Amadeo nearly asks what happened—it’s gratifying to know that someone else has screwed up with Angel—but he’s afraid. “She’ll be okay.” He nudges Marissa’s soft upper arm with his elbow. “She’s in her best childbearing years, did you know that?”
Marissa looks at him quickly, alarmed. “Did you tell her that? Is that why she went and got herself pregnant?”
“You think I encouraged this?” No way is Amadeo going to be blamed. “Before she showed up I didn’t see her for a year. There’s no way this is my fault. You’re her mother.”
Marissa sighs. “Fuck. I know.”
This baby is amazing. His tidy red ear, his miniature round nostrils, his funny flattened nose. The flimsy little nails. Those perfect Cupid’s-bow lips. There’s a kind of scrim on his face, like the white coating on a purple plum. Angel palms Connor’s clean new skull, feels his pulse through his soft spot. Fontanel, it’s called, and Angel loves this word, thinks it would make a beautiful name for a baby, if Connor were a girl. Fontanel.
They’ve both been cleaned up. Angel is wearing the most enormous maxi pad she’s ever seen in her life, a pillow wedged in her crotch. A mattress. But even this is a kind of comfort, buoying her. She is floating, as though this bed were set adrift in a wide, warm ocean. The two of them, Angel and Connor, and for a moment it feels as if they are all either will ever need.
And her father is with them, asleep in a chair in the corner. His features are smushed comically where his cheek is propped on his hand.
Angel closes her own eyes.
“Sweetheart?” A nurse drums her nails on the doorframe and glides in. “Time to give this little one a test.”
“What kind of test?” Angel asks, determined to advocate on behalf of her child, to be an informed consumer of health care.
“PKU.”
Angel tries to remember which one this is. Brianna gave them a handout that enumerates the newborn screenings, but Angel doesn’t have her binder with her, and she forgot to ask her dad to bring it. “PKU?”
“Phenylketonuria. If he’s got it, it means there are certain foods he won’t be able to process. Just getting the info we need.”
There have been so many nurses and medical assistants. At first, bearing in mind something Brianna said about the importance of always trying to use people’s names, Angel did her best to remember them, but every few hours a new batch descends, and she’s so tired. This one is animated and wears scrubs printed with fruits and vegetables. She leans over and lifts Connor away from Angel, unwraps a minuscule purple foot from the flannel swaddling. “A li’l pinch,” she says, and jabs him with a pin.
“Oh!” cries Angel. Connor’s features freeze, as if he’s surprised by the existence of pain. She is shocked by how deeply she feels his hurt.
And another shock: her dad leaps to his feet. “What the fuck are you doing?” Connor’s face splits and pours forth red, bleating wails.
“It’s fine,” says the nurse soothingly, speaking at once to Amadeo and to Angel and to little outraged Connor. With one expert hand, she pinches Connor’s heel and dabs the blood onto a strip of paper. “Just making sure he’s doing okay!” And the nurse is already coming toward Angel, rewrapping the baby, smiling cheerily.
Angel reaches for Connor and pulls him close to her, patting and rocking and murmuring until his cries quiet.
“It’s bullshit, stabbing a baby that little,” Amadeo says after the nurse leaves. His eyes are bright with tears. Amadeo jingles the coins in his pockets, looks around, tense, as if searching for someone to punch.
“Definitely better to stab a bigger baby,” Angel says, trying for levity, though she, too, is rattled. “It’s okay. Look, he’s calm again.”