Baby 538 and the Call My Daughter Made Behind My Back

Linda Patterson's number came up on my phone at 9:14 on a Tuesday morning, which was wrong, because Linda never calls me. Linda texts. Linda leaves notes in my volunteer mailbox at the hospital. So when her name lit up my screen while I was still in my bathrobe eating toast at the kitchen table on Yorktown Avenue, I knew before I answered that something had gone sideways.

"Walt," she said, "I need you to hold off on your shift this week."

I'm seventy-four. I taught auto shop at Memorial High School in Tulsa for thirty-one years before Carol got sick, and in all that time nobody ever told me to hold off on anything without giving me a reason. So I asked for one.

"Your daughter sent us a letter from your cardiologist," Linda said. "About the dizzy spell. She's asking us to suspend your clearance until we get a new note from Dr. Reyes."

I sat with that for a second. Out my kitchen window a cardinal was working over the feeder Carol hung on the maple before she died, and I remember thinking, odd, that the bird didn't care what was happening on the phone.

Here's the part Linda didn't have to tell me, because I already knew: Denise had been scared since the Tuesday before, when I got lightheaded on Yale Avenue and clipped a curb pulling into the Walgreens lot. No damage to the truck. No damage to me. A woman in the parking lot asked if I needed an ambulance, and I told her no, I needed a glass of water and five minutes, and that's exactly what I got. I told Denise about it myself that same night, because I don't keep things from my kids. I did not expect her to drive to my cardiologist's office and request my chart.

Nine years before that phone call, I had walked into the NICU at Ascension St. John for the first time two weeks after Carol's funeral, because our house had gone silent in a way I couldn't stand, and a volunteer coordinator named Linda — the same Linda — had handed me a clipboard and a background check form and said, "We've got babies in here whose parents can't be at the bedside around the clock. Somebody needs to hold them." I'd raised two kids of my own. I figured I knew how to rock a baby.

I did not know, going in, that I'd end up doing it five hundred and thirty-eight times.

I kept a little spiral notebook — the same kind I used to grade shop tests in — and after every shift I wrote the date and a tally mark, nothing fancier than that. Some nights it was one baby for three hours straight, a boy born at twenty-six weeks who needed skin against skin more than he needed anything a machine could give him. Some nights it was four babies in a row, twenty minutes apiece, because the nurses were slammed and the parents were an hour away in Sand Springs or working a night shift they couldn't get out of. I rocked them in the recliner by the window where you could see the lights on the Arkansas River bridge, and before I set each one back down I said the same four words I'd said to my own kids when they were small: "Grow strong. Grow smart. Grow gentle." It wasn't a prayer exactly, but it felt like one coming out of my mouth.

So when Linda told me I was off the schedule, it wasn't the inconvenience that got to me. It was that Denise had done it without saying a word to my face.

I drove to her house in Broken Arrow that afternoon. She was in the driveway loading groceries out of her Honda, and when she saw my truck pull in she set the bag down on the hood like she already knew what was coming.

"You went to Reyes's office," I said.

"I called his office, Dad. I didn't break in."

"You told them to pull me off the floor. You didn't tell me."

"Because you would've argued with me," she said, "and you would've gone anyway. You almost hit a building, and you shrugged it off like it was nothing, and I'm not going to get a call from a hospital saying you collapsed in a rocking chair holding somebody's baby."

"That baby's the reason I'm still getting out of bed."

"That's what scares me," she said, and her voice cracked on it, and for a second I saw she wasn't trying to run my life, she was trying to keep from losing her father the same year she'd lost her mother to a disease that took eighteen months to finish the job. I understood that. I did. It didn't change what she'd done.

I told her I was going to get checked out properly, on my own schedule, with my own doctor, and that I expected her to let me handle it like a grown man who'd been handling things since before she was born. She didn't argue. She just stood there in the driveway with a gallon of milk sweating onto the hood of her car.

Dr. Reyes ran the stress test on a Thursday. Resting heart rate sixty-eight. Blood pressure one-twenty-eight over seventy-six. The dizzy spell, it turned out, had come from a medication interaction with a new generic version of my blood pressure pill, something his office caught in about four minutes once they looked. He signed the clearance letter himself, right there in the exam room, and I watched him do it.

I drove the letter straight to Ascension St. John and walked into Linda's office without calling ahead. Denise was there. I hadn't told her I was going, but she'd shown up anyway, maybe out of guilt, maybe because some part of her wanted to see how it ended. She stood by the filing cabinet with her arms crossed while I set the letter on Linda's desk.

"Dr. Reyes says I'm cleared," I said. "No restrictions. He's happy to take your call if you want to confirm it, but I'd appreciate it if that call came from you to him, not the other way around, from here on out."

Linda read the letter twice and looked up at Denise before she looked at me, like she wasn't sure whose room this was anymore.

"Walt's back on the roster starting tomorrow," she said.

Denise didn't say anything. She just uncrossed her arms and let them drop.

I didn't yell at her in that office, and I didn't need to. What I did instead, two days later, was drive to the UPS Store on 71st Street that keeps a notary on staff, and I paid the ten-dollar fee to have my medical power of attorney changed. For six years it had been Denise's name on that form. I had Earl Whitfield's name put on it instead — my neighbor on Yorktown, a retired lineman I've known for twenty-two years, a man who minds his own business and asks before he acts. I didn't do it to punish her. I did it because the whole point of that document is trust, and trust means somebody asks before they move.

I called Denise that evening and told her plainly, the way I'd want to be told. She was quiet on the line for a long stretch, and then she said, "Okay, Dad. I get it." We didn't fight about it again. She still calls me every Sunday. She just doesn't call anybody else about me first.

Three weeks after that phone call from Linda, I was back in the recliner by the window overlooking the river bridge, holding baby number five hundred and thirty-nine — a girl, born eleven weeks early, two pounds nine ounces, her mother working the overnight shift at a distribution center off the turnpike because insurance doesn't pay the bills by itself. The monitor behind me beeped its steady rhythm. Somewhere down the hall, the vending machine ate somebody's dollar for the third time that week, same as it always does.

I settled her against my chest, felt her chest rise and fall against mine about twice as fast as my own, and I said the only thing I know how to say to a baby that small.

"Grow strong. Grow smart. Grow gentle."

Then I sat there with her until her mother's shift ended, and the lights on the bridge came on outside the window, and nobody had to tell me to be anywhere else.