The telephone on the nightstand beside the hospital bed did not ring so much as rattle against the veneered wood, and Carol picked it up on the first snap because she had been sitting there in that blue plastic armchair for fourteen hours straight with her coat still folded across her knees. I was four hundred miles south of Fargo on a floating hotel room that smelled constantly of chlorine and stale bleach, staring at a buffet tray of cold peel-and-eat shrimp that I had justified by telling myself I was protecting our savings account.
My name is Arthur, and I am the reason my daughter spent her first night on earth listening to monitors beep while her mother was cut open on a stainless-steel table. I have told this story to the bathroom mirror every morning for four months, and every time I get to the part about the chicken and rice, I want to put my fist through the glass.
The cruise was supposed to be a regional sales incentive for the district out of Sioux Falls, a four-night jaunt down to Cozumel that the company paid for if you hit your quarterly numbers. When the corporate calendar dropped in January, Danielle was showing just enough around the middle for us to joke about nursery colors while we ate dry toast in the kitchen. Then the doctor updated the due date after an ultrasound, and the red circle on the wall calendar overlapped the departure date of the ship by exactly forty-eight hours.
Danielle looked at that calendar once, her hand resting flat on her stomach, and she asked me in that quiet voice she uses when she is trying very hard not to be a burden. “Can you talk to them, Arthur? Can you just tell them we’re having a baby?”
“We need the bonus, Dan,” I told her, and I reached out to touch her shoulder like I was being reasonable. “If I turn down the trip, the district manager marks me down as uncommitted. We have the crib to pay for. We have the hospital deductible.”
That was the first lie I told myself, and it rolled off my tongue so smooth I almost believed it. We had three thousand dollars in a savings account that we had saved entirely from her overtime at the credit union before she started her leave. We could have afforded for me to stay home, but I liked the idea of being the guy who won the trip, and I liked the idea of getting away from the endless, heavy silence that had settled over our small house during her ninth month.
So instead of being a husband who stayed, I became a man who planned. I spent the entire Sunday before I left standing at our kitchen counter with a black Sharpie and fourteen plastic Tupperware containers from the grocery store.
I cooked five pounds of chicken breasts in a skillet with lemon pepper, boiled a massive pot of white rice, and then spooned them out into exact daily portions with little masking-tape labels across the lids. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday. Sunday. I stacked them in our chest freezer in the basement like little bricks of domestic devotion, and when I finished, I actually stood back and wiped my hands on a dish towel with a stupid, glowing sense of accomplishment. I left a magnet shaped like a lemon holding up a yellow legal pad of emergency numbers on the refrigerator door, right beside the coupon for diaper rash cream.
I honestly thought those little plastic tubs of dry chicken bought me the right to walk out the front door with my rolling suitcase while my wife’s ankles were swollen twice their normal size.
“You’re really going,” she said on Tuesday morning, standing in the doorway of the bedroom while I zipped my nylon duffel bag on the mattress. She wasn’t crying. That would have been easier to fight against, because crying gives you something to fix. She just stood there with her arms crossed over her oversized cotton nightshirt, looking at me with a flat, exhausted clarity that I spent the next three days trying to outrun.
“The ship leaves at four,” I said, avoiding her eyes as I tucked my phone charger into the side pocket. “Carol is driving down from Fargo tomorrow. She’ll be here before you even need to leave for the clinic.”
“My mother is sixty-eight years old, Arthur,” she said, her voice dropping down to almost nothing. “She’s driving four hours on the interstate in the snow.”
“She wanted to come,” I said, and I kissed the top of her head while she stood completely still, letting my lips touch her hair without leaning into it one bit. “I’ll call you the second we hit port in Cozumel. The roaming package is expensive, but I’ll make it work.”
I drove my sedan down to the port in Sioux Falls with the radio turned up high enough that I didn’t have to listen to the empty passenger seat beside me. I parked in the long-term lot, boarded the ship with three hundred other guys wearing floral shirts and lanyard name tags, and immediately went down to the stateroom to turn my phone off so I wouldn’t run up international data charges. On the first night, out on the open deck while the salt wind whipped through the artificial palm trees around the pool, I pulled out my phone for two minutes just to snap a picture of the dark water churning against the hull. I sent it to Danielle with a little thumbs-up emoji and a text that said, “Wish you were here, eating this prime rib.”
