Gerald couldn’t answer right away. Then he said the thing he’d been carrying for twenty-nine years.
“You told your mother,” he said. “About Danny’s lips. On the fifth day. You were seven, and you told her, and she said it was the cold. And I didn’t listen either.” He held on to Aaron harder. “You saw it first, son. You were seven years old, and you saw it first, and none of us listened to you.”
Part Fourteen: The First Night
They did the procedure that night, a balloon atrial septostomy. A pediatric cardiologist threaded a thin catheter through a vein in our son’s belly button up into his heart, inflated a tiny balloon, and pulled it back through the wall between the upper chambers to make the opening bigger. I wasn’t there. I was still in recovery. Aaron was, standing outside the cath lab with his face pressed to the window in the door.
When it was over, our son’s oxygen level came up to eighty-eight percent. Not perfect, but enough. Enough to buy time.
At two in the morning, they let me go see him. Aaron pushed me down the hallway to the NICU in a wheelchair. I was still in my hospital gown with an IV pole rolling beside me.
The NICU at Butterworth is a long, dim room with rows of incubators and the soft, constant beeping of monitors. I’d worked there for a year when I first started at the hospital. I’d mixed a thousand medications for the babies in that room. I’d never once imagined my own baby would be one of them.
Our son was in an incubator near the far wall. Tiny. Pink now, mostly. With a feeding tube in his nose and an IV in his foot and wires taped to his chest, and a little white bandage on his belly where the catheter had gone in. He was asleep.
Aaron put his hand through the porthole of the incubator and touched his son’s tiny fist with one finger. The baby’s fingers uncurled and closed around it.
Aaron sat there for a long time without saying anything. Then he said, very quietly, “Mer, I need to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“When I was holding him,” Aaron said. “When the nurse first gave him to me. Do you know what I was thinking about?”
I shook my head.
“The watch,” Aaron said. “Grandpa’s watch. The empty line under my name. I was standing there holding him, and I was thinking, I finally get to fill in the line. Dad’s finally going to look at me like I’m enough.” He stared at the tiny hand wrapped around his finger. “And then I looked at his face, and I saw Danny. And I thought, Oh God. I’m going to lose him too. I’m going to lose him just like Dad lost Danny, and it’s going to be my fault because I wanted it so badly.”
Part Fifteen: The Tries
I didn’t answer him right away. I looked at our son in the incubator, and I thought about four little girls asleep at their grandmother’s house across town. And then I told him about Hazel.
About the couch and the laundry. Didn’t he want us? About the top of the stairs at eleven o’clock at night. About Four tries. That’s us. We’re the tries.
Aaron took his hand out of the incubator. He put both hands over his face. He didn’t make a sound, but his shoulders shook for a long time.
“She said that?” he whispered finally. “Hazel?”
“She’s seven, Aaron,” I said. “She’s seven and she’s smart, and she listens to everything you say. All four of them do.”
“I never,” he said. “I never meant…” He stopped. “I love them, Mer. I love them more than anything. You know that.”
“I know you do,” I said. “And so does Hazel, somewhere. But she also heard you tell your dad, Finally. After four tries.” I took his hand. “She thinks she was a mistake you had to make before you got the thing you really wanted.”
He sat in the plastic NICU chair beside our son’s incubator for a long time, staring at the floor.
“That’s what Dad did to me,” he said finally. “After Danny. I spent my whole life feeling like the one he got stuck with. Like I was the try.” He looked up at me with red eyes. “And I did it to them. To all four of them. Without even knowing.”
Part Sixteen: Surgery Day
The surgery was eight days later.
The arterial switch. The surgeons would open our son’s chest, cut the two great arteries just above the heart, switch them to the correct sides, and move the tiny coronary arteries too, each one thinner than a strand of spaghetti. It would take about six hours.
He was eight days old and seven pounds, nine ounces.
Aaron’s mother brought the girls to the hospital that morning. Hazel, Iris, Clara, and Maisie, in matching pink coats, holding hands in a little chain down the hallway. They hadn’t been allowed to see their brother yet. NICU rules. But the nurses made an exception and let them stand at the window and look through the glass.
Four little faces pressed against the window. Four little noses making four little smudges.
“He’s so small,” Iris whispered. She’s five.
“He has a lot of wires,” Clara said. She’s three.
Maisie, who’s eighteen months, just put her hand flat on the glass and said, “Baby.”
Hazel didn’t say anything. She stood a little apart from her sisters, looking through the window at her brother with that serious, guarded face of hers. Then she said, without looking at anyone, “Is Daddy happy now? He got his boy.”
Aaron was standing right behind her. He’d been talking to the surgeon in the hallway, and he heard every word.
He knelt down beside her. He turned her around gently by the shoulders so she was facing him instead of the window, and I watched him look at his oldest daughter, really look at her, maybe for the first time in a long time.
“Hazel,” he said. “Can I tell you a secret?”
She shrugged.
“When I was seven,” Aaron said, “exactly as old as you, I had a little brother too.”
