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Park the Shark was not soft.
He’d been all bite, all teeth, for as long as he could remember. As the oldest of four boys, he had an impossible-to-curb attitude that was the bane of his mother’s and brothers’ existences since 1984. Any attempt to soften him had been futile once his father encouraged the attitude, most likely because he was the exact same way, and definitely because it amused him. Because of that, Park was very certain everyone came out the way they were destined to be, once they figured out how to stop squealing and writhing their way through life. Many never did.
Park was the sort of man who thrived on dominance, and good for him. The best fuck you in the world was being the best at everything he touched, and that feeling harmonized with two moments that still made him smile to himself: his father’s reluctant satisfaction when he strode across the stage, first his medical school class, and his mother’s shock when she found out there existed a woman willing to marry her then-thirty-eight-year-old eldest son.
Nature, nurture—it didn’t matter. People were all made up of blood, sinew, bone, and viscera. Personality, like everything else, was drawn from a genetic deck of cards. His was one that was never shaken and always focused. Sometimes, he did the shaking. Because he was bored. Because he had earned the right to do so.
On a summer morning, he was the only one in the ER’s Trauma 2 unaffected when he wedged his blaring pager phone between his cheek and his shoulder, then barked, “What?”
The ER doctors each eyed him silently before proceeding with the chest tube he needed in place before he could tackle this crushed shoulder and menagerie of cracked ribs in his OR suite upstairs. He’d been summoned for a consult, but he didn’t trust the cowboys not to find an unseen shard of bone and knock it through the heart, so he decided supervising was preferable to a malpractice suit.
“Alright,” he’d said before the nurse on the other end finished her piece.
He slid the phone back into his scrub pants’ pocket and began rolling his gloves off.
“Uh— Didn’t you want to supervise?” asked the exhausted-looking, rabbit-like intern.
Park ignored him and took three long strides to the other side of the room, where he dropped his gloves in the trash. “Get this upstairs. Walsh will take over.”
He heard the shuffle behind him, but he couldn’t care less; he was already out the door.
“Get me her chart,” Brendon demanded of the green-looking OB nurse as soon as he strode into the correct room, “and turn off the fucking lights.”
“Dr. Park?” The nurse gaped at him, and he didn’t dignify that with a reply. They wouldn't have let her graduate nursing school if she couldn't read, and while this wasn’t his department, it was his hospital, and he had a massive fucking attending surgeon badge on his chest. He simply took her place at the computer once she toddled away from it, its screen filled with the chart belonging to the woman in the bed against the wall.
The lights dimmed around him, sunlight taking over for fluorescents while he scanned, took in, evaluated. The woman murmured, and he glanced at her; her affect looked exactly like the epidural had just been administered, the relief beginning but nowhere near as instant as she wanted.
Having one, for the record, hadn’t even been a discussion. “You’re shitting me,” she’d laughed at her OB, cursing in the firm, yet saccharine way only she could. “No one needs to be a hero about a natural birth.”
“Brendon’s downstairs,” she thinly complained to the doula sitting beside her. The doula gave her a soft smile before she looked over at Brendon, at whom she did not smile. He didn't reciprocate those, didn’t find it worth the energy to encourage anyone, ever, and he respected that she didn’t bother wasting his time or hers with such a useless thing.
Brendon assumed it was the hundredth time she’d heard the same thing, and that the tone had been begging before tears and pain had rubbed a slender, fragile throat raw.
He jerked a singular nod.
“He’s right here, Mariah.”
Lashes fluttered open atop deep brown eyes that were hazy with her exhaustion, and Mariah’s chest lifted with a shallow breath. Then, she looked Brendon’s way and smiled in the way only she had ever offered him. “God, you’re slow.”
Seeing her eyes’ typical fire dulled to nothing more than a match’s flicker, Brendon decided he was the only one capable of shouldering the rest of this. His baby was about to tear this woman’s body in half. Headfirst, sticky, and screaming, she was going to push, force, and rip, spilling her mother’s blood and wrecking the only perfect woman he’d ever known from the inside out—and in the name of what? Being alive? In a world like this?
Her, a deeply buried, shadowed part of his brain filled in. Of course. Any child of his would be so selfish when it came to knowing this woman’s love.