The boat cell signal was garbage on purpose, exactly like everyone says, designed to force you into paying forty dollars a day for their satellite Wi-Fi package that I refused to buy. So for three days I lived in a comfortable, quiet vacuum where the only sound was the low hum of the diesel engines and the clink of ice in plastic cups at the outdoor bar. I got a text on Wednesday night that simply said, “She’s here,” followed by a low-resolution photo of a tiny red face wrapped in a hospital blanket. I stared at it for a long time on the sunlit deck, holding a plastic cup of draft beer, and I told myself everything was fine because the baby had a round head and Carol was right there in the corner of the frame holding the bassinet rail.
“Everything went smooth,” I told the guy sitting next to me at the bar, a district rep from Des Moines named Greg who was wearing cargo shorts and boat shoes. “My mother-in-law flew in to help out. Well, drove in. From Fargo.”
“That’s how you do it,” Greg laughed, clinking his cup against mine. “Let the family handle the heavy lifting while you get your miles in.”
I didn’t correct him. I let him think whatever he wanted because it kept the weight off my chest for another twenty-four hours. On Thursday afternoon, the ship finally docked at the concrete pier in Cozumel, and the moment we cleared the metal ramp and my phone picked up the Mexican cell tower, the screen went completely white. Notifications started stacking up so fast the phone vibrated in my palm for a full minute without stopping, text after text after text appearing in little white bubbles that tumbled over one another. Before I could even open the messaging app, the phone began to ring with an aggressive, jarring sound that made three tourists walking past me turn their heads.
It wasn’t Danielle.
It was Carol, and when I swiped the green button, I didn’t even get to say hello before her voice came across the line, sharp and thin and shaking with a rage that cut straight through the tropical heat. “Don’t you dare ask how she is, Arthur.”
“Carol?” I said, and my feet stopped dead on the concrete dock while a group of people carrying beach towels shoved past my shoulder. “What’s going on? Is the baby, “
“The baby is fine,” Carol said, and she wasn’t yelling, which was worse, because her voice had that dead, level drop of a woman who had spent forty-eight hours signing medical forms alone while her daughter bled out on a gurney. “Danielle started hemorrhaging thirty minutes after they brought her back to the room on Tuesday night. Her blood pressure dropped so fast the monitors started screaming before the nurse could even hit the call button. They had to take her back down to surgery to stop the bleeding, and she spent twelve hours in recovery while I sat in the waiting room with a newborn baby in a plastic tub because I didn’t even have your phone number written down on paper.”
“I was on the ship,” I muttered, and the words sounded so small and stupid coming out of my mouth in the middle of a Mexican port town that I wanted to swallow them back down. “I didn’t have the Wi-Fi pass.”
“She lost three pints of blood, Arthur,” Carol said, her voice shaking now, the thin veneer of control cracking right down the middle. “The doctor came out at four in the morning to ask me who to call if she didn’t turn the corner, and I had to look at him and tell him her husband was eating a buffet in the Gulf of Mexico because he couldn’t afford to miss a sales trip.”
“I’m coming back,” I said, my chest tightening until I couldn’t get a full breath of the humid air. “I’ll find a flight out of here right now. I’ll get to the airport, “
“Don’t bother renting a car,” Carol said, and the cold finality in her tone made my knees feel weak. “Danielle is home now. She checked herself out this morning with the baby in her car seat, and she didn’t let me call you because she didn’t want your voice anywhere near her room. The locks are already changed, Arthur. Your bags are sitting on the front porch in four black trash bags right beside the chest freezer full of your little Tupperware containers.”
She hung up before I could say another word, the dial tone buzzing in my ear like an angry insect while the cruise ship behind me blew its deep, heavy horn to call the passengers back on board for the return trip to Texas. I stood there on that concrete pier with my phone in my hand for a long time, watching a stray dog trot through the gravel near a stack of wooden crates. I didn’t get back on the boat. I didn’t go to the airport either for another two days, because I stayed in a cheap motel room near the ferry terminal with the TV off, staring at the stucco ceiling and waiting for a knock that never came. Danielle filed for divorce three weeks later through an attorney in Sioux Falls, and she didn’t ask for alimony or anything fancy, just the house and full custody and enough distance to keep me out of her sight forever. I still live in a rented studio apartment over on the west side of town, and every time I open my small refrigerator to pull out a cold bottle of water, I look at the empty plastic shelves and remember the exact weight of fourteen little tubs of chicken sitting in a basement that I will never walk into again.