He told her. He told her about Danny, all of it. The cabin, the snowstorm, the blue lips on the couch. I told my mom and she said it was the cold. Iris and Clara came over and stood close, listening. Maisie sat down on the floor and played with her shoelaces.
“And after he died,” Aaron said, “my dad was so sad that he forgot how to be happy about the son he still had. He forgot about me. Not on purpose. He just looked at me every day and saw that Danny was missing.”
Hazel’s eyes went very wide.
“And I grew up,” Aaron said, “thinking I wasn’t enough. Thinking I was the wrong kid. The leftover.” He swallowed hard. “And then I grew up and had four beautiful girls. And I think I made you feel the exact same way, didn’t I?”
Hazel didn’t answer. Her chin was trembling.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” Aaron said. His voice broke. “You were never a try. None of you. You’re not practice for anything. You’re the whole thing.”
He pulled her into his arms, there on the hospital floor. Then he reached out and pulled Iris and Clara in too, and Maisie crawled over on her own and climbed into his lap.
Four little girls in pink coats, tangled up in their father’s arms on the floor outside the NICU window, while on the other side of the glass their brother slept in his incubator, waiting for surgery.
Part Seventeen: Six Hours
The surgery took six hours and twelve minutes.
We sat in the surgical waiting room on the third floor: Aaron and me, his mother Carol, the four girls coloring at a little kids’ table in the corner, and Gerald. Gerald sat by the window the whole time, in the same chair, not moving, holding something in his hands.
At the two-hour mark, I went over and sat beside him. He was holding the watch, the gold Hamilton with the engraved B on the case. Aaron must have brought it from home. Gerald had the case open and was looking at the names inside: Thomas. Walter. Gerald. Aaron. And the empty space underneath.
“I gave him this when he turned twenty-one,” Gerald said, without looking up. “Told him it was for his first son. First son of the first son.” He ran his thumb over the empty line. “I said it like it was a tradition. It wasn’t. My father started it to make me feel important, and I kept it going because I didn’t know how to tell Aaron I loved him any other way.”
He closed the watch.
“There’s a name missing,” he said quietly. “There’s always been a name missing. My father’s watch has five names on it, not four. Danny should’ve been under mine. I never had it engraved. I couldn’t.”
He turned and looked at me with his hard gray eyes, and they were wet.
“I painted and Sons on every truck for thirty years,” he said. “Like if I kept it up there, he’d still be with us somehow. And I let Aaron grow up thinking it was a promise he had to keep.” He shook his head slowly. “I made him think he had to give me a son to make up for the one I lost.”
He looked across the room at his four granddaughters coloring at the little table. Hazel was drawing a picture of a hospital. Iris was drawing a heart.
“I never once held those girls the way I should have,” Gerald said. “Because they weren’t him.”
Part Eighteen: The Surgeon
At 4:47 in the afternoon, the surgeon came through the double doors. She was a small woman in blue scrubs named Dr. Emily Hart, one of the best pediatric heart surgeons in the Midwest. She pulled down her surgical mask.
She was smiling.
“He did beautifully,” she said. “The switch went perfectly. The coronary arteries transferred without any problems. His heart is working the way it’s supposed to now.” She looked at Aaron and me. “He’s going to be a very normal little boy.”
Aaron put his face in his hands. I grabbed his arm. Behind me, Carol started sobbing. And Gerald stood up from his chair by the window, holding the watch, and walked across the waiting room. He put one big hand on Aaron’s shoulder. He didn’t say anything. He just held on.
Then Dr. Hart said something else.
“I want to tell you something,” she said. “I read his chart before surgery. The nurse documented that his father noticed the cyanosis at forty-one seconds of life. Before any screening test.”
She looked at Aaron.
“Mr. Bowman,” she said. “I’ve done a lot of these surgeries. Most of these babies are caught by the pulse oximetry screen at twenty-four hours, or by a nurse, or sometimes too late. Your son was caught by his father, in the first minute, looking at his lips.” She paused. “Whatever taught you to look there, it saved his life.”
Part Nineteen: The Name
We named him Daniel.
Not right away. We’d picked out a name months earlier: Gerald Thomas Bowman, after his grandfather and his great-great-grandfather. Aaron had wanted it more than anything. Gerald Thomas. Bowman and Sons.
The night after the surgery, sitting beside our son’s incubator in the cardiac ICU, Aaron changed his mind.
“Danny,” he said quietly, his hand through the porthole, his finger in his son’s fist. “His name’s Danny.”
Gerald cried when we told him. He cried so hard that a nurse came over to check on him.
Then he went home and did two things.
The first thing he did was take a can of paint and a brush out to the Bowman & Sons truck parked in his driveway, the oldest one, a 1994 Ford F-350 he still drove on weekends. He painted over the word Sons. Then he called a sign shop in Grand Rapids and had every truck in the fleet repainted.
The new name is on all twelve trucks now: BOWMAN FAMILY ROOFING. SINCE 1961.
The second thing he did was take the watch to a jeweler in Grand Rapids, an old man named Marty who’d been engraving watches on Division Avenue since 1974. He asked Marty to add two lines inside the case.
The first line, under Gerald, was a name that had been missing for twenty-nine years: Daniel.
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