Chapter 3 - THE ONE-EARED RABBIT
The clinic doors clicked shut behind Grace, locking automatically with a magnetic buzz that left me standing alone in the fluorescent hallway with the billing clipboard still in my hands.
Ask Amelia whose car drove me to the county hospital when my water broke.
My mind refused to process the sentence. Amelia Brooks was the daughter of my father’s oldest banking partner. Yes, she had been around our family circle for years, and yes, she had worked as Junior Chair of my mother’s hospital charity board back when Grace and I were still married—but Amelia and I hadn't started dating until fourteen months ago. More than a year after my divorce was finalized.
Or so I had believed.
I looked down at the intake clipboard before handing it back to the receptionist. "Excuse me," I said, forcing my voice to stay level despite the roaring in my ears. "Why was the administrative hold placed on this endowment account yesterday afternoon?"
The receptionist hesitated, glancing at my platinum receipt before checking her screen. "Since you just became the guarantor of record on the balance, I can tell you the note says the primary donor requested a permanent termination of funds yesterday at 4:00 PM."
Yesterday at 4:00 PM.
Yesterday at four o'clock, I was sitting in my mother’s sunroom in Lake Forest with Amelia, drinking espresso while my mother handed me the velvet box containing the three-carat Vance family diamond and told me it was finally time to make our merger official. The exact moment she knew I was locked into proposing to Amelia, my mother had cut off the life-saving medical fund for her own three-year-old granddaughter.
No wonder Grace had been downtown in the rain today. She hadn't been out shopping or walking near my office by accident. The bus stop where I had seen her was right across the street from the Northern Trust building where my mother’s foundation offices were located. Grace had gone downtown in the pouring rain with three toddlers to beg my mother’s trust officers not to cut off Clara’s respiratory treatments—and she had run straight into me on the sidewalk instead.
Twenty minutes later, the magnetic lock on the inner hallway door buzzed, and Grace walked out carrying Clara on her hip.
The terrible rattling wheeze was gone. Clara’s breathing was slow and even, her rosy cheek resting against Grace’s wet collar, fast asleep after the steroids and albuterol. Beside Grace, the other little girl—the one with Grace’s soft dark curls—was dragging her feet, her eyelids drooping. Little Leo walked on Grace’s left, clutching the frayed hem of her coat.
When Leo saw me still standing by the elevator, he stopped and tugged on Grace’s sleeve.
"Man stay," Leo said quietly.
"I didn't leave, buddy," I said, dropping down onto one knee on the carpet so I was at eye level with him. Up this close, I could see the tiny scar on his chin—and the exact cowlick at the crown of his sandy-brown hair that drove every barber I’d ever had crazy. My chest ached so fiercely I thought my ribs might crack. "May I carry your sister so your mama can hold your hand?"
Grace opened her mouth to refuse, then looked down at her other daughter, who was nearly asleep standing up. Exhaustion won out over pride.
"That’s Maya," Grace said softly, nodding toward the sleepy girl with the dark curls. "Don't wake her too fast, she gets scared in strange places."
I took off my wet outer coat, draped it over my arm, and lifted Maya in my shirt sleeves.
The moment her small, warm weight settled against my chest and her little arms looped instinctively around my neck, something inside me broke open and rearranged itself forever. She smelled like baby shampoo and damp wool. For three years, I had sat in thirty-story boardrooms negotiating eighty-million-dollar commercial developments, convinced I was building something important. Holding this thirty-pound child who didn't even know my name, I realized I had missed the only thing that had ever mattered.
"My car is parked right across the street, Grace," I said as we reached the lobby doors. "It’s warm, and it’s still pouring out. Let me drive you home. You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to, I swear. Just don't put Clara back out in the cold rain after a breathing treatment."
Grace looked out the glass doors at the sheets of gray water lashing the street, then down at Clara sleeping on her shoulder. Slowly, she nodded. "Twenty-Sixth and Kedzie. Over the bakery."
Ten minutes later, the three children were buckled into the back of my SUV with the rear heaters humming gently. Since I didn't have car seats, I drove fifteen miles an hour down the side streets with my hazard lights blinking, checking the rearview mirror every three seconds.
In the passenger seat, Grace stared straight out the windshield, her hands folded tightly over her damp canvas bag.
As I turned onto Ogden Avenue, little Leo reached over from the middle seat to pick up the blue cloth rabbit Clara had dropped on the floor mat. As he lifted it by its single floppy ear, a stiff piece of laminated card slid out of a zippered pocket in the rabbit’s plush belly—where a small medical alert pouch had been sewn into the toy—and fell between the front seats.
I glanced down at the console and picked it up, thinking it was Clara’s emergency allergy card.
It wasn't a medical card.
It was a laminated baggage claim tag and boarding receipt from O'Hare International Airport, dated October 14, three years ago—the exact weekend our divorce papers had been signed while I was in London closing the Canary Wharf deal.
Wait. The passenger name on the boarding pass wasn't Grace’s.
It was mine: VANCE / RYAN MR.
And stapled to the back of the boarding pass was a printed visitor badge from the High-Risk Perinatal Unit at Stroger Cook County Hospital, stamped that very same Saturday morning at 9:14 AM—bearing my name and my corporate driver’s license number.
I pulled the SUV over to the curb beside Douglas Park, put the transmission in park, and turned to look at my ex-wife with the laminated badge shaking in my hand.
"Grace," I whispered, staring at a hospital visitor pass issued to me on a day I was four thousand miles away across the Atlantic Ocean. "Why does this say I came to your hospital room the morning the babies were born?"
May you like
Grace looked at the badge in my hand, and a single tear spilled down her hollow cheek.
"Because the man who walked into my delivery room with your driver’s license and your watch on his wrist wasn't you, Ryan," she whispered. "He brought me the divorce papers while I was in labor, and he told me if I didn't sign them before the C-section started, you would use your family’s lawyers to take all three babies away from me the second they were born."
