The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [48]
Chapter 15
No one should long to forget the night her first child is born, but Tess Monaghan did. She wished she could erase every detail of the evening from her mind. Not just that evening, but the weeks that followed as well. Upon arrival at Johns Hopkins, she was taken to an operating room for an emergency C-section. She begged them to wait for Crow, but there was no time to spare. She and her daughter were both in distress. “Your husband wouldn’t be allowed in the O.R., anyway,” a nurse told her, meaning to console her.
Yes, take the baby away from me, Tess thought as she slipped under the anesthesia. Save her from me. The adrenaline of the encounter with Carole Epstein had ebbed and Tess no longer saw herself as her child’s warrior-mother, but her greatest liability. Oh, hadn’t she been clever, sitting there with her iPhone and her laptop and her composition books. The Land of Counterpane indeed, fighting her battles with toys and proxies. Then one of the toy soldiers had shown up, larger and far more lethal than she seemed at a distance. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Department of Social Services worker is waiting when I wake up, ready to take the baby from me.
Instead, there was Crow.
“She’s fine,” he said quickly. “In neonatal intensive care because she’s only thirty-four weeks. But she’s almost four pounds, which is pretty good.”
“What does she look like?”
“My hair, your eyes, and a little rosebud of a mouth that’s wholly her own. She doesn’t look like a Fifi, though. We need a real name.”
But Tess had always known the name she wanted. She just hadn’t allowed herself to say it out loud. “The tradition is to pick someone who’s died. Remember my friend Carl? I’d like to name her Carla.”
Crow hesitated, and Tess thought he might object, that he might want a less sad legacy for their daughter. Carl had died under such horrible circumstances. But wasn’t all death horrible? “I’ll agree to Carla if you let me have the middle name I want: Scout.”
Tess smiled. “Carla Scout Monaghan. It will make my mother insane!” Then she realized that she was a mother herself, and the thought of making a parent insane had suddenly lost much of its appeal.
It turned out that Carla Scout was years away from such empathetic insight. Two days later she had a hemorrhage, apparently just for the hell of it.
The neonatal intensive care unit was pretty much the saddest place that Tess Monaghan had ever known, and she had seen her share of sad places. All those tiny babies, all those devastated parents. Carla Scout was the biggest patient, a behemoth. “Why is she even here?” Tess overheard one mother whisper the first week. She knew from the nurses that this woman’s son had been born at twenty-six weeks, so tiny that he could fit in the palm of one’s hand. Carla Scout Monaghan was huge by comparison. Yes, looking at her, even in the Isolette, in that welter of tubes and machines, it was hard to see that anything was wrong. Tess wanted to lean over and hiss: “She had a hemorrhage. We’re waiting to see how this will affect her. Happy now?”
Yet she knew the other mother was simply trying to find a place to offload her fear and terror. Tess couldn’t blame her. She wanted to do the same thing. Problem was, her anger and fear always circled back to her.
She had to blame herself. No one else would. She wished Crow would throw it in her face, how he had told her that her obsession with the Epsteins was unhealthy. She recalled how Mrs. Zimmerman warned her that morbid thoughts would warp her baby. She remembered Lenhardt telling her that parenthood would be her greatest joy, and if she were unlucky, her greatest sorrow. Yes, all the fairies