Читать книгу Damn Love - Jasmine Beach-Ferrara - Страница 6

DIFFERENT PATHS, SAME WOODS

For six months, the invitation to her son’s wedding sat in Ruth’s underwear drawer like a love letter, tucked behind a mound of folded pastel cottons and the one lace thong she owned. The sleek gray envelope was addressed only to her. Ruth Fearrington it read in black calligraphy, as if Ronny didn’t even exist. She hadn’t told Ronny about it, and she wouldn’t. If anything was going to convince him to reconcile with their son, it was not Peter’s wedding to another man.

Now that the day had arrived, she knew she’d made the right choice. Aside from the obvious, she had finished another round of chemo and was coming off four days with her face in the toilet, grateful for the tiniest things—the symmetrical, gleaming tiles under her knees, the soft, cool washcloth Ronny placed on her neck, a thirty-minute reprieve between retching.

But this morning, she’d held down a cup of hot tea and a piece of unbuttered toast. She was sitting on the rear deck in jeans and a t-shirt and the morning sun was shining on her face and her bald head, slathered with 70 sunscreen. At home, she didn’t bother with the wig unless she and Ronny were entertaining or making love.

He had finished the laundry and paid the bills, so she had nothing to do today except soak up the sun and go to brunch and a matinee with her best friend, Janet. Their sweet, dopey hound, Buster, was asleep at her feet, too old and arthritic now to join Ronny on his Saturday hunting trips.

It was the first week of deer season and by now, he would be deep in the woods of southern Orange County. He’d retired from his job as a US History teacher a year earlier and worked part-time time in kitchens and plumbing at the new Home Depot near SouthPointe Mall. The moon had still been shining when he’d gotten up that morning, extracting himself from her arms and dressing in the dark, packing his truck with a cooler, a pair of camo coveralls, and the ridiculous orange vest he wore so he didn’t get his head shot off. But it could be worse, she knew. Janet’s sister’s husband had recently announced that he was in love with his thirty-two year old trainer at their gym.

The deck was a birthday gift from Ronny. Like all of his projects, it was beautifully executed, the cherry stain gleaming, the nails evenly sunk, a discreet nook for his gas grill. They’d lived in the three-bedroom ranch since 1974, the year that Peter was born and that Ronny returned home to Durham from his final tour. After Peter went to college, they’d added the den. Later, when it became clear he wouldn’t be visiting, they’d turned Peter’s room into a craft studio where she made ornaments for their church’s annual Christmas fundraiser.

More recently, Ronny had redone the kitchen and both bathrooms. Nothing could be done about the house’s boxy, brick exterior, but with each addition, its interior more closely resembled the home Ruth wished they could afford. She was proud of what they’d done with it. The neighborhood kept changing, though. A tienda had opened up a block from them, its front windows plastered with ads for phone cards that she couldn’t read and the bright jerseys of Mexican soccer teams. There was now a halfway house for ex-cons a few streets over, and Ronny taught weekly Bible Study there with a friend from his North Baptist’s Men’s Group. Their new neighbor on the right was an artist who refused to mow her law or to let Ronny do it for her. To be polite, they had gone to an opening of hers at a downtown gallery a few months ago, but all her paintings had been nude self-portraits. Ronny could barely make eye contact with her after that. The paintings weren’t even that good; her face looked flat and she’d clearly been blindfolded when she’d done her boobs and hips.

Thinking of all this made Ruth laugh. Cancer did that, at least: helped sift the essential from the mundane. The sun was warm on her skin and that was real, as was the smooth half-acre of grass that stretched out behind the house. She loved walking barefoot through the grass to pick corn, tomatoes and berries from Ronny’s garden. And they were just a few miles away from Duke Forest where for decades she’d hiked the trails. Those woods were one of the great joys of her life. In them, she felt most like the girl she’d once been, the one who’d collected bugs and who’d wanted, until she’d barely passed chemistry junior year, to be a scientist.

Her cell phone rang. Buster barked once and then fell back into his nap. She answered, expecting to hear Janet’s voice.

“Mrs. Davis?” a man asked.

“Speaking,” Ruth said, slipping into the smooth, vacant tone she used to take calls at the pediatrician’s office where she worked as a receptionist.

“This is Felix Rivera.”

She hesitated, unable to place his name.

