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He just stared at her. Then he fixed the blanket, looked closely at the base of her spine, and said in a flat, cold voice: “I am sorry, but I cannot take her home.” For a moment, I felt as though everything around me went dead silent. Melissa stopped crying and demanded to know what the hell he meant. But Ryan refused to look at either of us. He just pointed at a small, coin-sized reddish mark right above her lower back, a classic sign of spina bifida, shoved the baby back into my arms, and walked out of the room, turning his back on us and heading straight for the exit. I was still hooked up to monitors, completely exhausted, trying to hold the newborn while my sister-in-law spiraled into a full-blown panic attack.
For the next three days, I was furious. I took the baby home and tried to calm Melissa down, convinced that my brother was just a heartless coward who couldn’t handle a medical challenge.
But when Ryan showed up at my kitchen door three days later, looking like he was walking to his own execution, I didn’t hesitate to give him a piece of my mind. And what he told me had nothing to do with our baby’s back. It was something infinitely worse.
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It turned out that around the time the first trimester came around, Ryan was fired from his job. He thought it wasn’t a big deal, because he could always land another job, but things didn’t go as smoothly as planned, and he got stuck between lying to his wife and spending his days looking for whatever job he could find.
While he did that, the bills piled up. He drained three credit cards just for setting up the nursery and paying for every doctor’s visit.
When the doctors in the delivery room began tossing around words like “surgery,” “specialist,” and “therapy,” Ryan didn’t see his infant daughter. All he saw was another massive bill he had no way of paying. Paralyzed by the fear of admitting his failure as a breadwinner and drowning in debt, Ryan had cynically used his newborn’s medical condition as a cheap excuse to walk away.
