The PowWow

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."

Jacob had nodded at that the way he nods at everything, slow and complete, and then gone right on standing at the nursery window like the glass itself might change its mind about letting him see through it. The window looked too small against his massive frame.

David Isaac Yaats. I want to write the name out in full here, at the start, because I don't think I fully understood, standing in that hallway, what it was going to come to mean by the time this account is finished. David for the shepherd who became a king and never once stopped being both at the same time. Isaac for the son who was promised, and then very nearly wasn't, and then was anyway, because some promises get tested precisely so their keeping can be proven. Jacob picked the second name without any help from me, which told me everything about how much thought had gone into it and how little he'd felt the need to explain.

Jeremiah had actually mentioned that name recently, in a different context. It was never the blood that made the promise. He hadn't known he was naming this child in advance.

We were in the hallway outside the nursery — Roiya, Curtis a phone call away and already threatening to break every speed limit between his apartment and the hospital, and me, standing a little apart from Jacob because some grief and some joy both need a body to hold its own space, and this was joy, but it was joy heavy enough that it needed room. That joy was adding mass to him before that window. Once Jacob got past being terrified that his son had arrived six weeks early, I suspected the rest of us were going to need somewhere safe to stand.

Naomi was down the hall, in a room of her own, which was the part of the night that had actually frightened me before David arrived safely and gave everyone something better to be afraid about.

"Internal strain," the OB had called it, standing in the doorway with the chart still in her hands, choosing her words with the particular care doctors use when they're trying to be accurate without being alarming. "Nothing acute. No active bleeding, nothing that requires intervention tonight. But there's more soft tissue stress than we'd expect from a delivery this size, and given—" she'd paused there, visibly deciding how much of the given she was actually equipped to explain, "—given what we understand about the pregnancy's particulars, we'd like to keep her overnight. Just to watch."

I'd caught Naomi's eye over the doctor's shoulder. She hadn't looked frightened. She'd looked, instead, like a woman doing math in her head, running her own numbers against numbers she hadn't been given yet, filing the whole thing under data to be properly analyzed once she had the strength to sit up and do it herself.

"He's strong," she'd said, to nobody in particular, which from Naomi was as close to an explanation as we were going to get that night. "Of course he's strong. I should have accounted for that. He wanted out."

That was Naomi's version of terror-joy, I think, though she'd never have called it that. A body built to house something with our particular inheritance in it had done exactly what that inheritance does — pushed harder than an ordinary body was built to absorb — and the woman lying in that bed, sore and stitched and watched overnight as a precaution, had responded to the whole thing with something closer to professional interest than fear.

Jacob's version looked nothing like that.

I have watched my brother take hits that would put lesser men in traction. I have watched him lose fights and win them, weep at his own wedding for exactly four seconds before composing himself, come entirely undone with joy at the news that he was going to be a father. None of that prepared me for the specific, quiet terror of watching him stand at a nursery window, looking at a son he could not yet hold, six weeks early and jaundiced and small enough that the incubator seemed built for a doll rather than a person.

This wasn't grief-shaped joy, the way the announcement had been, back at that Thursday table, an earthquake of the good kind. This was something narrower and sharper — a father discovering, in real time, that loving someone this much means surrendering, immediately and completely, any illusion of control over whether they're safe. Jacob had spent his whole life being the strongest thing in almost every room he entered. He was not the strongest thing in this one. The room belonged to machines and monitors and a nurse checking numbers on a screen, and there was nothing in Jacob's arsenal — no strength, no speed, no faith spoken loud enough — that could do what those machines were doing simply by existing.

"He is breathing on his own," Jacob said, to the glass, to himself, to whoever was listening. "They said that is good."

"It's very good," I said.

"He is small."

"He'll grow. That's sort of the whole design of babies."

Jacob didn't laugh. I hadn't really expected him to. But he did glance at me, briefly, and something in his face loosened by a degree or two, which was as much as either of us could ask of that particular hour.

Roiya stood on his other side, watching through the same glass with an expression I'd been slowly, gratefully getting used to over the last several months — open, unguarded, entirely present, none of the flatness that used to live behind her eyes on nights that should have felt exactly like this one. She'd come straight from her own apartment the second Curtis called her with the news, hair still damp, coat thrown on over pajama pants, because some news doesn't wait for a person to be presentable before they're allowed to receive it.

"He's got your nose," she told Jacob, which was almost certainly untrue of a newborn and completely true in the way that mattered.

"He does not."

"He absolutely does. Poor kid."

That got the smallest crack of a smile out of him, there and gone, exactly the size the evening could afford.

I reached up and placed a gentle hand on my brother’s shoulder. “Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.”

And the mountain moved, settling a bit. Jacob looked at me. That was enough.

We stood there a long while, the three of us, watching a small sleeping shape do the extraordinary, ordinary work of simply continuing to breathe. I said a quiet prayer at some point, without deciding to, the kind that arrives whole instead of assembled — thank You, and please, both at once, both meant completely.

It was well past midnight by the time the nurse gently suggested that visiting hours, elastic as they'd been for a family clearly living through something significant, did in fact have their limits, and that David would still be exactly where we'd left him come morning.

"Go home," Naomi told us, from her bed, when we stopped in to say goodnight. She looked tired in the satisfied way of someone who had just done something enormous and was allowed, finally, to stop doing it for a few hours. "Both of you. All three of you. I'm fine. He's fine. Nobody needs three grown adults standing in a hallway all night proving how much they love a baby who's asleep and can't currently appreciate the gesture."

"I could stay," Jacob said.

"You could," Naomi agreed. "You could also come back at six a.m. instead, when I'm actually awake to enjoy having you here, rather than sitting in that chair being noble at me while I sleep." She reached up and touched his face, brief, fond. "Go home. Sleep an hour or two. Come back at first light, and bring coffee, and we'll go look at our son together."

Jacob considered that with the gravity he brings to everything, and then, slowly, nodded.

"First light," he said.

"First light," she confirmed.

We said our goodnights. Roiya hugged Naomi carefully, mindful of stitches neither of us could see but both of us knew were there. I told Jacob I'd drive. We walked out through the quiet, fluorescent hush of the hospital corridors, past the nurses' station, out through the sliding doors into a parking lot gone dark and cold under a sky with no moon in it worth mentioning.

None of us said much on the walk out. There wasn't much left to say that the night hadn't already said better than we could.

I remember thinking, crossing that lot, that this was the kind of night a family gets maybe a handful of times across a whole life — pure, uncomplicated, worth every bit of the fear that had come before it. I remember thinking we'd earned it, after everything. I remember thinking, with something close to relief, that whatever else this year had cost us, at least tonight had been simply, entirely good.

I did not know yet how little of the night was actually behind us.