Chapter 4 - The Ghost in the PlasterThe photograph was sixteen by twenty inches, framed in oxidized silver that Claire had found in an antique shop in the Marais during their third anniversary trip to Paris.

It had been taken four years ago, on the rocky bluffs above Lake Superior, six weeks before the first ultrasound showed four distinct gestational sacs.

Claire was wearing an oversized Irish fisherman’s sweater that had belonged to her father, her dark auburn hair whipped across her face by the northern wind, laughing into the lens with her head tilted back, her arms crossed over her ribs as if she were trying to hold all the cold blue air of the north country inside her lungs.

Ethan stood on the second-floor landing of the Lake Forest mansion, holding the heavy frame against his stomach.

The house was dark. It was 8:45 PM.

In the nursery down the west gallery, the four imported cribs stood in a precise semicircular formation beneath the hand-painted mural of an English woodland that Claire had hired an artist from the Art Institute to complete during her fourth month.

The room was silent, but it was the artificial, tense silence of an armed truce.

The two day-nannies he had retained—terrified of losing their severance, terrified of Ethan’s sudden appearances—had left at eight, leaving the four infants swaddled in their neutral gray organic cotton blankets, their bottles lined up on the marble prep station like ammunition on a firing line.

Ethan walked into the nursery.

The room smelled of hypoallergenic soap, sterile water, and the faint, cold scent of high-grade plaster.

He walked to the marble fireplace that had never been lit—the chimney had been sealed with an electronic damper to prevent particulate matter from entering the nursery’s micro-filtered air supply—and set the silver frame on the mantelpiece.

The silver caught the amber light of the baseboard LEDs.

Ethan stepped back three feet.

His lungs seized.

It was the first time he had looked directly at Claire’s face since the morning of the funeral, when they had opened the bronze casket in the church basement for forty seconds so he could place her grandmother’s pearl ring on her third finger.

In the photograph, her eyes were so bright, so violently alive, that it seemed impossible that the body that had housed them was currently twelve feet beneath the wet sod of Rosehill Cemetery.

“You should have waited,” Ethan whispered to the silver frame. His voice was cracked, ugly with the accumulated bile of ninety days of solitary confinement. “You knew the fourth sac was small. The perinatologist told you in May that the fourth sac was taking the blood from the placenta. He told you we could reduce. He told you the odds.”

Claire’s photographic smile didn't waver. She continued to laugh into the gray wind of Lake Superior, her hair flying across her eyes, stubborn and radiant and completely deaf to the mathematical terror that had governed his life since the day they met.

“They’re ours, Ethan,” she had said to him in the private suite at Prentice Women’s, her hands resting on the massive, taut curve of her belly while three IV pumps hummed around them. “You don’t get to value-engineer four human beings. We take all four, or we don’t deserve any of them.”

“And now you’re gone,” he said to the wall. “And I’m paying a cleaner from Berwyn to make sure they don't scream themselves to death.”

A floorboard creaked behind him.

Ethan turned his head.

Grace stood in the doorway. She had changed out of her daytime sweatpants into a pair of dark jeans and a fresh, plain black long-sleeved T-shirt. She carried her worn canvas tote and her stainless-steel thermos.

Behind her, standing in the shadows of the gallery, was a young man of twenty-four, broad-shouldered, with the distinct, soft features of trisomy-21, wearing a clean, pressed denim jacket and holding an old plastic lunchbox with both hands as if it were a ceremonial vessel.

“Toby,” Grace said softly, not looking back. “Wait on the bench by the stairs. Don't touch the bronze lamp.”

“Don't touch the lamp,” Toby repeated, his voice deep, thick, perfectly cheerful. He sat down on the velvet-upholstered bench in the hall, placed his lunchbox squarely between his sneakers, and began swinging his feet with a rhythmic, contented thud against the baseboard.

Grace stepped into the nursery. She looked at the mantelpiece.

She walked past Ethan without looking at him, stopped before the photograph, and reached out with one dry finger to adjust the angle of the frame by two degrees, so the face looked directly down toward the four cribs.

“She was pretty,” Grace said.

“She was stubborn,” Ethan replied, his hands jammed deep into his pockets.

“She’d have to be,” Grace said, turning around to face the semicircular arrangement of cribs. “To carry thirty-two weeks of quadruplets inside a five-foot-four frame without losing her mind.”

As if summoned by the sound of her voice, Jack began to stir in the third crib.

It started with that familiar, terrifying preliminary rustle—the tiny heels kicking against the organic mattress, the sharp, nasal snort of an infant whose airway was tightening, the sudden, rising whimper that Ethan had learned to dread more than a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Ethan’s shoulders hitched instantly. His hand reached toward the intercom button to summon the night supervisor.

Grace caught his wrist.

Her grip was astonishingly strong. Her fingers, hardened by fifteen years of wringing industrial mops and lifting eighty-pound laundry hampers, clamped around the tendons of his forearm like a carpenter’s vise.

“Don't,” she said.

“He’s starting,” Ethan whispered, his pulse spiking into his ears. “If Jack starts, Noah wakes up. Once Noah gets going, Lily will scream until she vomits. It takes two hours to settle them once the chain starts.”

“Let him start,” Grace said.

