Duet for Three Hands by Tess Thompson Page B

one side of the desk to the other.
    “Why?”
    “He’s deformed, Mr. Fye. It’s a shock to most people. Something you don’t want in your mind when you try for the next baby.”
    “But he’s alive?”
    “Yes.” He nodded. A concession.
    “Then I want to see him.”

    A nun took him to the nursery. Four or five healthy babies in bassinettes were lined up in neat rows. His son was in the corner bassinet, set aside from the rest, like something discarded. My God, Nathaniel thought when he leaned over to get a better look at him, he’s no bigger than a kitten, his face shriveled like an old man, and his eyes scrunched shut. Should he touch him? Was it all right, or would it hurt him? He was so still, so small. But wait. Was he breathing? He felt panic rising in his chest. “Is he alive?”
    “Yes.” The nun made a sympathetic sound with her mouth, like the cluck of a hen. “It’s shallow, but see there, how the blanket moves.”
    He fought tears, gulping down air to try and stop them. “How could this be?”
    “I’m sorry, Mr. Fye. Many newborn babies don’t make it.” She hesitated, and when she spoke her tone sounded regretful. “I’m sure that’s no comfort to you.”
    It was not. He didn’t care about those other babies. He didn’t care about the statistics. He cared only about this mite in front of him. His son. Whom he loved. Whom he had loved without knowing him in the flesh for the months he formed in Frances’s body. He’d lived an entire imaginary lifetime with his son when he daydreamed at the piano and as he walked the streets of New York and even when he was awake in the night. In those invented moments, he’d taught his son to play piano and listen to music, carefully like a musician, on the gramophone. They’d walked together through every color of fallen autumn leaves in the Maine woods near his mother’s home. Later, they’d caught lobster, and he’d told him stories of his grandfather in heaven. He’d taken him to the lake house and watched Clare bounce him on her lap and read him books. They’d sat with Whitmore on the dock and put their poles in the brown water, swatting at mosquitoes, waiting for fish to bite and talking of nothing and everything at once. He’d walked behind his son and Whitmore as they held hands crossing the yard and into the house where Cassie fried up catfish while his boy grinned and stuffed biscuits into his mouth with pudgy fingers. He’d imagined Frances rocking him in the early morning hours, her face peaceful in the dim light of dawn. And now his son was before him, not his imagined fair-haired boy, but just his sweet soul delivered into the wrong body.
    And yet, how he loved him. Beyond anything he’d imagined—this love that he had not fully understood until now. He loved him regardless of the way he was made. Regardless of the fact that he would not live. He understood for the first time: this was how his father had loved him.
    An image came to him of his father’s red, chapped hands folded on his lap in the evening firelight. “Play just one more for me, Nathaniel.”
    “I’m naming him John,” he told the nun. “After my father.”
    “Do you want to hold him?” She had a round face and wore thick glasses that made it seem as if her eyes protruded unnaturally.
    “Will it hurt him?”
    “No, Mr. Fye, it will only give him comfort as he waits to meet our Lord in heaven.”
    He felt a helpless sliding under, like a drowning man. “I don’t know how.”
    “Sit in the chair here and hold out your arms.” He did so, and she picked up the baby from the cradle and put him in Nathaniel’s arms. He peeked under the blanket. John’s scrawny body was purple, like he was bruised. The nun had put a tiny diaper on him. His legs were no bigger than the width of Nathaniel’s thumb, and his poor, misshapen feet twisted inward. After a few moments, he looked up to find the nun gone. It occurred to him that Frances hadn’t seen the baby. He