Chapter 2 - The Identification of the Mark
Dr. Wright was the senior attending physician for the obstetric wing—a man whose reputation among the residency staff was based on a specific type of cold, procedural inertia. He had been at St. Jude for twenty-four years; the younger nurses claimed he hadn't raised his voice since the hospital integration of 1999, and his hands were so steady that he could perform a low-transverse cesarean section during a facility power failure without altering his respiratory rate. He was sixty-two, with a high, narrow forehead and a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses that hung from a black silk cord around his neck.
"Let’s see the placenta presentation, Martha," he said as he stepped up to the foot of the gurney. His voice was a dry, academic baritone that had no room for the festive, high-pitched chatter that usually follows a successful delivery in a public ward.
He pulled his spectacles up to his eyes, checked the three-page paper chart that was clipped to the rail of the infant incubator, and then turned toward the bassinet where Martha had just laid the boy to check his APGAR score.
The baby had turned his head to the left, away from the glare of the overhead surgical lamps. The wet hair on his scalp had begun to dry under the radiant heater, the individual strands separating into a fine, dark fringe that lay flat against the pink skin of his temple.
Directly above his right ear, starting from the hairline and curving down toward the edge of his cheekbone in a perfect, half-inch crescent, was a narrow streak of hair that was completely white. It wasn't the dull gray of an administrative oversight or the pale blond of an albino trait; it was a brilliant, silver-white that looked like a line of liquid solder had been dropped onto the dark wool of his head.
Dr. Wright stopped moving.
His right hand, which had been reaching for the silver stethoscope in his breast pocket, froze in the air two inches above his buttons. The paper medical chart slid from his left fingers, the aluminum backing striking the linoleum floor with a sharp, echoing clang that made the junior resident near the sink jump back against the counter.
"Doctor?" Martha asked, her hand stopping on the baby’s umbilical clamp.
Dr. Wright didn't look at her. His face had gone from the ruddy, scrubbed pink of a senior clinician to a flat, chalky yellow that made the veins around his temples look like blue threads under the skin. His mouth opened slightly, his breath coming in a short, whistling gasp that sounded as though he had just been struck in the solar plexus by a heavy weight.
He stepped closer to the bassinet, his fingers trembling so violently that he had to grip the chrome edge of the tray to keep his balance. He bent down until his eyes were three inches from the baby’s temple, his gaze locked onto that silver crescent with a wild, unblinking intensity that looked like a man looking into an open grave.
"Doctor Wright?" the junior resident asked, moving around the side of the bed. "Are you experiencing a syncopal episode? Do you need an EKG?"
"The father," Dr. Wright whispered. His voice didn't sound like his own; it was thin, cracked, and carry the dry, hollow resonance of an old reed instrument that had been left in an attic for twenty winters. He didn't look at the resident; he looked down at me, his eyes wide and wet behind his gold frames. "What did you say the father’s name was, young lady?"
My chest tightened, the iron hoop around my pelvis returning with a cold, residual ache that had nothing to do with the labor. I pulled the blue blanket closer to my chin, my fingers catching on the coarse weave of the hospital cotton.
"Logan," I said, my voice barely reaching the desk level. "Logan Wright."
The monitor beside the bed continued its rhythmic, low-frequency beep—sixty-eight beats per minute, regular sinus rhythm—but the room itself seemed to drop into a deep, sub-zero silence where the only active sound was the small, wet rattle of the baby’s breathing in the plastic tray.
Dr. Wright’s hands came away from the bassinet edge. He reached up, took his glasses off his nose with a single, jerked motion that snapped the silk cord on the right side, and dropped them into the wastebasket beside the linen hamper without looking down.
"How long have you known him?" he asked. He was standing directly over me now, his white coat smelling of starch and cedar wood, his shadow covering the entire upper half of my gurney.
"Almost three years," I said. "We lived on Harrison Avenue. Near the old brewery."
"And where is he today?"
I looked toward the empty vinyl chair near the door—the one where the other fathers left their coats and their half-empty cups of machine coffee. "He left in November. The night I showed him the test. He said a baby wouldn't trap him."
Dr. Wright closed his eyes. Two large, heavy tears broke from his lower lids and ran down the deep, vertical lines of his cheeks, disappearing into the gray hair of his mustache before he could raise his sleeve to wipe them away. When he opened his eyes again, the wet, terrified expression was gone, replaced by a cold, gray clarity that looked like the winter ice on the Potomac.
"That white streak," he said, pointing a single, steady finger at the baby’s head. "That is not a mutation, Miss Lin. That is a genetic anomaly called poliosis, and it has run through my late wife’s family since the family settled in the valley in 1840. She had it. Her brothers had it. And Logan had it when he was delivered in this very wing twenty-eight years ago."
I felt the bed beneath me tilt, the green linoleum floorboards rising up to meet the ceiling until my brain couldn't tell which way the water was running in the pipes.
"You know him?" I whispered.
Dr. Wright reached into the left pocket of his white coat, pulled out his heavy brass identification badge—the one with the blue seal of the Commonwealth’s medical board—and laid it flat on the sheet near my hand.
May you like
Robert L. Wright, MD. Chief of Obstetrics.
"Logan is my son," he said.
