Chapter 12 - Hope Grace
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The nurse hit a button on the wall before the contraction released me.
Alarms travel fast in a hospital at night.
Footsteps answered from every direction.
Doctor Harris appeared at my bedside with his sleeves already rolled.
He read the monitor once.
He read my face once.
Then he gave orders in a voice that allowed no argument.
I was eight months pregnant.
My daughter was not supposed to come for another four weeks.
My body had decided that fear and grief and relief were reason enough.
Another contraction folded me in half.
Elena gripped one of my hands.
Vincent held the other.
I remember thinking that my daughter had chosen the exact hour her grandfather's enemy fell.
Even unborn, she refused to let Richard Sterling have the last word.
They wheeled my bed down a corridor that seemed to stretch for miles.
Ceiling lights passed over me like a countdown.
Vincent ran beside the bed until a set of double doors stopped him.
A nurse told him he could go no farther.
He looked at me over her shoulder.
"Clara."
I tried to smile for him.
It came out as a grimace as another wave tore through me.
"Tell her about Daniel," I gasped.
"Tell her first."
The doors closed between us.
Doctor Harris fought for us the way soldiers fight, with calm hands and no wasted words.
Monitors called out numbers I did not understand.
Someone said the baby's heart rate was falling.
Someone else said it twice, faster.
The room changed temperature.
Hands moved.
Lights brightened.
I begged my daughter out loud to stay with me.
I begged Daniel, wherever he was, not to let her follow him.
I begged God for one ordinary miracle instead of another tragedy.
Then the pressure changed.
Then the room went very quiet.
Then I heard it.
A cry.
It was thin.
It was furious.
It was the most beautiful sound ever made in this world.
She was alive.
She was small enough that the nurse carried her past me in two cupped hands.
I saw a red face.
I saw a fist the size of a walnut, raised like she intended to fight the whole room.
Then they took her away down the corridor, and my heart went with her in a plastic box on wheels.
Doctor Harris leaned close as the world began to blur.
"She is in the neonatal intensive care unit," he said.
"She weighs three pounds and nine ounces."
"Her lungs need help."
"But she is fighting, Clara."
"She is fighting hard."
I woke hours later in a quiet room.
My stomach felt empty in a way that frightened me more than the pain had.
Vincent sat beside the bed with his head in his hands.
Elena slept upright in a chair, still wearing yesterday's clothes.
Rosa stood at the window with her rosary wrapped around her fingers.
"Hope," I whispered.
Vincent's head came up.
"She held on through the night," he said.
"The doctors say the next day matters most."
"The nurses say she has already pulled at every wire they own."
I laughed once.
Then I cried.
Then I demanded a wheelchair.
They took me to her an hour later, wrapped in blankets, shaking from weakness and need.
The neonatal unit was a world of soft alarms and blue light.
My daughter lay in an incubator with a cap on her head and a tube helping her breathe.
She looked impossible.
She looked like a rumor of a person.
I pressed my palm flat against the warm plastic.
Her fist opened and closed.
Opened and closed.
"She needs a name for the chart," the nurse said gently.
I had chosen her first name months ago, in secret, the night Daniel died in my dreams and told me to keep going.
I had chosen her middle name on the staircase of the Moretti mansion without knowing it.
"Hope," I said.
"Hope Grace Bennett."
Elena made a sound behind me.
I turned.
She stood in the doorway with both hands over her mouth.
"Grace," she whispered.
I nodded.
"For the girl Daniel saved."
"For the daughter you never stopped looking for."
"My daughter will carry her name until she is old enough to carry her own story."
Elena crossed the room in three steps.
She knelt beside my wheelchair in the middle of that humming ward.
She wept like a woman who had been handed back a piece of her own heart.
"She will know," Elena said.
"Grace will know her name is in your daughter's name because her father was a hero."
"Daniel was my hero first," I said.
"Now he belongs to both our girls."
Vincent asked the nurse a question so quietly that I almost missed it.
He asked whether he might hold her.
The nurse studied the man the whole city feared.
Then she studied his hands, which were trembling.
She gowned him.
She washed him to the elbows.
She opened the incubator with the care of a priest opening a holy book.
Hope Grace Bennett rested against Vincent Moretti's chest, smaller than his two hands together.
He did not breathe for a long moment.
His lips moved without sound.
I knew the promise he was making, because it was written across his whole face.
He was promising Daniel.
He was promising the man who had died keeping one little girl hidden.
Both girls would grow up knowing his name.
Both girls would grow up free.
The night passed in measurements and small victories.
Her oxygen improved.
Her color improved.
She startled at a dropped chart and the nurse laughed and called her dramatic.
I told the nurse she came by it honestly.
Rosa brought soup that nobody ate.
Elena learned the names of every nurse on the floor.
Vincent memorized the sound of Hope's monitor until he could tell her heartbeat from all the others.
When her oxygen dipped once near dawn, four adults stopped breathing along with her.
When it rose again, Elena whispered a prayer of thanks.
My daughter had been alive for one day.
She already ran the entire floor.
In the morning, Rosa arrived with a small visitor in pink shoes.
Grace walked into the corridor holding Rosa's hand and a paper crown she had made for the baby.
Elena lifted her so she could see through the glass.
Grace pressed one small palm flat against the window of the neonatal unit.
She studied the incubator with enormous seriousness.
Then she turned to the whole corridor, to nurses and strangers and all of us, and announced her verdict like a queen issuing a decree.
"Everybody, that is my cousin Hope."
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