“Peter’s Felix.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I know this is unexpected, so let me get right to the point. There’s a ticket waiting for you on a 12:05 non-stop flight today out of Raleigh-Durham. It arrives four hours before the ceremony and a driver will take you directly to the hotel. I booked a room for you and a return flight for Monday.” His voice was smooth and deep, unlike Peter’s, which bore a lilt that sometimes made her cringe.

Ruth didn’t know what to say, so she went with good manners. “That’s certainly generous,” she began. “But I don’t see how it would be possible.” When she’d asked Dr. Patel about flying, he’d frowned and pushed his rimless glasses up on his nose. He’d gotten her this far—through the breast cancer eight years ago and now this run in with lymphoma—and she trusted him with her life. The chocolate cakes she baked for him and his new wife before each visit were the best way she knew to say this. Last fall, when one of her scans had come up clear, Ronny had delivered a cooler full of frozen venison steaks and sausage to Dr. Patel’s house, surprising the doctor in the midst of a dinner party.

“At least take the flight information,” Felix persisted. She’d never met him and knew only that he was a lawyer and that his parents would be at the wedding.

She jotted the flight number down on the border of the crossword puzzle she was doing in the News & Observer, and then hung up and closed her eyes. She longed to see Peter and she understood the clear overture he’d made by inviting her. But he wanted her there only under the condition that she be genuinely happy for him. That would never happen and she couldn’t pretend otherwise. The kindest thing she could do was stay home and keep her mouth shut. It was all too much to think about. The inevitable fight. Her health. Ronny’s reaction.

Months earlier, she’d gotten as far as checking ticket prices and visiting the website of the hotel where the ceremony would take place and where out-of-town guests were encouraged to stay. But the rates at the W Hotel were more than the monthly payment on Ronny’s new truck. The Hampton Inn in Asheville, where they vacationed each August, was more her style. Although she hadn’t seen Peter in almost thirteen years she could tell, from his tone in their conversations, from the wedding invitation, that he’d become a snob.

There was a man at their church who used to be that way. The Sunday after Easter, he’d given a testimonial and had called his fiancée up to the altar, where they stood hand in hand. “We’re all sinners,” he had said through his tears. “And the great miracle is that Jesus loves us anyway.” She thought that if Peter could just hear this story, it might move him the way it had her.

Janet knew all about it and had been urging her to go. I know I ’m not a mother, Janet would say, choosing her words carefully, but it seems like all he wants is to know you love him. Ruth had confided in no one else. Who would she tell? Her mother thought it was 1963 and cried about JFK’s assassination every night over another nursing home dinner of canned green beans, boiled chicken and cherry jello. She had her Women’s Group at North Baptist, and the girls at work, but it wasn’t the kind of subject you bring up casually.

Peter didn’t know she was sick and she preferred it that way. She didn’t want him visiting out of guilt or pity. He needed to choose to return home. He hadn’t set foot in the house since the Christmas of his junior year of college. They’d gotten back from the Christmas Eve service and were about to open presents when Peter made his announcement. They were sitting in front of the fire, eggnog poured, Bing Crosby playing, wrapped presents spilling out from under the tree. Don’t ever come back here, Ronny had spat out, and thirty minutes later Peter was slipping into the passenger seat of Alex’s idling car. As they’d pulled away, Ruth had realized that Alex—Peter’s best friend since childhood and high school girlfriend—had been waiting for Peter’s call, that it had all been staged in a sense. She had imagined Alex’s family taking him in like a wounded stray. She had been humiliated and bereft. How could she have known that both father and son would act like those stupid words uttered by Ronny were a blood oath? She didn’t like it anymore than Ronny did, but she held onto a hope that Peter would change. Once, she’d found Ronny thumbing through baby pictures of Peter in the garage, his eyes dark. But he refused to talk about their son, and until recently, she’d felt that she couldn’t go behind his back.

Over the years, she’d followed Peter’s career online, reading his articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and in the magazines he freelanced for. They’d been back in touch for two years now, after she’d emailed him in response to a birthday card he’d sent. It was a compromise position, one that she’d consulted with her pastor over. He had given his blessing and this mattered to her.

