His Own Eyes
He was the only person on the road. It was pitch black and the dim headlights of his old Corolla only let him see a few feet ahead at a time. The only other light was the digital clock that blinked on the dashboard—3:47 a.m. His eyes were half closed and covered by strings of thin greasy hair that crept out from under the brim of a red trucker hat. His clammy hands gripped the bottom of the wheel as he stared straight ahead into the tunnel of trees that lined the thin highway. He had woken up only half an hour earlier, and his head was still throbbing. He was getting used to the headaches—he hadn’t slept well for weeks.
He tried to remember her face, as he often had. He had it mostly put together but not quite. He could picture her thin lips and the tiny mole in the corner of her nose, but couldn’t recall the color of her eyes under all the mascara she wore that night. He remembered how her curly, dry hair felt on his fingers, but not what color it was. Just that it was dark. He never even learned her full name. He only knew her by Ellie. She didn’t want to tell him her last name. Or maybe he forgot to ever ask. Her voice was the only thing still clear to him, as she had called just this morning—the call that woke him up. Their short conversation played over and over again in his head. For some reason he was glad that she had called him tonight. He wasn’t sure she would. She’d shown no interest in talking to him after the suggestion he made the first time she called.
As he took the exit to the hospital his mind shifted to his parents; he had been thinking about them a lot recently. When he had gone home for the summer they barely talked to him. His father was an attorney who worked long hours at his firm and even longer hours in his home office. His mother was always home, but she would waste her days in front of the TV smoking Newports. He rarely saw them interact with each other, and when he did it was usually when they teamed up to complain about his grades or lack of a job.
He knew their marriage wasn’t a happy one. They were very young when they had him—his father had just started law school, and his mother was still in college. He didn’t need anyone to tell him that he had been an accidental pregnancy. His parents had a shotgun wedding just six months before he was born, and his mother had dropped out of school.
During the summer he found an old photo album his parents had made to document the first year of his life. There were maybe nine or ten pictures in the book before it cut off, the rest of the pages blank. There was one of him in a stroller, another of his first birthday, his face covered in frosting. The rest looked almost identical—still images of him lying in his crib, except for one photo of him and his parents together in the hospital, right after he was born.
That tiny Polaroid haunted him. His parents stared blankly through the frame, both offering only the faintest of smiles, as he lay obliviously on his mother’s lap, staring up at them with his big blue eyes. They looked scared. That only made him feel worse. He hadn’t been able to talk to them at all about his situation with Ellie. He had no clue how they would react, and he was scared to find out. His parents never tried to connect with him. They kept on him about school, but other than that, everyone in the family kept to themselves.
His hands began to tremble as he pulled into the hospital complex. It was the only building for miles. The parking lot was surprisingly empty, and it was still pitch dark other than a few lights at the entrance. He sat in his parked car for a few minutes, completely still. He wanted nothing more than to leave—but he knew he’d never forgive himself if he wasn’t there. Neither would Ellie. He didn’t know if he cared what Ellie thought of him, but he still felt obligated to her. He didn’t want to be a deadbeat. He considered himself a responsible person.
He thought back to the night he met Ellie in a bar a few miles from where he went to school. He remembered her telling him that she no longer spoke with her parents, that she had left home just weeks after graduating high school. He often fantasized about doing the same, but he knew he never could; his parents still paid for his school, his groceries, everything. He wondered if this was what attracted him to Ellie in the first place—she was independent, and didn’t rely on anyone but herself.
He couldn’t remember much else from the night they’d spent together. He remembered waking up in her small, grimy apartment tucked above a smoke shop. The whole room smelled like cigarettes. It reminded him of his mother. He left before Ellie even woke, crawling over piles of dirty laundry and scattered papers. He felt a little bad, but she was an attractive girl, and he was sure she had guys over all the time. Leaving wasn’t anything personal.
It was two months later when he heard from her again. He didn’t even know how she got his number. He remembers the whole experience like a dream, a surreal vision. He was in his friend’s apartment, and when he stepped out to take the call he didn’t come back. He must have talked to Ellie for hours before she hung up on him. He hadn’t said anything to comfort her, to offer his support. She hadn’t called since.
Eventually he just took a deep breath and got out of the car. He was so distracted he could barely feel the biting December winds. It was snowing for the first time that year, but he didn’t notice. His feet stumbled beneath him as he made his way over to the big glass hospital doors. He made his way around the few people in the waiting room to a woman sitting at a round wooden desk at the center of the lobby. The woman sent him on his way to the maternity wing.
