Shit. He’s going to hate me even more.
“She has a fever of a hundred and five.” He jumps into the driver’s seat, gunning the engine.
“Oh.”
He looks at me out of the corner of his eye as we pull out of the driveway. What was that? Frustration? Disappointment?
I squirm for the entire ten-minute ride, shooting glances to the backseat where she is strapped. Should I have sat back there with her? What is the fucking protocol for being a mother? When we pull up, he hops out of the car before I can even open my door. The car seat is unstrapped, and Caleb is halfway to the emergency room doors before I can straighten my hair. I follow him in. He is at the nurse’s station when the automatic doors hiss open for me.
She slides over a clipboard of paperwork and tells him to fill it out. I reach out before he can and grab it from the counter. He is in no state to fill out paperwork. I carry it over to a chair and get to work.
I can see the worry on his face as he speaks to a nurse. I pause to watch him. It is such a rarity to see him this way — vulnerable, fretting — the corners of his full mouth turned down as he nods at something she says and looks into the car seat at the baby. He glances back at me and disappears behind the emergency room doors with the nurse, not bothering to ask me if I want to come. I’m not sure what to do, so I ask the nurse at the desk if I can go back with them as I hand in the forms. She looks at me like I’m an idiot.
“Aren’t you the mother?”
The mother. Not her mother or the baby’s mother — just the mother.
I look at her frizzy hair and her eyebrows, which are in bad need of plucking.
“Yes, I am the uterus that carried the child,” I snap. I walk through the emergency room doors without waiting for an answer.
I have to peek into several curtained partitions before I find them. Caleb does not acknowledge my presence. He’s watching a nurse hook Estella up to an IV while she explains the risks of dehydration.
“Where are they going to put the needle?” I ask, because clearly her hands are too small.
She gives me a sympathetic look before telling us that the IV needle will be inserted into a vein in Estella’s head. Caleb’s face drains of color. He won’t be able to watch this, I know him. I straighten my back importantly. At least I can be of some use. I can stay with her while they do this procedure while Caleb waits outside. I am neither squeamish nor prone to tears, but when I suggest this, he looks at me coldly and says:
“Just because it makes me uncomfortable doesn’t mean I’m going to leave her by herself.”
I shut my parted lips. I can’t believe he said that. I didn’t leave her by herself per se. She was in the care of professionals.
I sulk in my hard, miserable chair while Estella wails down the emergency room. She looks pitiful and tiny beneath the beeping machines and wires that are snaking out from her small head.
Caleb looks like he’s on the verge of tears, but he has her in his arms, careful not to disturb the wires. Once again, I am struck by how natural he is. I thought it would be this way for me — that the minute I laid eyes on my baby, I would know what to do and feel an instantaneous connection. I bite my lip and wonder if I should offer to hold her.
It is sort of my fault that she’s here. Before I can stand up, the doctor pulls aside the curtain that separates us from the busy ER room beyond. He is middle-aged and balding. Before he greets us, he consults a clipboard in his hand.
“What do we have here?” he asks, touching Estella lightly on the head. Caleb explains her symptoms, and the Doctor listens while examining her. He mentions that she was taken to daycare, and I shoot him a dirty look.
“Her immune system needs time to develop,” he says, removing his stethoscope from her chest. “In my opinion, she’s too young for daycare. Usually women take a short maternity leave before putting their child into full-time care.”
Caleb shoots me a look. Seething. He is absolutely seething.
I focus on a box of latex gloves. He’s going to yell at me. I hate when he yells at me. I can guarantee my skin has already erupted into a splotchy mess; a telltale sign that I’m shitting myself.
“I’m going to admit her so we can monitor her for forty-eight hours. She could dehydrate otherwise. Someone should be in to take her up to pediatrics in a few minutes.”
As soon as he leaves the room, Caleb turns to me.
“Go home.”
I stare at him with my mouth open.
“Don’t you take that self-righteous tone with me,” I hiss. “While you go traipsing all over the country, I’m stuck at home — “
“You carried this little girl, Leah, in your body.” He makes a motion with his hands that makes it look like he’s holding an invisible ball. Then just as suddenly, he drops his arms to his sides. “How can you be so calloused?”