“She didn’t make it to the hospital,” I whispered.
“She held you for nine minutes,” my father said. “Then she was gone.”
I couldn’t speak.
“The hospital review said he did everything right,” my father went on. “Every single thing. It wasn’t his fault. It was a placental abruption. Nobody could have saved her on that road. But he came to the funeral. He stood in the back in his uniform, and he cried so hard, Cal. Harder than me. He couldn’t even look at me.” My father shook his head. “Two months later, I heard he’d quit. Walked away from the job. Never went back.”
My father opened the old leather briefcase on his lap. He took out a yellowed envelope. Sealed. Addressed in his younger handwriting.
To the paramedic who delivered my daughter.
“I wrote this the week after the funeral,” he said. “I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault. That he gave me you. I went to the station twice to give it to him. He’d already gone. I didn’t know where. And then life happened, and you happened, and it sat in my desk drawer for thirty-one years.”