When she’d last seen him at age twenty, Peter had looked just like Ronny. They had the same lanky body and square jaw, the same slow grin. There was a picture of Peter and Felix on the wedding invitation, standing on an empty Pacific beach. Peter had filled out and his hair brushed his collar. His eyebrows looked waxed and his body leaned easily into Felix’s. They were both dressed in white linen pants and collared shirts.

In one of their calls, she’d asked him if he ever wore dresses. “Yes,” he’d said after a pause. “But it doesn’t mean I want to be a woman.”

“I’ve never known it to mean anything else,” she had replied.

“It’s about performance,” Peter had shot back and she had let it stop there.

It was late—she usually called him after Ronny went to bed—and she had been sipping a glass of chardonnay in the family room, the lights off, the moon casting a bright beam onto the wooden floor. In the dark, she felt like she could say anything to him. She asked questions and in response, he often surprised her with his candor. He rarely had questions for her though, and she couldn’t quite explain why she held her tongue when it came to describing her life. She would murmur vaguely in response to Peter’s various, odd confessions: the affairs that weren’t really affairs because no one objected; the possibility that he and Felix would somehow have a child.

They maneuvered through these calls as if they were dismantling a bomb. One wrong move and it would be over. But she pushed on. She had to. Nothing could be worse than his absence, as pure and aching a wound as she’d known.

Later, she had tried to imagine him in a dress, something black and more expensive than anything she owned. She could see the padded bra, his hips canted, a sly satisfaction on his face. It bothered her that he insisted on calling it performance. Over the years, the pediatrician she worked for had seen a handful of kids with this problem, and it inevitably led to a diagnosis and a referral to a psychiatrist. You could always spot them in the waiting room, boys with big delicate eyes and movements like a young deer’s, girls with round little biceps and wide stances. And quiet, always quiet, sticking close to their parents as the other kids played in the waiting room.

A few times, she had found Peter in her negligees and heels when he was a boy. It had scared her. Those first few years of school, he’d come home crying on a handful of afternoons. How do you tell your six-year-old boy he’s going to get himself killed if he doesn’t watch it? But he’d figured this out on his own and by the time he was eight or nine, he had asked to join Alex’s Pop Warner football team, and soon enough he had become a bookish teenager and joined the school newspaper. She had breathed a sigh of relief as she helped him with his boutonniere the night of Senior Prom. When he left to pick up Alex, he had seemed genuinely happy and she’d felt like she’d done a major part of her work as his mother. The next morning, she’d made him waffles and had listened, delighted, as he re-enacted the break up that had occurred on the dance floor between the Prom Queen and the school’s All-American quarterback. If Peter was as tortured as he later claimed to have been during those years, she had missed it, and knowing this now was just a further injury.

A friend of hers at church had a son who was a heroin addict, and Ruth thought of theirs as different paths in the same woods. Her friend had once confided that she hated to answer the phone late at night because she was certain it would bring word that her son had overdosed. Ruth could relate. There’d been years where she thought any day might deliver the news that Peter was dead from AIDS. She still didn’t believe him entirely when he insisted that he was healthy. Healthy and lucky, was how he put it.

During her last chemo session, their pastor had sat with her for a few hours in the treatment room of Duke’s Cancer Center, which seemed to her like Hell’s version of a salon with its banks of salmon-colored recliners, its hovering, smocked volunteers offering reiki treatments and lemon water, and its bags of relentlessly bright drugs emptying drop by drop into her veins. “God’s with you even when you’re puking,” he had told her. “Especially when you’re puking,” he’d corrected himself earnestly and she could tell he was pleased with himself for using such an earthy term as puking. Young, handsome and brimming with ambition to double the membership of North Baptist, he had a touch of the golden boy about him. But he wasn’t quite prepared for the underbelly of the congregation’s life. Reverend Doctor Good Boy, Ruth called him to herself, and she knew he was wrong about this one. She would allow that God was getting her through in a general sense, sure, but there was no way he had anything to do with the sour, fetid stench of chemo puke or the animal-like convulsions that could possess her body.

By the time Janet arrived that morning, Ruth had her wig and her fake boobs in place. Cheyenne they called the wig, Pamela and Anderson, the boobs. The wig fell in a way her natural hair never had and the breasts were as perky as hers had been at twenty-five. She often kept her bra on during sex, for Ronny and for herself. It was just too much otherwise, the battered, stark flatland of her chest, the scars.

