Chapter 6 - The Visitor
The NICU on the sixth floor of the Prentice Pavilion was a cathedral of low light and high-frequency monitors.
The room was kept at seventy-four degrees, smelling faintly of sterile water, warmed cotton, and the synthetic rubber of infusion lines. In the center of Pod Three, surrounded by four computerized syringe pumps and an overhead radiant warmer, sat an Isolette made of clear, heavy acrylic.
Inside the box lay Claire.
She was so small that the blue-and-white hospital diaper was folded over twice to keep from covering her ribcage. A thin, clear cannula delivered five liters of humidified air into her tiny nostrils; a pulse oximeter band, glowing with an eerie red light, was wrapped around her left heel like a miniature ruby bracelet. Her skin was pink, translucent as rice paper, with fine, dark hair covering her shoulders and the back of her neck.
I sat in a specialized recline chair beside the acrylic wall, holding my breath.
Theo stood behind me, his hands resting on my shoulders, his thumbs rhythmically stroking the tense cords of my neck through my hospital gown.
"Touch her hand, Naomi," he murmured.
I reached through the circular porthole on the side of the chamber. The air inside was humid and warm, like a greenhouse in midsummer.
I extended my index finger.
Claire’s hand—no larger than the top joint of my thumb, with five perfect, paper-thin fingernails—drifted upward in an uncoordinated, newborn arc. Her fingers touched my skin, hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then closed around my knuckle with an impossible, fierce grip that made the breath catch in the back of my throat.
"Hi, Claire," I whispered, the tears finally running free, dripping off my chin and onto the blue paper cuff of my wristband. "I'm your mama. You're safe now. Nobody's pushing anyone anymore."
Beside the incubator, the digital monitor displayed her heart rate: 138... 140... 139. Steady as a pocket watch.
"She has Arthur’s forehead," a voice said from the doorway.
I stiffened. The pain in my surgical incision flared with a sharp, burning pull as my abdominal wall contracted instinctively.
Theo’s hands tightened on my shoulders, an immediate, physical anchor that kept me from lunging upward.
Standing at the entrance of Pod Three was Aunt Clara—my father’s younger sister. She was sixty-eight, with the same broad, practical cheekbones as my father, wearing an unpretentious gray wool cardigan and sturdy leather walking shoes. In her hands, she carried a battered leather sewing basket that I recognized instantly: it had sat on my grandmother’s dresser in Cicero for forty years.
"Clara," Theo said, his voice relaxing by half a degree. "The nurses told me you were downstairs."
"I was," Clara said, stepping into the room with that quiet, unhurried grace that runs in the women of my father's bloodline. She walked to the other side of the incubator, set the sewing basket on the low shelf, and looked down through the acrylic glass. Her eyes, pale gray and surrounded by deep sun-wrinkles, filled with a sudden, fierce warmth. "Look at that girl. She’s a Castellin through and through. Look at the length of those toes. She’s going to be taller than her mother by twelve."
"Aunt Clara," I whispered. "Were you... were you at the party?"
Clara pulled a rolling stool over and sat down, resting her rough, garden-scarred hands on her knees.
"I was there until the glassware broke, Naomi," Clara said softly. "And then I walked out to my car, drove back to my house in Elmhurst, and waited for Theo to call me."
"You knew?"
"I knew Arthur didn't leave that will from nineteen-ninety-four," Clara said, her voice dropping into a low, steady rumble that sounded like dry leaves being crushed underfoot. "My brother came to my kitchen two weeks before he went into the hospital. He had a glass of buttermilk and three ginger snaps, like he always did on Tuesdays. He told me: 'Clara, Renata is going to try to sell the canal lots. She thinks that land is a jewelry store. You make sure Naomi gets the deeds. Bianca will spend it on shoes, but Naomi will build something that lasts.'"
She reached into her sewing basket and pulled out an old, yellowed legal document bound with three tarnished brass grommets.
"Arthur gave me the duplicate original of the twenty-twenty-two trust, Naomi," Clara said, handing it across the incubator to Theo. "He told me to keep it behind the water heater in my cellar until the right time. He said: 'When Renata does something unforgivable, give it to the lawyers.'"
Clara looked up, meeting my eyes with an unblinking, ancient honesty.
"She did it, didn't she?" Clara asked.
"She pushed me, Aunt Clara," I whispered, my hand still trapped in Claire’s tiny, fierce grip. "She looked at the blood on my dress and she told me it was just a little push."
Clara didn't sigh. She didn't shake her head. She simply reached out with her rough index finger and touched the glass of the Isolette right above Claire’s head, tracing a small, silent circle on the plastic.
"Your father spent forty years hauling ice blocks through the Cicero yards, Naomi," Clara said. "He had three fingers crushed in sixty-eight. He worked with broken ribs in the freeze of seventy-nine. He didn't build that estate so a vain woman could buy a Mercedes for a man who doesn't even know how to grease his own lawnmower."
She stood up, smoothed down the front of her gray cardigan, and turned toward the door.
"The lawyers have the papers," Clara said. "The bank accounts are frozen. The brownstone in Naperville is being posted for judicial auction on the twenty-eighth to satisfy the back taxes Renata forgot to pay while she was drinking champagne in Miami."
She paused at the threshold, looking back at Theo.
"Theo," Clara said.
"Yes, Clara?"
May you like
"Don't settle," the old woman commanded. "Arthur never settled on bad steel. You take the whole house down to the footings."
"Already done, Clara," Theo replied.