The doula stood and switched with him, whispering something about getting ice chips, bottled water, and Brendon’s street clothes before she slipped out the door. At first, he didn’t sit; towering over her gave him a surgeon’s view, even though she wasn’t going to need one, and even though he’d never birthed a baby before. He wasn’t going to be birthing this one, either, but he had eight-and-a-half months’ warning to refamiliarize himself with the medical side of this while Mariah told him all about what real gentle parenting was, how pretty much everyone did it wrong, and how the two of them were going to get it just right.
An expression with warmth he didn’t deserve turned toward him, framed with threads of near-black hair that slipped free from the knot crushed against the pillow. She was flushed from her temples to where the hospital gown swooped, off-center, across her collarbone; it was too big for her, and Brendon registered the atrocity of offering a woman so vulnerable an immodesty like this.
Her eyes closed, and she nestled her cheek against the pillow. The epidural had begun to hit in earnest. “My water broke.”
Her chart said as much. With that and the contractions, odds were high they’d have a newborn by dinnertime. “I saw.”
She shifted in a futile attempt to give herself comfort. One by one, he glanced at every line attached to her, then resisted the urge to snap at her not to displace anything. “I just came here instead of calling you. Elizabeth drove—I should have called you on the way.”
He’d need to have a bottle of wine delivered to his wife’s best friend. Mariah liked crossing her Ts, so she would want to send a thank you, but she always focused on the wrong things and put herself last. He’d remove the distraction before she could think of it. “Good. You’re a terrible driver when you’re not in labor. Don’t make me imagine how bad you’d be when you are.”
She looked like she was about to laugh, but her nose wrinkled. Contraction. He grabbed her hand as it floated up, before she could panic while she grasped for him, and slowly sank to sit at her eye level.
That turned him, for forty-five seconds, into a shushing version of himself he had never met before. He closed his eyes, lowered his forehead to touch hers, and modeled breathing for her while he counted the seconds. The OB would want to know how long each contraction was.
Once it passed, his heart was firmly lodged in his throat because this was one thing he could neither break in order to fix, nor suture back together for her. None the wiser to her husband’s singular incompetence, she melted with a sigh. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. The apologies she was so quick with never merited a reply, although he knew she would never learn. Stubborn woman. He pressed a kiss he knew would calm her against her forehead, since she would need every ounce of her wits and strength to get through the next hour, then five, then ten.
Around hers, his hand clenched just enough that she wouldn’t notice. If only he could take her pain in his hands and snap it in half. Crack its neck so completely that its grasp on her went slack and sloughed right off. Slice the muscle away so it had nothing left to smother her with.
People were all made up of blood, sinew, bone, and viscera.
This one was perfect.
Ten fingers, ten toes, shrieking, and warm. She was a perfect collection of still-forming and still-fusing bone, of tiny organs wrapped up in the most fragile skin he’d ever run his fingers over. It occurred to him that he should be wearing gloves, that she was too delicate for hands that were as broad and decisive as these ones that dissected and stitched. He never handled babies. Ever.
But this one belonged to him. This one relied on him. This one demanded that her father get his shit together. Until about twenty minutes ago, he was convinced he already did. It was the only thing he could recall ever being wrong about: he hadn’t been ready.
She was a burst, a flash of life so full and bright that even Brendon could hardly wrap his head around how she was barely seven pounds.
Did she know, he wondered, how completely he belonged to her?
The OB invited him to listen to her breathing and heart himself. Her secret smile betrayed how she seemed to think she was doing him a favor in a, “ha-ha, I figured out something I can lord over Shark,” way, but he was too focused on the squirming little creature who looked just like his wife to care. She had her eyes, her nose, her mouth, and—at least for now—her stature. She certainly had her spirit. She had her lungs, if just-born crying could be compared to chewing him out after he said something sharper than she felt like tolerating. Good. The baby was nothing like him.
It would be the greatest thing he’d ever done, orgasming in the right spot to give the world a second one of her.
Mariah would kill him if she ever heard him say that, but the thought made him feel like a god.
Brendon had dealt with a reasonable amount of concerned spouses and parents in ortho, but he was newly enlightened about the genre of family members who thought they could tear him a new one after he just saved their loved one’s life and limb. Limbs. Plural. Being a father to a helpless, barely alive creature and the husband to a wife with visible threads holding her together was like being handed a dull scalpel and told to carve out a fast-spreading infection. From bone. From the marrow. There was desperation in him he wasn’t used to, a strong feeling that he could trust no one but himself in an imaginary race against a self-imposed clock.