“You won’t believe who I saw at the gym this morning,” Janet began, pushing her sunglasses up into her newly-highlighted hair and reaching into the fridge for a can of Diet Coke. Through pilates and a raw foods diet, Janet had dropped four sizes and bought a new wardrobe in the past year. That her makeover coincided with Ruth’s puffy-faced, bald-headed, flat-chested retreat from femininity was hard to miss. Maybe it was only fair, Ruth thought sometimes. She had always been the pretty one, the lucky one. She’d also been fertile and had chosen a faithful first husband. There had been reason for Janet to envy her. You have no idea what it’s like to know that you are completely alone. Even if something were to happen with you and Ronny, you’d still have Peter, Janet had said years earlier, when they’d gotten drunk on gin and tonics the night her divorce went through.

“Ginny Murray.” Janet answered her own question. “She got gastric bypass last year. Her belly flap is about down to her knees. I was next to her in the locker room and it took no less than five minutes to tuck that thing into her panties.” Ginny had gone out with Ronny during the six months that he and Ruth had broken up during senior year of high school. Janet still delighted in any excuse to bring her up.

She and Ruth had been best friends since the age of seven. Janet had been there the day Ruth met Ronny, on their first day of junior high in 1966. Ruth had been maid-of-honor at both of Janet’s weddings. Janet and Ronny alternated chemo shifts, so that Ruth never went alone. And the one time that Ronny had truly fallen apart, when Ruth was in the ICU with an infection almost too quick for Dr. Patel to contain, it had been Janet who pulled Ronny through. She’d found him about to peel out of the hospital parking garage, whiskey on his breath, fear in his eyes. She’d talked him into her car and back to her house, where her second husband had brewed a pot of coffee and made up the guest room.

“Pack a bag at least,” Janet said when Ruth told her about Felix’s call. “We’ll go to brunch and see how you feel,” she said, reaching to pull down Ruth’s overnight bag from the top shelf in the hall closet.

When Janet had hit menopause, she had come to a tenuous peace with the fact that she would never have a child and something had changed, slowly but perceptibly. She remarried, choosing an unlikely man. Her new husband was an ex-hippie contractor who’d tripled his business during the building boom of the last decade. They bought a beach house and two Lab puppies who went to daycare when Janet had her weekly shift at a shelter for battered women. Her husband smoked pot and had coaxed Janet into joining him a few times. She had told Ruth it made their sex better, along with a dose of the big V. Ruth envied her sometimes.

“All I’m saying is keep your options open. I know he put you in a terrible position by not inviting Ronny. But you can go and that’s the beauty of it.” Janet adjusted her sunglasses in the rear view mirror and backed out of the gravel driveway. Ruth smiled as Buster charged the chain link fence and barked, slobber hanging from his gray jowls. An overnight bag, packed with her black cocktail dress, pj’s and a change of clothes was in the backseat, along with Janet’s gym bag and dry cleaning.

“What would I tell Ronny?” Ruth asked.

“He’ll be so busy with his deer carcasses, he’ll hardly know you’re gone.”

Ruth hadn’t been on a plane in a decade. They preferred to travel by car. She’d seen and done what she wanted to in life. She could say that now. Fifth row seats to see Johnny and June Cash at the Grand Ol’ Opry. Visiting the Vietnam Memorial with Ronny. Walking Foley Beach by moonlight on their 25th wedding anniversary. Staying at The Biltmore Estate, where they’d splurged on champagne and filet mignon from room service. It was a good life.

Janet ordered low-fat, low-carb everything at Atlanta Bread Company and Ruth sipped on a banana smoothie. They sat in matching faux leather armchairs. Sun streamed in through the large front windows, which allowed an unremarkable view of SouthPointe Mall’s parking lot. SUV’s and mini-vans circled the lot, screaming kids lagged behind their glaze-eyed parents, a skinny teenager in baggy jeans and a Carolina baseball cap stuck his hand in his girlfriend’s back pocket and pulled her close. Something easy to listen to poured through the speakers.

Janet was eager to talk about her sister, Becky, who was staying with them and no longer speaking to her husband. “Becky said that he said that the trainer makes him feel alive. Well, sure you feel alive when you’re having the sex of your life and you lose twenty pounds and a younger woman’s throwing herself at you. This one, she used to be a cheerleader at State and apparently she’s pretty acrobatic. I bet she’s gotten him into some kinky stuff. That’s one thing I’m trying to get through Becky’s head. She’s had a terrible time since Mom died. But you can’t stop having sex with your husband for a year and then be totally shocked when this happens.

