cafeteria and bought a cup of coffee. His hand shook as he tore the sugar packet, knocking over the paper cup and spilling the coffee on his pants. He wished he believed in a God he could pray to.
When he returned to the waiting room, the baseball game was over and the elderly couple gone. He turned off the television, closed his eyes, and tried to imagine bringing Sheila and their daughter home, wrapped in the blue blanket they’d purchased together months before. The image wouldn’t hold.
He rose, paced the hall, sat again. He gripped the armrests as tightly as he could to keep from feeling that he was jumping out of his skin. He tried to envision his daughter growing up, teaching her softball, watching her become the athlete he’d wanted to be. But other images kept intruding: crashing into that outfield wall, the surgeon peering down at him on the operating table, the obstetrician barring him from the delivery room.
At last he heard footsteps approach. He leaped up to meet the doctor. His scrubs were splattered with blood, his face drained of color. We lost her! Cary thought. He lunged for the chair to keep from falling into the chasm that opened up beneath him.
The doctor took his arm to steady him. “Your wife’s very brave. She wanted so much for this baby to live.‘If you have to choose’ she said, ‘choose the baby.’”
Cary sank into the chair, unable to speak.
The doctor bent beside him. “But we saved them both. They’re both fine,” he said proudly. “You have a healthy baby daughter.”
Cary didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or scream. He felt a wave of gratitude for the doctor and shame for how he’d misjduged him. Sheila had been right to trust him after all. “Can I see her?” Cary asked.
“Of course. They’re just bringing her into the recovery room. But you can see your daughter now.”
Dr. McKenna led him to the nursery. A nurse brought over a tiny bundle wrapped in a pink blanket and held it out to him. She shifted the blanket so that he could have a better view. The baby had a tuft of red hair, as untamed as her mother’s. Cary looked down at her with an overwhelming mixture of humility and awe.
The nurse again offered his daughter for Cary to hold. Gingerly, he took her. The baby was so light in his hands that he felt an ill wind could sweep her away.
He had found Sheila, almost lost her, then received this wondrous gift. Good luck, bad luck, dumb luck couldn’t explain any of it. Maybe it was what Dr. Wang struggled to describe. A mystery beyond his comprehension or control.
The baby stared up at him with Sheila’s pale green eyes. Her arms flailed and her delicate hands opened as if reaching out to him. A wave of anguished tenderness washed over him. Who could predict what joys or tragedies awaited her?
He would name her Mirabelle, for the rare Echinopsis mirabilis, the Flower of Prayer. He hoped the name would give her courage to confront whatever life would bring.