He’d declined his daughter’s first bath. He’d declined to hold her. He’d signed the birth certificate once the doula filled it out. He’d snapped at the baby nurse, “Stop wasting my time. She needs her mother.”
His out-of-it wife laughed the entire time, giggling into the glass straw cup filled with electrolyte powder, sparkling water, and cranberry juice. The doula called it a “mommy mocktail.” Brendon thought that was stupid until he saw the relief on Mariah’s face when it was placed in her hand.
Her breath was slow to catch in the way it was for anyone coming out of surgery while awake. Brendon watched her face and noted every time she opened her mouth and closed it again. Sometimes, it was as if she wanted to say something but didn’t know what, and others were merely gaping as if she were reminding herself how her jaw worked. Her eyes flitted around the room as if she hadn’t really seen it until this moment. She touched her chest with her knuckles—feeling her heartbeat, her serrated breaths while both lost their edges—before running her hand over her front, over the belly that no longer held a baby.
He orbited closer to her, his whole world narrowed down to five-feet-even of woman and a swaddle of blankets. He reached for her cheek, slid his ring and pinky finger toward the soft underside of her jaw, and angled her head toward him. With her chin in the solid cup of his palm, he turned her face left, then right, then skimmed his thumb over her bottom lip.
The right words were in him, somewhere, but they were buried under scars, blisters, and calluses too old and solid to burn through. What he thought he should say squeezed at his throat, choking him: no, wrong, those things never, ever come out of your mouth. She won’t believe you. You won’t believe yourself.
(Mariah immediately knew what he did not: the words would come, only after he got both her and the baby home, where there was endless calm of their own making and no audience for a quarter-mile.)
He kissed her. The bite of medication that lingered on her tongue barely masked the sourness of dehydration. There was a whisper of fake sour-sweetness, too, but none of these things mattered as much as the way she relaxed into him: muscle that trembled as it uncoiled, slowly trusting that her body was safe and there was no sign of danger near.
“Can I hold her?” she whispered.
“Of course you can,” he, not the doctor in charge, replied.
The last thing the doula did before she told them to text if they needed anything was help Mariah wiggle out of the top of her gown and lay the baby on her breast. Breastfeeding was a whole other story, Brendon was aware, but his wife looked so pleased to have the baby in her arms that he’d gladly put himself in between her and anyone who thought it was a good idea to cut this moment short.
“Hi. Oh my god, hi, baby. You’re here,” she whispered. Only Brendon was close enough to catch the words meant for his daughter, and he felt like an intruder for hearing them. While she squirmed, then settled, cooing all the while, the baby looked far less fragile in Mariah’s arms than she had in his own. The thought of his hands being wrong for something, for either of them, made him go still with dissatisfaction, and his jaw worked while he puzzled out how, exactly, he was supposed to fix that.
“Bren,” Mariah murmured, demanding his attention. Her head angled down to run her nose left and right over the baby’s downy dark hair while said baby, eyes closed and mouth open, curled into her chest. “I would kill someone for a bagel right now.”
Leaning against the wall so he wouldn’t pace the room, he shook his head, mouth twitching. “You can’t threaten murder in a hospital.”
Her eyes flicked up. “Says you.”
Chin inclined, he challenged, “Do it and see what happens to you.”
“Do you promise to bust me out of jail?”
He pretended to consider that. “If I can fit it in.”
Breathlessly, she laughed. “I’m serious. I’ve only had ice chips and half a cranberry juice.”
“I thought you wanted sushi.” They’d talked—she talked, he listened despite pretending not to—about everything she wasn’t allowed to eat and desperately wanted to in her first month of motherhood. Sushi topped her list, along with champagne.
After he changed out of scrubs, before the baby was officially here, he looked through her bag, and his ridiculous, hilarious wife actually did remember to pack the bottle of Dom Pérignon they’d been saving. Even while she was in labor days ahead of her due date. She’d always been the sort of woman who, when she said she wanted something, meant she would make it happen her damn self.
If she just settled down every once in a while, he’d do whatever she wanted for her. Anything she asked for. Everything she didn’t. Hence, the joy and novelty of trying to outsmart her whims before she knew what they were.
He’d just keep the spare, backup champagne in his car hidden until her first Mother’s Day, at which point he’d look like a hero.