“A whole year?” Ruth asked.

Janet nodded. “She finally told me she’s been suicidal from the depression. I had no idea. No one did, not even her doctor. Turns out she hasn’t been sleeping for months either. I told her they can get through this, but she’s not exactly in a conciliatory mood. Yesterday he showed up on the porch wanting to talk and she threw a shoe at him. It hit him in the forehead. I keep telling her, sweetie, it doesn’t have to be so black and white.”

“He took a vow,” Ruth said. “They both did.” She saw no need to dwell in the gray on this one. Even in her worst moments with Ronny this much was clear. Don’t cheat, don’t split up.

“Well, I’m taking her to the doctor tomorrow,” Janet kept talking and Ruth’s mind wandered, as it often did in conversations like this. She thought about how she and Janet used to walk from school to the Royal Ice Cream Parlor on Friday afternoons where they’d sip Cokes, smoke and wait for Ronny to finish his shift at his father’s gas station. That was back when the downtown tobacco warehouses still churned out millions of Lucky Strikes each year and a few years after the sit-ins at Royal. She’d met one of the students who’d gotten arrested, a quiet girl with horn-rimmed glasses and braids who lived a few blocks from her. They’d once shared an umbrella as they both walked home in a May thunderstorm from their respective schools. The girl had grown up to be a law professor at Carolina and Ruth sometimes saw her being interviewed on the news.

Back then, she had thought she and Janet and Ronny would go on and on like that forever. Over forty years had passed. In some ways, so little had changed. They’d had one long run together. She wasn’t going to get much more time. She knew that was true, although she didn’t have the heart to tell Ronny or Janet or Dr. Patel. Before, she had been fighting. But now she was dying.

A man walked by holding a tray and a newspaper and when he turned to sit down, Ruth realized she knew him from church. He was the one who’d given that testimonial, though she could not place his name. He was sitting alone, sipping coffee and spreading cream cheese on his bagel. She watched him and she thought of Peter. Every few seconds, she gave Janet an “umhmm.” Her friend was an endurance athlete when it came to talking. Listening to her often exhausted Ruth, but Janet’s monologues never struck her as less than a feat.

The man glanced away from his newspaper, picked up his phone and then set it down again. There was that cocked quality to his wrist and his high cheekbones cast a slightly delicate quality to his face. But there was also the gold cross on a thin chain around his neck, visible in the v neck of his fitted t-shirt, and the matching gold band on his ring finger. Watching him, she looked for signs of happiness.

His phone rang and when he picked it up, he smiled, his shoulders relaxing, his eyes bright. He laughed into the phone and shook his head. Relief spread through her chest. She imagined his wife’s bright voice on the other end of the phone, maybe telling him about her workout or calling from the grocery story to ask his opinion on wine. She watched as he finished the call, still laughing. He was finding a way through and this gave her hope. This was what she wanted for her son.

“Let’s go to the airport,” Ruth said, interrupting Janet.

Janet raised her eyebrows but Ruth was already up and clearing her tray. She knew now that she was meant to go to San Francisco. She wouldn’t give up on Peter, but nor would she try to talk him out of the wedding. There was no need to. That was the great joke of it all, and she only wished she’d seen it earlier. The wedding wouldn’t be legal or real and neither would the marriage. They were play-acting. It’s about performance. Isn’t that what Peter had said? Let them go through with it. Fine. It could be undone, like so much else. She would once again be by Peter’s side, and from that position she could whisper to him that there was another way. It was all so clear. She felt a surge of energy and promise. As Janet rushed to catch up with her, Ruth laughed. The sun shone brightly and they had plenty of time to get to the airport. She was going to be with her son, like any mother would.

They pulled out of the parking lot and headed east on I-40. Ruth didn’t tell Janet what had changed her mind. She didn’t want anything to ruin this and knew the many ways that Janet could, with her bawdy humor or her occasional bursts of chilly, irrefutable logic.

They were two miles from the airport when they hit traffic. Above them, the silver bellies of planes angled towards the runway and the blue sky seemed endless. From behind, they heard an ambulance and fire trucks approaching. All the traffic inched left and Ruth watched as the emergency vehicles sped by. “Must be bad,” Janet murmured, checking her watch. “But we’ve got lots of time.”

