Chapter 48
The baby was born in April, in the University Hospital in Kingston, at four forty in the morning after a long night that Marcus spent in the waiting area and then beside the bed, holding Nia's hand and being, in his own estimation, significantly less useful than he wanted to be.
He was twenty-nine years old and not prepared, despite having prepared, despite having read everything and thought about everything and spoken to every parent he trusted Leroy, who had two children, Priya, who had a daughter about what it was like.
Nothing was preparation for the specific reality of your child arriving in the world.
She was seven pounds three ounces and she had Nia's cheekbones and what appeared to be Marcus's eyes, and she arrived shouting, as her paternal grandfather had though Marcus had no memory of this, only the story his mother had told him many times.
They named her Elise Diane Campbell.
He called his mother from the hospital at five in the morning.
She arrived at six, walking through the hospital corridors in her good coat, and stood at the door of the room and looked at her granddaughter in Nia's arms.
Marcus watched his mother's face do something he had seen perhaps twice in his life: something completely unguarded, completely open, the full weight of her feeling present on the surface.
She crossed the room and Nia put the baby into her arms.
Diane held Elise Diane Campbell and looked at her with the total, measuring attention she brought to everything important.
'She's going to carry something,' his mother said, quietly.
Marcus blinked.
'Mama Vie said that about me,' he said.
'I know,' his mother said. 'I was thinking the same thought.' She looked up at him. 'It means she's strong enough.'
He stood in the hospital room in the early morning with his wife and his mother and his daughter and felt the world, once again, reorganize itself around a new person who had arrived full of protest.
He wrote in his journal that evening, in the chair beside Nia's bed while they both slept:
'She is here. All of it every mile, every Sunday phone call, every letter to Leroy, every morning run, every lesson, every year all of it was building toward the moment she arrives and I hold her and understand what continuation means. My mother built me. I am going to build her. She will build something I cannot see yet. That is the whole story. That is the only story.