My Brother Did a Silly Magic Trick for His Baby Girl, and Three Days Later We Were in the Children’s Hospital

It’s 3:12 in the morning and I’m on a fold-out chair that wasn’t built for anybody’s back, watching my big brother watch his daughter breathe.

Junie is fourteen months old. She has a tube taped to the back of her hand and a bandage across her tummy that’s longer than my finger. Desmond hasn’t took the yellow gown off since they brought her back from surgery. He just stands at the crib rail with one gloved hand resting on it, like if he lets go the whole room tips over.

There’s still a dried smear of applesauce on my sleeve from Sunday. I haven’t been home. I keep looking at it like it’s proof that Sunday was real, that she was in her high chair throwing applesauce at me and screaming laughing.

Sunday Tasha was working a double, so it was just Desmond, Junie and me at his place outside Dayton. He had this desk toy from his office Secret Santa, a little cube of shiny silver magnet balls. He was doing “magic” with them. Close the fist, open the fist, gone. Junie lost her mind every time. Which hand, Junie? Which hand?

His phone buzzed. Work. He set the magnets on the coffee table for maybe a minute. Maybe less.

Nobody counted them. Why would you count them.

She seemed fine Sunday night. Monday she threw up twice and wouldn’t eat. Tuesday morning the pediatrician looked at the X-ray for a long time without saying anything, and then she said a word I didn’t know, and then we were driving to the children’s hospital with Desmond in the back seat holding Junie’s foot because he couldn’t reach her hand.

Three magnets. They found each other inside her, through the walls of her intestine, and they held on.

My phone is on a cracked screen from March and Mom’s voicemail is full. She calls from Florida every hour and I can’t make myself pick up and say it again. Parking here is $14 a day. I counted quarters out of my wallet for the vending machine, four quarters and a dime, for peanut butter crackers Desmond won’t touch. They’re still on the windowsill.

Around 2 a.m. the surgeon came back, Dr. Feld, tired eyes over his mask. He didn’t say much. He leaned over the rail and touched Junie’s hand with one purple fingertip, and she grabbed it in her sleep. Desmond made a sound I never heard my brother make in thirty-four years.

It’s unreal. I keep saying it in my head and it doesnt get any less unreal. My big brother, the one who taught me to ride a bike, standing over his baby girl who is not okay, not even a little bit, and all of it because of a stupid game. A dumb little magic trick on a Sunday afternoon. I keep trying to make that fit and it won’t fit.

My back hurts from this chair and I don’t care. I can’t stop looking at his hands on that rail.

Tasha still thinks Junie found them on the floor.

Tasha came in at six with her badge still clipped to her scrubs and her hair half out of the bun. She’d driven straight from the end of her shift. She went to the crib first, of course she did, and she put her face close to Junie’s and whispered something I couldn’t hear.

Then she turned around to take her jacket off, and Desmond’s jacket was hanging on the same hook, and the empty plastic cube was sticking out of the pocket.

I watched her see it. I watched her understand it. It took maybe two seconds, and it was the longest two seconds of the whole week.

“Des,” she said. Just that.

My brother didn’t lie. I want to say that first because I was scared he would. He’d been carrying that lie since Tuesday like a rock in his throat, and I think he was almost relieved to put it down. He told her everything. The magic trick. The phone. The coffee table. One minute, maybe less. He didn’t make it smaller than it was. He didn’t say “accident” once.

Tasha didn’t yell. That was worse, honestly. She sat down on the edge of my fold-out chair and put both hands over her mouth and stayed like that. I got up and went to stand by the window because it wasn’t my moment to be in, and I picked up the peanut butter crackers just to have something to hold.

After a long time she said, “You should have told me Tuesday.”

“I know.”

“I’m a nurse, Des. I would have known what questions to ask. I would have been here.”

“I know.”

She didn’t forgive him right then. I’m not going to pretend she did. She got up and went to Junie and stayed on the far side of the crib, and he stayed on his side, and the crib was between them for most of that day.

Dr. Feld came in around ten for rounds. He looked at both of them and I think he read the room in about one second, because he talked slow and plain. The surgery went well. There were two small holes where the magnets had pinched the intestine together, and he’d repaired both. No infection so far. The next forty-eight hours would tell them most of what they needed to know. If she started eating and her belly stayed soft, she could go home in about a week.

Then he said something I wrote down in my phone afterwards so I wouldn’t forget it. He said he does this surgery more than people would believe, and almost every time there’s a parent in the room who thinks they’re the only one who ever looked away for a minute. He said, “You’re not. You’re just the one who’s here now.”

Tasha cried for the first time after he left. Desmond didn’t go to her. He waited. And after a while she reached across the crib rail, not all the way, just halfway, and left her hand there. He took it.

Thursday night Junie opened her eyes properly and was furious about the tube in her hand, which the nurses said was a great sign. Friday she had her first sips of clear liquid. Saturday, a few spoons of applesauce. Tasha fed her, and Junie grabbed the spoon and flung a little of it at her dad, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on the floor.

I finally went home Saturday night and put that sweatshirt in the wash. I almost didn’t want to.

They brought her home the following Wednesday. The first thing Desmond did, before he even took his shoes off, was go through the whole house with a flashlight on his hands and knees. Under the couch, under the radiators, in the cracks between the floorboards. He found one more magnet under the TV stand. He held it up and didn’t say anything, and Tasha just nodded, and he dropped it in a ziplock bag and drove it to the dump that same night. Not the trash can. The dump.

Then he called our cousin Nadia, who has twins, and then a guy from work who has a toddler, and then the woman who’d given him the desk toy in the Secret Santa, who cried on the phone. He wasn’t trying to make anyone feel bad. He just needed somebody else to know what he didn’t know.

Junie is running now. She has a thin pink line across her belly that Tasha calls her zipper. She’ll never remember any of it.

My brother will. I see him at birthday parties now, scanning every coffee table before he sits down.