The mid-day sun was blistering. It soaked Ruth through the windows of the SUV. The relief that she had felt was being replaced by a crawling anxiety. The seat belt was too tight against her chest, but she couldn’t loosen it. Sweat gathered along her spine and her mouth dried out as suddenly as if it had been suctioned at the dentist ’s. She gripped the handle on the side door and tried to swallow the hot bile gathering in her throat.

“Pull over,” she managed.

They’d been through this drill before. But this time they were in the center lane, boxed in by traffic on both sides with a mile to go until the next exit. Janet put on her blinker and cut toward the shoulder, but the driver of the semi on their right gave them the finger and inched up to block their path. Ruth tried to open the door, but couldn’t manage the automatic lock button. She vomited, a burning liquid with clumps of undigested toast and streaks of bright red blood. The vomit splashed onto the dash and all over the front seat. She couldn’t stop.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Janet said, blasting on the horn and reaching into the backseat for her workout bag. She yanked out a towel and placed it on Ruth’s lap, and then took hold of her friend’s clammy hand. Ruth’s face was the gray of wet concrete. Janet rolled down the windows. “We’re going to the ER, asshole,” she yelled. The semi’s driver finally understood what was happening and cleared a path for them to the shoulder. Janet gunned the car. Ruth kept vomiting until only blood was coming up.

As soon as the triage nurse saw her, Ruth was rushed off for a CT scan and x-rays. Janet ran alongside her stretcher and when Ruth’s wig slipped out of place, Janet gently took it off, stuffing it into her purse. They took her to an exam room next and a nurse, intern, resident, attending, and oncology fellow streamed in and out, conferring in loud voices outside the curtain.

It was almost noon when Dr. Patel arrived, wearing a pink golf shirt and jeans and slightly out of breath. Ruth began to cry then. She was on an IV and had an oxygen canula in her nose. The soft whirr of the gas entering her body and the beeping of the monitors filled her ears. Dr. Patel took her hand. “It’s scary, I know. But you’re OK, Ruth. You’re OK. All that Advil you were taking for the stress headaches got to your stomach, that’s all.” His lilting accent always distracted Ruth a little from the news he was delivering.

“Where’s Ronny?” he asked.

Janet held up her cell phone. “Hunting,” she said tensely.

Dr. Patel frowned slightly. “We need to admit you for observation tonight, Ruth. But this doesn’t change anything. The chemo’s working. We’re going to beat this.” Ruth nodded, too tired to ask any questions. Janet stared at her phone, as if sheer will might summon Ronny back to civilization.

Hours later, Ruth lay in a bed on the 8th floor of the hospital. The Durham sky was dark outside her window. The unit was chaotic with the sounds of the night shift. Nurses’ voices drifted in from the hall. A patient called out that she had to pee. A local anchorman narrated the day’s news on her sleeping roommate’s TV. Janet was in a chair next to the bed, wearing scrubs that a nurse had loaned her to replace her bloody clothes.

Ronny was finally on his way, tearing down I-40 with a dead buck tied into the back of his truck, calling Janet every five minutes for updates. The plane she might have taken would have landed in San Francisco already. Three thousand miles away, Peter would be getting ready for the ceremony. Any last bit of hope he’d been holding onto would have been extinguished by now. She could see him blinking a few times and shaking his head, as if adjusting to the concept that he was now fully severed from his family. This was not true, but she knew he would see it that way.

She had been certain they would be a different kind of family. The kind that lives a few miles apart and celebrates every holiday, birthday and graduation together. But they weren’t.

After almost forty years of marriage, even Ronny could still surprise her. There were places in him that she’d never find her way to. Peter had been born three months before Ronny got home from his final tour. Janet and her mother had coached her through labor and Janet had moved in with her for those first few months. They’d all driven down to Fort Bragg to meet Ronny’s flight from Dover. He’d kissed her first, and had later told her that they’d reminded his platoon to greet their wives before their kids, not to screw up this one simple thing. They—Ruth, her parents, Janet, Ronny’s father—had stood in a circle around him on the steamy black tarmac, forming a shield as he knelt down on his knees and cradled Peter to his chest for the first time. It was only when he’d taken Peter into his arms that he had started to cry.