Chapter 40: Never and Now

I: Faith: Never

Maria’s baby was born healthy, pink, and bellowing, eight pounds and fifteen ounces. He was so big that the Panamanian doctor made his nurses weigh him three times on two different scales. The name she gave him was predictable. It started with M.

“Meet Mario,” said a glowing Cooper, Mario swaddled to sleep in his arms. I watched Cooper stare at that sparkling new life, like it was the answer to some ageless mystery, but written in a language he could not read.

“She named him after herself,” said Zane.

“Not surprising,” I said. “But it wouldn’t have been surprising if she had named him ‘Miles’ or ‘Cooper.’”

“Neither ‘Miles’ nor ‘Cooper’ translates well into Spanish,” Cooper said.

“She might have named him ‘Kilometros,” Zane joked.

We were gathered in Zane’s hospital room where he was lying with his heavily-casted legs aloft.

“And where are Lauren and Walter?” asked Cooper.