Which is why, on a crisp October day, he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he shouldn’t be here.  Here on this Earth – probably not.  But in a much more specific sense, he knew that he shouldn’t be here.  He wasn’t welcome; that much had been clear since the day she’d been admitted.  John was sure that even the nursing staff glared at him today as he passed, the depressing blue of hospital lights highlighting the disapproval in their faces.

Still, he continued down the hallway, gripping the handrail for balance.  As he neared room 403, he slowed his pace, pausing outside the door to listen.  The voice he heard inside belonged to his oldest daughter Abby, and as he listened, he could almost see her sitting at the bedside, one very still hand clasped between her two. 

“I just don’t know what to tell him,” she was saying, and he realized he was listening his daughter disclose personal details to the one person she knew wouldn’t repeat them, and he began to back away, unwilling to eavesdrop on such a private monologue.  But once again, there was that old curiosity that had cemented his feet to the floor, and he realized he couldn’t will himself to go.

“It’s silly to be telling you this,” Abby continued from inside the room.  “Even if you could hear me, even if you could wake up, what could you possibly tell me?  What do you know of this kind of problem, anyway?” She inquired, fully-aware - John assumed - that no answer would come.  “Still, I just like to talk to you.  It makes me feel like you’re still here…” her voice trailed off, and he could hear the tears in her next words.  “But what do I tell him, baby?” she repeated, and John pictured her forehead lowered onto the bed.  “He loves me so much. And I know I love him, but I also know I just can’t do this.  No matter how hard I try to convince myself, it’s just too much.  There’s not room in his life for both of us, at least not for me.  Maybe I’m being selfish, but I want more than that.”

There was a long pause, and again John considered walking away.  But as he turned to go, Abby’s voice cut through the silence.

“Is it petty of me to be talking about this, even thinking about it, while you’re in here?  I still feel guilty when I cry about it, knowing there are such worse things.  I feel guilty when I laugh…I feel guilty for having any emotions unconnected to you, and what happened.  And your mom…sweetie, you have to pull through, for her.  I don’t know if she…”  Abby’s voice broke once more, and this time John found it in him to turn and walk away before his daughter saw him there.

“Mr. Baxter?” John turned to see Nurse Harris studying at him from the nurse’s station across the hall, and heard Abby’s sharp, surprised gasp from inside the room.  “Is there something I can help you with?”  John shook his head, silently cursing her for calling his presence to his daughter’s attention.   

“No, I was just waiting to go in.  Wanted to give my daughter some privacy,” he rationalized as Abby appeared in the doorway, purse slung over her shoulder and jacket neatly in hand, clothes immaculately pressed and not a single strand of hair out of place.

“Hi,” Abby gave him a tight smile, but he could see the coldness in her eyes.  He smiled in return, and before he thought better of it, wrapped his daughter in a quick hug.  She remained rigid, her hands limply patting his back twice, the way she would greet a mere acquaintance. 

He wondered briefly why she didn’t ask how much he had heard, but knew that his face betrayed his newly acquired knowledge.

“What was that about? Everything ok with Tom?” he skipped straight over the small talk.

“Everything’s great,” she said, her lie obvious to both of them, but each lacking the energy to press the issue any further than that.  “Look, I’ve got to go.  We’ll see you soon, I’m sure.”  Then, for the slightest second, the coldness in her eyes melted away and for the first time in a long while, John let himself hope.  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said, touching his arm in the friendliest gesture she’d shown him in months.  The friendliest gesture anyone had showed him in months.

“I know,” he nodded through the tears that were springing to his eyes.  “I just had to…I couldn’t…” he trailed off, his throat swelling up.

She nodded, a sudden sympathy overtaking her and radiating from her eyes.  With one last pat on his arm, she spun on her heel and left him staring after her in the cold hallway. 

Tearing his gaze from his departing daughter, he turned to room 403, took a deep breath, and entered.

No matter how many times he set foot in this room, he never got used to it; Never got used to the stale light streaming in through the small window, to the endless flowers, cards and balloons lining the windowsill, the constant beeping of the machine that kept her alive, the buzz of its monitor, and more than anything, the way the vastness of the hospital bed made her body look almost infinitesimal.  He sat down in the chair next to her bed and picked up her hand, curling his around it, pressing it to his tear stained cheek and closing his eyes.

Words betrayed him, his usually vast vocabulary silenced under the crushing weight of his grief, of his guilt.

