“You’re what?” I said, completely astonished. After all, Lily Anne had just been born yesterday.
“Ready,” she repeated patiently. “We’re ready to come home.”
“It’s much too soon,” I said.
“The doctor says it’s not,” she said. “Dexter, I’ve done this before.”
“But Lily Anne—she might catch something, or the car seat,” I said, and I realized I was so filled with panic at the thought of Lily Anne leaving the safety of the hospital that I was talking like Rita.
“She’s fine, Dexter, and so am I,” she said. “And we want to come home, so please come pick us up, okay?”
“But Rita,” I said.
“We’ll be waiting,” she said. “Bye.” And she hung up before I could come up with any kind of rational reason for why she shouldn’t leave the hospital yet. I stared at the phone for a moment, and then the thought of Lily Anne actually outside, in a world full of germs and terrorists, galvanized me into action. I slammed the cell phone into its holster and jumped to my feet. “I have to go,” I said to my sister.
“Yeah, I got that,” she said. She threw me her car keys. “Get back here as fast as you can.”
I drove south in pure Miami style, which is to say fast, moving smoothly in and out of traffic as if there were no real lanes. I did not usually drive so flamboyantly; I have always felt that, contrary to the true spirit of our city’s roads, getting there is just as important as maintaining a forceful image along the way. But the moves came naturally to me—I grew up here, after all, and the current situation seemed to call for all the haste and macho firmness I could muster. What was Rita thinking? And more, how had she persuaded the doctors to go along with it? It made no sense: Lily Anne was tiny, fragile, terribly vulnerable, and to send her out into cold hard life so quickly seemed to be complete and callous madness.
I stopped at home just long enough to grab the brand-new infant car seat. I had been practicing for weeks, wanting to be perfect with it when the time came—but the time had come too soon, and I found that my fingers, usually so deft, were icy blocks of clumsiness as I tried to fumble it into place with the seat belt. I couldn’t get it through the slot in the back of the thing at all. I pushed, pulled, and finally cut my finger on the molded plastic and flung the whole thing down as I sucked at the cut.
This was supposed to be safe? How could this protect Lily Anne when it attacked me so aggressively? And even if it worked as it should—and nothing ever did—how could I keep Lily Anne safe in a world like ours? Especially so soon after birth—it was madness to send her home now, one day old. Typical medical arrogance and indifference; doctors think they’re so smart, and all because they passed organic chemistry. But they don’t know everything—they did not see what a father’s heart so clearly told me. It was much too soon to fling Lily Anne out and into the cold cruel world, merely to save a few dollars for the insurance company. This could never end well.
I finally got the car seat in place, and then rushed on to the hospital. But contrary to my perfectly logical fears, when I arrived I did not find Rita standing outside the hospital, dodging bullets while Lily Anne played with used syringes in the trash. Instead, Rita was in a wheelchair in the lobby, a tightly wrapped bundle of baby in her arms. She looked up at me with a loose smile when I rushed in and said, “Dexter, hi, that was very fast.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to register the fact that somehow everything was fine. “Well, actually, I was sort of nearby.”
“You’re not going to drive us home that fast, are you?” she said. And before I could point out that I would never drive fast with Lily Anne in the car and in any case I thought she should stay here a little longer, a cheerful and hairy young man hustled over to us and grabbed at the handles on the back of Rita’s wheelchair.
“Hey, here’s Daddy,” he said. “You folks ready to go?”
“Yes, that’s—Thank you,” Rita said.
The young man blinked and then said, “All righty then,” and he stomped down to release the wheel brake and began to push Rita toward the door. And since at some point even I have to cooperate with the inevitable, I took a deep and resigned breath and followed along behind.
At the car I took Lily Anne from Rita and placed her carefully in the aggressive car seat. But for some reason, all the practicing I had done with Astor’s old Cabbage Patch doll did not quite translate to the real baby; finally Rita had to help me get Lily Anne properly fastened in place. And so it was a completely helpless, all-thumbs Dexter who finally climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. And with many anxious glances
in the mirror to make sure that the car seat had not burst into flames, I nosed the car out of the parking lot and onto the street.
“Don’t drive too fast,” Rita told me.
“Yes, dear,” I said.
I drove slowly home—not slowly enough to risk the heavily armed outrage of my fellow citizens, but within spitting distance of the speed limit. Each blast of a horn, every thump of an overcranked car stereo, seemed new and threatening, and when I stopped at red lights I found myself glancing anxiously at the nearby cars to see if any automatic weapons were pointed our way. But somehow, miraculously, we got home safely. Undoing the straps of Lily Anne’s car seat was not nearly as complicated as fastening them, and in no time at all I had her and Rita inside the house and comfortably ensconced on the couch.
I looked at the two of them, and suddenly everything seemed so different now, because for the first time they were here, at home, and just seeing my new baby in this old setting seemed to underline the fact that life was new and wonderful and fragile.
I dawdled shamelessly, soaking it up and reveling in the utter wonder of it all. I touched Lily Anne’s toes, and ran the back of my finger over her cheeks; they were softer than anything I had ever felt before, and somehow I thought I could smell the pink newness of her right through my fingertips. Rita held the baby and slid into a smiling semidoze as I touched and sniffed and looked, until at last I glanced at the clock and saw how much time had passed, and I remembered that I was here in a borrowed car whose owner had been known to verbally behead people for far less.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” I asked Rita.
She opened her eyes and smiled, the ancient smile Leonardo did so well, mother with wonder child. “I’ve done this before, Dexter,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”
“If you’re sure,” I said, with a brand-new sensitivity that I actually felt.
“I’m sure,” she said, and very reluctantly, I left them there.
When I got back to the Ransom Everglades campus with Debs’s car I found that she had been assigned a room in an old wooden building with a view of the bay, as a sort of temporary interrogation room. The Pagoda, as the building was called, perched on a bluff above the athletic field. It was a rickety old wooden building that didn’t look like it could survive a single summer storm, and yet somehow it had stood long enough to become a historical landmark.