That same night, my daughter started to convulse. My wife tied her to her back and ran to the acupuncturist. She said my daughter weighed nothing but emanated a heat that was scorching, that made water run down the sides of her face and wet her back. She remembered concentrating on listening to my daughter breathe. It was so slow and shallow.
The acupuncturist, an old woman with strongly veined hands, laid her on a small bed and slowly put thin needles into her arms, her legs, her stomach, and the tiny lobes of her ears. My wife thought a child that young would fight the small pricklings, would buck up and flail at such adult foolishness. But my daughter lay there quite still and looked at her as though none of this was happening. The old woman put one last needle between her eyebrows and told my wife she would sleep. And she did. The old woman said my daughter had a hot wind in her that needed release, that a great battle was occurring inside her. That she only looked quiet but was fighting.
When my daughter awoke an hour later, the old woman said my wife could take her home. She said it would pass.
And where was I? Sleeping like a fool.
When I woke, we argued. I wanted to bring her back to the hospital. I felt sure the old woman had failed. But my wife, with a strength I did not know she possessed, said I could go where I wanted but she and the baby were staying home. The fever broke, and by midmorning my daughter was sitting up and eating and watching Woody Woodpecker on television.
Suddenly, I stand. I clench and unclench my fists. I feel the deepest urgency to run, to find my daughter, to put the blood back in her, to carry her on my back to someone who can help her. I need to remind her to fight. I walk quickly to the door while my wife stares at me, but when I look down the gleaming hall I don’t know in what direction to turn. Every door is the same, closed to me.
I stand in the hallway until I’m asked to make room for a bed to go by, a wife holding her husband’s hand, the husband never looking away from his wife’s face. Earlier, the nurse told us that what my daughter suffered was called placental abruption, that while it is serious, she was lucky to have been close to the hospital. My wife gripped my elbow the whole time the nurse was talking, and I told her afterward that everything would be fine, but I did not believe it. That is why I am standing in the hallway. I am a father; I must let her know how much I need her to live. How foolish I am. Then I see a figure walking toward me, made dark by the setting sun from the window behind him, and I see it is David. David in thin blue hospital clothes walking toward me, his arms outstretched. He is smiling.
Tatiana Han-eul Lewis is born at 7:35 p.m., weighing seven pounds ten ounces. She has black hair waving two inches high. As I hold her bundled form, she pinches and changes her face in many different ways, going through too many emotions at once. I know how she feels. My wife hovers nearby, her body a beam of light, scolding me to hold her securely. I tell her myarms are made of iron and steel, and indeed, they feel as if they were fashioned just for this purpose. My wife proclaims her a beauty. The baby struggles and opens one eye, the other sealed shut with mucus. She stares up at me with one brown eye as if she knows me already. I fill with pride when my daughter says she looks like me. Yes, you have an old man’s face, I tell her silently. I have waited many years for you.
A week later, while everyone is asleep, I arise with the need for release. In old age, everything shrinks, even the bladder. Afterward, as I pass through the dining room to the kitchen for a glass of water, I stop before the picture of the man in the black overcoat. I stand there while the light in the room advances from blue to pink with the rising sun. And I begin to see what was always there to be seen, that the man in the picture is not cruel. He is merely holding on to some sadness.
We cannot erase the past, I tell him, but we can add happiness upon happiness until it no longer hurts us.
That long-ago day after we left the clinic, my wife told me that she did not wish to go home. A neighbor, an immigrant like us but from Iran, was watching over our children. I asked my wife is she was hungry or thirsty, that we could go to a restaurant, but she said no, no, only drive away. So I drove slowly through the streets of our town, around the rotary with its statue of Lafayette triumphant on his horse, now badly scarred by terrible words in haphazard paint, and along the Merrimack River, where the little wooden cottages were nearly sliding into the