For a long time, he sat there in silence, until finally he opened his eyes, brushing her pale hair off of her forehead, a single tear falling onto her cheek.  He wiped it away, her skin warm underneath his finger, and stroked the back of her tiny hand with his thumb, the course skin of his work-worn hands a glaring difference from the smooth skin of a child’s.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” he choked out, toying with the wristband that encircled her arm, and as he read his granddaughter’s name, he wondered now if it was there to identify her, or as one last instruction to everyone who came to sit by her bed.

Faith.

With one last squeeze to her tiny hand, John rose and walked calmly out of the hospital, ignoring the nurse that suddenly called his name as he pushed through the double doors into the bright October light, steering out of the parking lot mere seconds before she ran into it, waving her arms in a desperate attempt to get him to turn around.

Steven

Steven McCord stirred the ice in his scotch and watched the phone ringing next to him.  He’d decided as soon as he saw the name on the caller ID not to answer, but the green glow of the screen was mesmerizing in his slightly inebriated state.  He wondered as he took a sip when it was that he’d switched from beer to Scotch, knowing full well that it had been sometime in the five months since the accident, but struggling to remember making the conscious decision.

The phone finally stopped ringing, and he sighed in relief as the screen darkened and “Baxter, John” disappeared from view.  He waited for his father-in-law's voice to come through the answering machine, but for once, nothing happened.  Again, Steven wondered about the past months’ recent changes, realizing that in the past few weeks John had finally accepted that no amount of voicemails would audit a returned-call from his son-in-law, and so he had stopped leaving them altogether.  But, as was becoming common these days, he couldn’t recall a certain day this had occurred.  His days and weeks blurred together, aided considerably by the Scotch, and he found that his last clear memory was of that fateful morning in May.  The memory of it prompted him to pound what was left of the mahogany liquid in his glass, and reach half-heartedly for the bottle to refill it.

Replacing the cap and pushing the significantly emptier bottle away, he thought again of John Baxter.  To say that the two had gotten along wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate, but to say that John disapproved of the choices he and Laura had made would have been the understatement of the year.

Like John before him, Steven had met and instantly loved his wife in college.  He remembered the first time he saw her on campus, crossing the bridge that had connected the mall to the union, and though to this day he could not name what it was, something about her had struck him motionless.  He’d gone over it all in his mind – the confidence with which she moved, the kindness in her eyes, her slender waist, the way her hair caught and reflected the sunlight like a prism.  Though she could have easily been called beautiful, her petite figure and sweet voice gave her a girlishness that propelled her straight into the category of “cute,” and he’d loved her all the more for it.  Like an idiot, he’d stood there in the middle of that footbridge and watched her pass, staring in a less than subtle way that was foreign to him, but she’d just smiled as she passed and walked away without so much as turning around. He saw her around campus several times after that, but it wasn’t until a year later when they’d finally had a class together that he’d worked up the nerve to talk to her.  To his surprise, she later told him that she had noticed him as well, and had been too shy to approach him herself, but thrilled when he’d done it for her. 

From that moment on they were inseparable, and within six months had already talked about spending the rest of their lives together.  If he had to, Steven could probably pinpoint that as the time when John Baxter had started to express concern over how quickly his daughter’s relationship was progressing.  His fatherly concern had turned to adamant disapproval when Laura got pregnant the summer going into her junior year, and had turned to bitter disagreement when they’d decided to keep the baby.  Though both were promising students, neither Steven nor Laura was majoring in something that would land them a great job right out of college.  Steven had one more year of med-school, with years of residency and loans ahead of him, and Laura would be graduating with a degree in Child Psychology, something that she couldn’t do much with until she’d completed a Master’s degree.  As with Steven, her scholastic future promised a heap of debt, and neither of them had much money set aside for the future.  So, Steven had grudgingly admitted, John Baxter had a point. What stable home environment could they possibly offer a child when they’d both be balancing work and school for at least the next four years?  The schedule would be grueling, and wouldn’t allow for much family time, much less any time for just the two of them – to the objective eye they it looked like they were setting themselves up for disaster.  But they hadn’t cared.  They were in love, they were going to end up together anyway, and this was their baby.  How could they ever hope to lead normal lives if they knew that out there somewhere was their child, being raised by someone else?  So, after very little thought, they both came to the conclusion that the only thing they could do was keep it. 

