“It’s okay,” she whispered, kissing the side of his face. “You don’t have to talk about it.”
After a few moments, he pulled away and took a deep breath. “I wanna tell you about him.” He slipped his hand in hers, and she followed him out into the room with the pool table—the room with the photos.
“We named him Jordan,” he said, picking up the photo of the baby in the incubator from the mantel, and wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve. The tattoo on his shoulder suddenly made sense, and Ella felt guilty for being relieved over something like that at a moment like this. “Her entire pregnancy had been normal. I was there when he was born. Everything went fine. He was a perfect baby.” He stared at the photo for a while, lost in thought, and then he continued. “My mom and sister flew out the morning I called to tell them Shelley was in labor and in the hospital. Noah and Abel and the girls flew out later that day.” He smiled suddenly. It was a bittersweet smile, and he even let out a small laugh. “It was the happiest day of my life. They’d taken him away a few minutes after he was born, but they said it was just for routine testing. Then later the doctor came in and told us there was something wrong with his heart but they weren’t sure yet what it was.”
He told her how Abel and Noah had to leave the next day and how Hector had been on a chess tournament so he’d been the only one who hadn’t been there to meet Jordan when he was alive. No one thought it was that serious because the baby looked so normal and healthy. He wasn’t even attached to a bunch of tubes or anything yet. His mom and sister even left without much concern because his grandpa was having surgery in California the next day, but they promised they’d be back. The next day they’d had to hook baby Jordan to all the tubes and keep him in the incubator. That’s when things began to get scary.
“That’s when Gio arrived,” Felix continued. Ella squeezed Felix’s hand as he continued to stare at the photo, but she could see he was no longer looking at it. He was staring through it. “Things between Gio and me weren’t exactly one hundred percent yet, so the fact that he flew all the way out there just to meet my son meant a lot. At that point, the doctors had explained Jordan’s heart hadn’t fully developed on the left side. But they made it sound as though surgery could fix that. We even got to hold him a few times, and thank God Shelley thought to take pictures, because as much as hearing that my infant son was gonna have to have heart surgery scared the shit out of me, I never imagined . . .”
He stopped talking, and though he didn’t cry, Ella could see his Adam’s apple move as if he were swallowing back the emotion. Ella rubbed his shoulder, kissing his arm and trying desperately to be strong for him, but her own heart was breaking for him now too.
Felix cleared his throat, attempting to talk. He was able to, but Ella could hear the strain in his voice. “Gio stuck around longer than he’d originally planned to. When it became clear that this was more serious than they initially thought, he said he was staying longer. He was the only one there with us in the NICU the day the alarm on the machine went off and the nurses and doctors rushed in and whisked him away. I swear to God”—he stopped, pressing his lips together tightly for a moment—“it may as well have been my heart that stopped because that’s how it felt. We waited for an agonizing eternity, but it was actually only an hour that he was in emergency surgery. I was so scared,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Never in my life had I prayed so much and so hard.”
He set the photo down and then hugged her again tightly, inhaling deeply. He didn’t cry anymore, but just like when she’d held her brother the night he cried so bitterly about Sonia being raped, Ella could still feel Felix’s profound pain. He’d been carrying an ache around all this time. She wished she had the power to take all his hurt away, at the very least have the wisdom to say something that would lessen it. But she had nothing, so she continued to hold him silently.
When he was finally able to go on, they moved into the den where they sat down and she coaxed him into lying next to her with his head on her lap. She massaged his scalp gently as he told her about how the baby had died in surgery. Shelley’s family had all been there, but Gio had once again been the only one of Felix’s friends or family with him when they got the news and even held him when he’d cried like a baby.
He sat up suddenly, looking as drained as he sounded, and Ella could only imagine what it’d been like for him then. If just reliving it now brought on so much sorrow, she cringed to think what he’d gone through then. She didn’t think his story could get any more heartbreaking, but then he went on.
“Jordan’s death was something that bonded Shelley and me in a way that I thought could never break.” She saw how his expression went hard, and that’s when she knew she’d been right about there being more to his pain. “I knew as much as my family and friends hurt for me that no one else but Shelley knew exactly what I was feeling, and she said the same thing. We’d forever share the most horrific experience of our lives, losing our son. But we were both still in agreement that his short life and what he’d gone through would not play out in the tabloids, so we didn’t even give him my name. We filed everything under her mom’s maiden name—even the death certificate. That’s why there’s been little to nothing ever written about it. It’s how we both wanted it.”
Ella tried to get him to lie back down, but he’d gone from hurt and vulnerable to tense—almost mad. She settled for just holding his hand and rubbing her other hand over his as he continued, his tone going a bit hard.