Walter Mosley: Fortunate Son

“Dr. Nolan.”

“Yes, Miss Beerman?”

She took a deep breath and then said, “I have something I want to ask you.”

“What’s that?” he said in a whisper.

“Do you ever plan to kiss me?”

Dr. Minas Nolan had never in his life been without words. And even then he thought he had an answer to Branwyn’s question. But when he opened his mouth to speak, nothing came out.

“Never mind,” Branwyn said, and she pulled the handle on the door.

Minas reached out for her arm.

“No,” he said.

“No what?”

“I...”

“What?”

“I never, I never thought that you wanted me to... and I was afraid that you’d stop coming with me if I...”

Branwyn turned toward the doctor and held out her arms. He rushed into the embrace, and they both sighed. They hugged without kissing for the longest time. It seemed that with each movement of their shoulders they got closer and closer, until one of them would groan in satisfaction and chills would jump off their skin.

“Let’s go back to your place,” Branwyn said finally.

That’s when he first kissed her.

He turned the ignition and slipped the car into gear.

She touched the side of his neck with two fingers and said, “You drive me crazy.”

They never went to sleep that night. The first rays of the sun found them nestled together, thinking very close to the same thoughts.

“I’m worried about Thomas,” Minas said after a very long, satisfying silence.

“What do you mean?” Branwyn asked, rousing from her lassitude. She had just been thinking that she had enough time to go see Thomas before she had to be at work.

“Dr. Settler doesn’t know what he’s doing for the boy. He just keeps him in that bubble, waiting for him to die.”

“No.”

“Yes. He has no positive prognosis. I think you need to try something else.”

“Like what?”

“You need to take him out of that place and hold him and love him. Maybe he’ll live.”

“Maybe?” Branwyn asked, knowing that this man cared more for her than the whole of Helmutt-Briggs Hospital and every other doctor she had ever known.

She was thinking over what he had said when loud crying erupted from somewhere outside the master bedroom. Minas jumped up, and Branwyn followed him into the room across the hall. There, in a large crib, sat a giant baby with golden hair and eyes the color of the Atlantic Ocean. He was hollering, but there was no pain or sorrow in his face, just mild anger that he’d become hungry a moment before the nanny brought his food.

The nanny was a small Asian woman (later, Branwyn would find out that Ahn was from Vietnam) who seemed too small even to lift the child tyrant — Eric. But she hefted the thirty-five-pound infant from his crib and stuffed the rubber nipple of the plastic bottle into his mouth.

“He’s so big,” Branwyn marveled. “Twice the size of Thomas. And his eyes so blue. I never seen anything like it.”

Eric, nestled in the tiny nanny’s arms, suckled the bottle noisily while staring with wonder into Branwyn’s eyes.

“He like you,” Ahn said with a nod and a smile.

Branwyn tried to figure out how old the woman was. She couldn’t tell by the weathered face or the tiny features. She smiled at the woman and held out her arms, taking the behemoth baby to her breast.

Eric dropped his bottle and stared open-mouthed at the woman holding him. He made a soft one-syllable sound and put his hands on her face.

“Ga,” he said.

“Ga,” Branwyn replied with a smile.

Suddenly Eric started crying, hollering.

“You stop that crying right now, Eric Nolan,” Branwyn said in a stern but loving voice.

Abruptly baby Eric stopped, surprise infusing his beautiful, brutal face.

Ahn smiled and hummed.

“That’s the first time he’s ever obeyed anybody,” Minas said softly so as not to break the spell. “Usually when he cries, there’s no stopping him.”

“That’s because Eric and I understand each other. Don’t we, boy?”

Eric laughed and reached out for Branwyn’s face like a man come in from the cold, holding his hands up to a fire.

Ahn made breakfast while Branwyn, Eric, and Minas went to the drawing room on the first floor. There they sat on the divan that faced a picture window looking out on the Nolans’ exquisite flower garden.

“It’s so beautiful, Doctor,” Branwyn said while bouncing the baby on her lap. “You have more flowers than the florist I work for.”

“My wife loved flowers.”

“So do I.”

Minas was looking at his son’s white body beaming against Branwyn’s dark-blue dress and darker-still skin.

“Don’t you think that you should call me Minas or honey or something like that?”

Branwyn laughed and so did Eric.

Then a deep sadness invaded the woman’s face.

“Did I say something wrong?” Minas asked her.

“I shouldn’t be happy like this when my baby can’t even be comforted by my arms.”

Minas opened his mouth to say something, but again he could not find the words.

Eric opened his mouth too, and Ahn — who had just entered the room carrying a platter of sliced fruit, cheese, and bread — had the distinct feeling that the baby could have spoken if he wanted to. But Eric just stared at the black woman with the intensity of a much older child.

“I have to go to the hospital..., Minas.”

“I’ll drive you,” the handsome doctor said.

On the ride, the doctor said again that Thomas would never get better as long as he was in that bubble.

“He needs his mother’s arms and the sun,” Minas told her.

“That’s what I told Dr. Settler, but he said that with Tommy’s lung like it is he’s liable to get an infection and die if they let him out.”

“He won’t grow in there,” Minas said, “and he won’t get better.”

“But what will happen if I take him out?”

“He’ll be your baby in your arms.”

“But will he die?”

“I don’t know. He might. But one thing’s for sure... he’ll never grow to be a man in the ICU.”

The doctor dropped Branwyn off at Helmutt-Briggs and then drove back to his home in Beverly Hills. Before he was in the front door, he could hear Eric’s howls. Minas found the boy and Ahn in the nursery. She was holding him, and he was battering her face with pudgy fists. The boy had been screaming at the top of his lungs until his milky skin turned red.

“He won’t stop,” Ahn told the doctor.

Minas took the boy in his arms. Eric fought and struggled and screamed and shouted and hollered. Hot tears flooded out of his eyes. Every now and then he’d stop long enough to be fed, but as soon as the bottle was empty, he started in crying again.

It was like that all day. Dr. Nolan examined the boy for gas and then infection, but he couldn’t find anything and the baby couldn’t talk. All he could do was yell and cry.

At four thirty in the afternoon, after what seemed like three years of tears to the doctor and Ahn, the telephone rang. Minas rushed to it, hoping for some heart attack or stroke that would take him to the peaceful operating room.

“Dr. Nolan?” a woman asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m calling from the ICU at Helmutt-Briggs. We were told that you’re familiar with a woman named Branwyn Beerman.”

“Yes.”

“Well, Doctor,” the woman said, “we think that she removed her son from the isolation unit he occupied. He’s gone from the hospital, and the number we have for her on file has been disconnected.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Do you know how we can get in touch with her?”

Eric was screaming two rooms away.

“Don’t you have an address for her on file?” Minas asked.