Steven had held Laura’s hand the entire way to her parent’s house when they’d made the six-hour drive from school to tell them, but by the time they were within 25 miles of Winnetka, his palms had begun to sweat so badly that he’d had to let go.  Laura had given a quick, nervous laugh and squeezed his leg, but he could see her own fingers trembling.  Telling them that Laura was pregnant was going to be hard enough – but Steven knew the real fireworks would begin when they disclosed their plans for the future.  Abortion had never been an option – both for Laura and Steven, and definitely not for her parents.  But he knew that with “such promising futures for both of them,” adoption would be the expected solution.  And, he’d been right. 

As soon as the words were out of Laura’s mouth, he’d expected to not be able to meet her parent’s faces.  On the contrary, he'd found himself unable to tear his eyes away.  John sat in stunned silence for all of thirty-seconds before rising and walking out of the room.  Anne had immediately begun to cry.  She cried the same way that Laura did – her face literally crumpled, feature by feature.  First her lower lip began to quiver, and her physical effort to try and stop it made the rest of her face follow suit, until every inch of her was trembling in an effort not to well up.  But her body eventually betrayed her, and the tears flowed unabashedly.  She didn’t even make an attempt to wipe them away, only stared first at Laura, then at Steven, and back to Laura again.

Steven had been the first to find his voice.  “Mrs. Baxter, I-” but she had interrupted him.

“I didn’t even know that the two of you were…Laura, I didn’t know you had…” she trailed off, unable to say it out loud, as if anything at all could possibly make this moment more awkward.  That their daughter was not the girl they’d always considered her was not something Anne Baxter wanted to consider, much less justify by speaking out loud.

“Well,” she said simply, pausing for a long time before repeating herself. “Well.”  She finally wiped at the tears on her face, composing herself as best she could.  “What are you going to do?” she asked, her expression hopeful with renewed confidence that her daughter had made the right decision.

“We’re going to raise it, Mom” Laura had said, in a voice calmer than Steven had ever heard it.

“I’ll be damned if you’ll raise it,” John cut in, and Steven wondered when exactly he had reappeared to stand in the doorway.  He was about to say something when Laura surprised him with a strength that until then, he hadn’t known she possessed.

“Yes, Daddy, we are.”  Before her father could interrupt, she continued quickly.  “I know it’s going to be hard, We’ve got a lot of struggles in front of us – school, work, loans, a pretty crazy schedule for the next few years, even before the baby.  But these are all things that we’re aware of, and they don’t change the fact that this is our child.  We can do it.  Somehow, we’ll get through it, and we’ll be ok.”

Again, Laura’s father had turned and left the room. 

And he hadn’t spoken to them for months afterward.

Laura had called, and had written him letters explaining that this was not a reflection on him or on his parenting, that it wasn’t his fault.  It was no one’s fault, really, it had simply been an irresponsible decision, and now she was going to take the responsible way out of it. 

But John Baxter had wanted none of it.  Only when Faith was finally born did he begin to come around.  His pride made it hard for him to admit defeat, but Steven could see the love in the older man’s eyes the very first time he’d laid eyes on his granddaughter.  And from that moment on, it seemed there was no one who loved her more.  John was constantly calling and stopping by just to be with her.  As she grew, she became increasingly more like her grandmother, and when Anne died a week short of her granddaughter’s 3rd birthday, John had seemed to gravitate to Faith in his grief. 

Those early years had been hard for Steven and Laura, almost impossible.  Both had struggled through undergrad, balancing school and work and hardly seeing each other, much less the baby.  When they had graduated, Laura had taken a full time job, putting grad school on hold until Steven had finished med school so they could always have a steady income coming in.  She had worked long hours in order to bring in enough money for themselves and their daughter, and he had spent long hours learning his trade.  When he  finished med school and began his residency at Northwestern Memorial, Laura had opted to put off grad school a little longer, wanting to stay at home until their daughter was situated in school.  Finally, there in Winnetka, they’d slowly begun to rebuild from the ruins of what their relationship had become after years of neglect. 

They had almost made it, too. 

And then May happened.  Now here he was, alone at the dining room table they’d picked out together as a wedding present.  Drunk again, no amount of Scotch capable of burning the sour taste that crept into his mouth as he saw his father-in-law’s name appear again on his caller ID.

And across town, John Baxter steered his Toyota frantically back toward the hospital and dialed Steven’s number one last time, praying that he’d answer.

{rokintensedebate}