The PowWow

Adrenaline is a loan, not a gift. It always comes due, and it came due for me sitting on the porch of Jeremiah's house, watching my own hands shake in a way they had flatly refused to do inside the house, like my body had been waiting for permission and only just gotten it.

"Walk me through it again," I said to Jacob, mostly because talking was better than the alternative, which was sitting there listening to my own pulse redecorate my skull. "From the top. Slow."

Jacob was leaning against the porch rail, arms crossed, the bruise on his face finally starting to announce itself now that nothing more urgent was competing for his attention. "The lights went out."

"Right. And then?"

"Something hit me."

"I know something hit you, Jacob, I was there, I got the sequel. I need the something. Height. Build. Anything."

Here is a thing nobody tells you about the worst night of your life: it doesn't have the decency to stop being the worst. It just piles on.

The parking lot lights came back on eleven minutes after they went out — I know because I counted, because counting things is what I do when my hands won't stop shaking and my brain needs somewhere to put itself that isn't my sister is gone. Eleven minutes. Long enough for a coordinated abduction. Short enough that the hospital's night security guard, jogging out to find two grown men on the pavement and no idea why, still had his coffee in his hand. He offered me a sip. I have never wanted anything less in my life and I have wanted very few things as much as I wanted him to stop asking if we were okay.

We were not okay. My…

The lights went out all at once, which is not a thing that happens by accident in a parking lot with its own dedicated electrical service, and I registered that fact about half a second before I registered anything else that mattered.

Half a second, it turned out, was already too long.

Something hit Jacob first. I didn't see it coming — nobody could have, not in that dark, not at that speed — but I heard it, a sound like a car door slamming except wetter, heavier, and I saw my brother's enormous frame go sideways in a way I had genuinely never once seen it go in thirty years of watching him absorb things that would have ended other men. He didn't fall. He staggered, which from Jacob was its own kind of alarm bell, a landmark suddenly discovering it could move.

I turned toward him. That was…

Chapter 1 - David Isaac He was smaller than I expected, which is a strange thing to say about a baby, since I had no real basis for what to expect in the first place, but there it is. Six weeks early, according to the nurse who kept saying it in the specific reassuring tone medical professionals reserve for numbers that sound worse than they are. Six pounds, one ounce. Ten fingers. Ten toes, which Jacob counted twice, out loud, with the solemnity of a man auditing a ledger he could not afford to get wrong.

"He's fine," the doctor had said, for maybe the fourth time, to a father who did not appear capable of hearing it as a settled fact rather than a hope in progress. "Early, small, a little jaundiced, nothing that time and the incubator won't handle. We just want eyes on him for a few days."