She hummed. “Just order both.”
“Together? You’ll make yourself sick.” He dropped into the chair beside her, Dunkin’ app open and DoorDash not far behind, because he really felt like he was going to crash. Ordering her a bagel meant he could get himself four shots over ice.
“No, I won’t. It’s like a bagel with lox.”
“I can get you a bagel with lox.”
“I didn’t ask for a bagel with lox. I want a bagel and sushi. And champagne.”
Jesus Christ, he thought. He was so in love with her, she could demand that he get on his knees and let her put a fucking leash on him, and he’d do it. “Yes, your highness.”
The baby gurgled. Mariah looked down and cooed. The combination caused a lapse in Brendon’s efficiency, and something disorientingly unfamiliar turned in his chest. It was slippery and odd, like he couldn’t get a grip on— on himself.
He cleared his throat and set his phone aside. “Twenty minutes.”
Mariah nodded, and the evening silence filled the room like a cool, welcome fog. She’d been in active labor for only six hours, had no complications beyond the usual real-time puzzle of major surgery, and she looked like she knew exactly what she was doing with their newborn. He, on the other hand, memorized how many sutures she needed, the exact dosage of every medication she’d been given, and the sound of every complaint and empty threat she threw at him and promptly forgot.
He’d heard patients scream before. It was just a pain or fear response, and he was good at tuning it out, managing the root.
His wife screaming, on the other hand, was going to haunt him for the rest of his life. He’d been the root. When it came to managing himself, however, it was her who had him in hand, and he knew better than to do anything but let her. He recalled the time when he reminded her that she could stay home with the new baby if she wanted to. She'd laughed in his face. “I didn’t pass the bar just to have your babies. We’re getting an au pair.”
He’d just nodded and told the financial advisor to set aside $50,000 a year to pay the woman Mariah had chosen.
When she looked at him next, she was a vision of a woman it never occurred to him to imagine: pink-cheeked and soft, with a tired, teeming joy he’d never seen on anyone before, and like he was genuinely her most favorite person in the world.
“You should hold her,” she said.
His voice came out shell-shocked. “Any other demands?”
“Mhm.” Her eyes glittered, her fire returning like an incoming storm he was frozen, awestruck, in the path of. “Take your shirt off.”
She’d been looking forward to watching him do skin-to-skin with their baby ever since the positive pregnancy test. It didn’t hurt, having a wife who was shameless about how attracted to him she was.
He obeyed. Obviously.
When he took her from her mother, his daughter fussed. If it had occurred to him to have a thought at all, he would have reminded himself that he was not a nurturing man, that peds was his least favorite specialty to interact with, and that a crying baby never did anyone any good. If he were a baby, he would probably also scream at the sight of himself.
Instead, something else roared to the fore of his mind.
He sat down with his newborn kicking his ribs, gathered her frail shape high on his chest, and shifted his torso to softly bounce her. He watched that little face turn from contorted with the displeasure of being held by someone different to confusion about the fact that she didn’t hate what was happening to her, only to land on placid comfort once she decided this was acceptable. Once she was calm, Brendon was again struck by the sensation of how strongly she reminded him of her mother, the only other person who ever looked content against his chest.
Her genetics were working hard, then, in their family’s deck of cards.
Beside him, Mariah laid back down, gown lazily pulled back in place and the desire to sleep veiling her expression. He glanced at her—noticing her noticing him—and caught her watching the baby coo and cuddle against his chest.
When she realized he was watching her back, she looked up and smiled. “Talk to her. She knows your voice.”
There came the squeezing feeling in his chest, again. “And where did you get your medical degree?”
“Park University School of Secondhand Medicine.”
He snorted.
“Brendon.” Her voice had gentled. “She gets one dad. You get to decide what he’s like.”
“Please,” he retorted without any teeth. His attention dropped to the baby, again, while he tried to make sense of every new thing about her. About Mariah. About himself. It was a whirl, a puzzle—nothing he couldn’t handle, and yet the most moving thing he’d ever done. “It’s not that noble.”
If she was right, and he suspected that she was, that meant he might have been wrong.
At least he was capable of admitting it wasn’t the first time.
(Mariah would wonder, always, what he whispered to the baby in that moment. Her husband was the least sentimental man she knew, as far as words were concerned, but he was also the one who taught her that “I love you” could be said in a million unspoken languages, and as many different times a day.)