She didn't let go of his wrist. She held him there, three feet from the crib, forcing him to stand in the room while his son’s face turned from pale pink to dark crimson.

Jack’s mouth opened. The first cry tore through the filtered air of the nursery—a thin, reedy, furious wail that sounded like a shorebird caught in a net.

“Grace,” Ethan pleaded, the professional veneer stripping away completely, leaving only the raw, panicked boy who had watched the monitors turn red three months ago. “Pick him up.”

“No,” Grace said. She released his wrist and took one step back, leaning her hips against the cold marble of the mantelpiece, right beneath Claire’s silver frame. “You pick him up.”

Ethan went completely white. “I can't.”

“He’s your son, Ethan.”

“I’ll drop him,” Ethan choked out, his hands trembling violently as he held them out between them. “Look at my hands. Look at them! I haven't held him since the hospital. The nurses did the feedings. I held Lily once and she stopped breathing for forty seconds. They had to use the bag-valve mask on her.”

“She had an apnea of prematurity,” Grace said, her voice dropping into that low, flat, unsparing cadence that offered no shelter. “It had nothing to do with your hands. Pick him up, Ethan. Or let him scream until his hernia pops. But I am not touching that crib until you do.”

Jack’s wails were gathering volume now—sharp, rhythmic, furious bursts of sound that set Noah stirring in the next crib. Noah’s small fists were punching the air, his face screwing into a matching knot of protest.

“I can't,” Ethan whispered. A tear—hot, jagged, shameful—spilled over his lower lid and tracked down through the dark stubble of his cheek. “Grace... please.”

“You can,” she said. She didn't look at him with pity. She looked at him with the cold, absolute expectation of a master sergeant watching a recruit climb a rope over an abyss. “You built sixty-story towers over a swamp, Ethan. You can pick up six pounds of bone and spit.”

Jack let out a shriek that broke on the high note, his small back arching in a spasm of gastric agony.

Ethan moved.

He didn't think; he didn't calculate the biomechanics of the lift. He plunged his hands into the acrylic basin, his long, work-roughened fingers sliding under the small, hot curve of Jack’s ribs, his left palm supporting the wobbly base of the infant’s skull.

He lifted.

Jack felt weightless—terrifyingly, monstrously light, like an empty paper bag that might blow away if a window cracked open. The boy’s skin was slick with sweat, his cotton swaddle coming undone, his tiny legs kicking frantically against Ethan’s thumbs.

“Bring him to your neck,” Grace commanded from the mantel. She had not stepped forward. She had not reached out. “Don't hold him like a package. Put his ear against your throat. Let him feel your vocal cords.”

Ethan pulled the boy in.

His chin pressed into the wet down of Jack’s hair. The child was burning hot, screaming directly into the hollow of Ethan’s collarbone, his small, sharp fingernails scratching through Ethan’s linen shirt to dig into the muscle of his chest.

“He's not stopping,” Ethan gasped, his eyes wide with terror as Jack’s cries reached that high, breathless plateau that preceded a cyanotic spell. “Grace, he’s turning blue!”

“Talk to him,” Grace said.

“What?”

“Talk to him, damn it!” Grace’s voice cracked across the room like a whip. “Tell him who you are! Tell him where his mother went! Stop acting like a stranger in your own house!”

Ethan closed his eyes.

He fell to his knees on the thick wool nursery rug, his knees striking the floor with a dull, heavy thud that jarred his spine. He wrapped both arms around the tiny, arched form of his third son, burying his face in the boy’s neck, the smell of sour formula, baby oil, and Claire’s lingering genetic ghost filling his sinuses until he felt his ribs were going to split from the inside out.

“Jack,” Ethan sobbed.

The sound was not an executive speaking. It was the howl of a wolf that had crawled into an abandoned den.

“I’m here, Jack,” Ethan wept, his tears soaking into the boy’s hair, into the cotton of the swaddle, into the skin of his own wrists. “I’m here, baby. I’m sorry. I’m so damn sorry she didn't come home. I’m sorry I couldn't bring her back. I’m sorry I left you in the dark.”

The nursery went quiet.

Not instantly. Jack’s cries stuttered—one breath, two breaths, a ragged, wet hiccup that caught in his throat—and then the small, arched back softened.

The tiny fist that had been scratching Ethan’s collarbone uncurled, its damp palm coming to rest flat against Ethan’s jaw, warm and sticky and smelling of salt.

Jack let out a long, shuddering sigh, his cheek sliding down into the hollow of Ethan’s collarbone, his tiny mouth parting against Ethan’s skin.

Noah stopped stirring in the second crib.

Lily settled her head back against her sheet with a soft, nasal snort.

Sophie, across the room, didn't move at all.

Ethan stayed on his knees, his forehead pressed against the wooden slats of Jack’s crib, his breath hitching in his chest with the violent, ragged aftershocks of a dam that had finally broken after ninety days of rain.

Grace walked over to them.

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She did not touch Ethan’s shoulder. She did not offer a handkerchief. She simply knelt beside him on the rug, reached into the crib behind him, pulled out a spare cotton flannel blanket, and draped it over Ethan’s back and the sleeping infant in his arms.

“There,” Grace whispered. “Now you’re an anchor.”