Ellie’s room was labeled with a small slip of paper with her name on it. His heart dropped the second he saw her lying there. She looked nothing like the vague image that had been lingering in his mind; her skin was as pale as the hospital walls, and her dark curly hair was twisted into a careless, tangled bun. The crumpled hospital gown she wore clung tight to her damp skin and was covered in patches of sweat that had soaked through. There were empty beds lined up beside her, but the only other person in the room was an elderly nurse who was scribbling something on a clipboard.
Both women turned slowly toward him as he walked through the doorway, each offering a superficial smile.
“Is this him, Mom?” the nurse asked.
Ellie nodded.
The nurse walked over and grabbed him by the arm. Her smile was bigger now. “Give me one second, I’m gonna go make sure he’s ready to say hello.” She left the room, leaving him and Ellie by themselves.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, standing uncomfortably.
“I’m okay. It went pretty normal, I think. How are you feeling?” she half-laughed. “You probably look worse than I do.”
He realized she was right. He felt his face burning and sweat dripping from every crevice on his body, “Uh…um…”
She laughed again, this time sounding annoyed. “It’s okay. I did fine without you.”
“It’s not like you gave me much of a heads up.”
“I told you seven months ago.”
“You know what I mean.”
She lost her smile and turned her head away. “I wanted to do it by myself. You would’ve stressed me out. You didn’t even want—”
“I’ve tried to apologize for that. I didn’t know how to react.”
“You didn’t know how I was going to react. You meant what you said.” She looked angry, and he realized that she hadn’t forgiven him.
“I’m glad you called me tonight,” he said.
“You have a right,” she responded.
He didn’t like this answer. For some reason, he wanted her to want him there. He wanted her to appreciate his effort. He’d driven all this way. Their conversation was interrupted when the nurse knocked loudly on the door.
“Ok, Dad,” she said. “You can come with me to the nursery.”
He cringed. Being called “Dad” made him uncomfortable. Before he left the room, he exchanged one last glance with Ellie. Her face was still solemn, and he realized in that moment that her eyes were gray.
The nurse took him to a glass window that looked into a room filled with cribs and incubators, a handful occupied by infants. The room was brighter than the rest of the hospital; the walls were painted a light pink and covered by big stickers of flowers and clouds.
“He’s that one right there,” the nurse said, pointing to a crib in the center of the room.
He felt a knot in his stomach as he stared at the baby, who was wrapped up in a bright blue blanket, sleeping quietly. It didn’t look how he thought it would; its puffy face was beating red, and its waxy skin glistened under the fluorescent lights.
“Did you wanna hold him?” the nurse asked.
He didn’t really want to. He had never held a child before. But he reluctantly agreed, not wanting the nurse to think less of him.
They entered the nursery, and the nurse lifted up the baby and placed it into his arms. He held it awkwardly until the nurse shifted his position so that the baby’s head lay on his forearm.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” the nurse said as she left the room.
This startled him. He didn’t really want to be alone with the baby; he had never even interacted with one before. He held it for a few seconds before it woke and began to cry. He thought it was a terrible sound, a sharp pain that was jagged in his ears. He shushed it as he rocked back and forth. He was pretty sure that was how to get a baby to be quiet. He saw it in a movie once.
After a minute the baby did start to quiet down. Relief washed over him—he didn’t want the other infants to wake and cause a scene. But he felt proud, too. The baby had already responded to him, in a way.
He stood in silence, in shock, staring at his son. It stared right back up at him with big blue eyes, eyes he recognized from that Polaroid of his family. For the first time that night, his breath slowed and he didn’t feel the tightness in his chest. He was almost comfortable. He stood quietly in the room looking around, waiting for the nurse to come and take it back.
When the nurse did come back, she asked him politely to leave the nursery, insisting that the baby needed sleep. He handed the baby to the nurse and left the room. He heard it start to cry again as he walked away. To his own surprise, a part of him wanted to turn around and rock the baby back to sleep.
As he made his way through the long hospital hallways, he realized that he felt a bit more at ease than when he arrived. He had come seeking some sort of closure—but he realized that was impossible now. That was his child and he owed something to it, even if he didn’t know what. When he got back to Ellie’s room, he noticed a phone hanging on the wall just outside the door. He didn’t even know if it was for public use, but he dialed his parents’ home number anyway.
Noah Banas is a junior majoring in English at SUNY Geneseo.