Chapter 5 - The Glass Room
The neonatal intensive care unit at Prentice Women’s Hospital was kept at seventy-four degrees, but it felt cold because of the light.
The light was blue.
It came from four high-intensity phototherapy lamps mounted above the row of Giraffe OmniBed incubators in Pod C. The room smelled of heated plastic, sterile water, and the faint, sweet scent of human milk that had been warmed in an electric bath.
Claire lay inside box seven.
She did not look like the photographs of babies in the magazines Renata kept on her coffee table.
She was sixteen inches long. Her skin was the color of a fresh bruise—a mottled, translucent reddish-purple that showed the fine, blue tracery of her veins across her skull like the rivers on an antique map. A silicone tube the thickness of a pencil was taped into the corner of her mouth, vibrating forty times a minute as a sensor-driven oscillator forced oxygenated air into her stiff, premature lungs.
Across her eyes was a tiny blue fabric mask, held by an elastic strap no wider than a rubber band, to protect her retinas from the ultraviolet bulbs above her.
Theo was sitting on a stainless-steel rolling stool beside the incubator.
He had not shaved in four days. His jaw was covered in a thick, dark growth of stubble that made his cheekbones look sharper, more skeletal. He wore a gray hospital scrub top that was three sizes too large for him, the sleeves rolled twice to keep the cuffs out of the sterile field.
His right hand was inside the incubator port.
His index finger was resting in the palm of Claire’s right hand.
The baby’s fingers were no larger than pine needles, but they were closed around his knuckle with a ferocious, desperate tenacity that made the tendons in her tiny wrist stand out like horsehair.
I approached in the wheelchair, my staples screaming against the vinyl seat with every roll of the rubber casters.
Theo didn't look up immediately. He watched the green line of the oxygen saturation monitor—ninety-four percent, ninety-five percent, ninety-four percent—with that terrifying, mathematical focus that had kept our household balanced through three years of negative pregnancy tests.
"The cranial ultrasound was clear this morning," he said.
His voice was hoarse, down in the basement of his chest.
"Aris Thorne came by at six," he continued, his eyes remaining pinned to the green line. "The hematoma is reabsorbing. The ventricles are symmetrical. There is no intraventricular hemorrhage."
I reached out from the chair and laid my palm against the side of his knee. The denim of his jeans was stiff with dried river water from the Audi’s radiator hose.
"Theo," I whispered.
He slowly turned his head.
His eyes were bloodshot, the whites webbed with broken capillaries from forty-eight hours of fluorescent light and adrenaline. When he saw my face, something in his jaw finally loosened—not an expression, but a release of pressure, like an iron valve being backed off half a turn with a heavy wrench.
He reached down, took my left hand from the armrest of the wheelchair, and brought it to his mouth. He kissed my knuckles, one by one, his stubble rough against my skin, his lips dry as parchment.
"She has your ears, Naomi," he said.
"She has your chin," I replied, looking through the plexiglass at the tiny, frantic rise and fall of her chest under the phototherapy lamps. "The stubborn one. The one that doesn't move when the wind changes."
Theo reached into his scrub pocket and pulled out a small, rectangular piece of stiff white cardstock.
It was an official notice of a special meeting of the shareholders of The Julian Castellin Corporation, scheduled for nine o'clock on Friday morning in the conference room of Chapman and Cutler on West Monroe Street.
"What is this?" I asked.
"Your mother has forty percent of the common voting stock," Theo said. "She inherited it through the residuary clause of the Skokie will before we filed the lis pendens on the trust."
"And the other sixty?"
"Thirty percent belongs to you," he said. "And thirty percent was placed in the Claire Julian Settlement under Julian’s 1998 declaration."
He leaned closer to the wheelchair, his thumb tracing the blue vein on the back of my hand.
"The meeting was called by the trustee," he said. "To vote on the immediate liquidation of all corporate assets to satisfy the outstanding state tax liens on the dry-cleaning properties."
"Can she block it?"
"She has forty percent," Theo said. His voice was flat, dry, and cold. "Forty percent does not win a proxy vote in the state of Illinois, Naomi. Forty percent simply means you have a seat at the table while the other sixty percent sells the chairs from under you."
I looked back through the incubator glass.
Claire’s tiny foot gave a sudden, involuntary jerk, her heel kicking against the blue foam mattress with the strength of a small, wild bird.
"Where is Renata staying?" I asked.
"The Drake told her this morning that her room was needed for a convention of pediatric cardiologists," Theo said. "She’s currently sitting in the lobby with five pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage and her bridge partner, waiting for Mason to return her calls."
"He won't return them," I said.
"No," Theo agreed, his eyes drifting back to the green line of the monitor. "Mason is currently in Lake Geneva with his father, looking at three hundred acres of wet pasture they bought with a bridge loan they cannot service."
He reached his other hand through the incubator port, his finger touching the tiny, translucent patch of skin over Claire’s heart.
"Your father spent forty years in the steam, Naomi," Theo murmured. "He smelled of dry-cleaning fluid until the day he went into the ground. He had gray spots on his lungs from the boiler smoke when he was thirty-five."
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He looked at me.
"Nobody gets to turn forty years of that into an eighty-thousand-dollar Mercedes with a silver ribbon," he said. "Not while this little girl is breathing through a three-millimeter tube."
