My younger brother, Jamie, is twenty-nine and has Down syndrome.
After our mother died, I became the person he called when the bus route changed, when his paycheck looked wrong, or when he wanted someone to taste the soup he’d learned to make. He worked four mornings a week at a garden center and had been counting the days until my daughter was born.
My wife, Claire, never gave him a chance.
The first time Jamie asked to hold Sophie, Claire pulled the baby against her chest.
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Claire, he’s held babies before.”
“And if he squeezes too hard? Drops her? Gets excited and forgets she isn’t a doll? I’m not experimenting with my daughter.”
Jamie heard every word and quietly put his hands in his pockets.
After that, Claire found new reasons to keep him away. If he reached toward Sophie’s stroller, she moved it. If he brought a toy, she wiped it down before giving it to the baby.
Once, when Jamie offered to give Sophie a bottle, Claire laughed.
“I already have one baby to watch. I’m not supervising you, too.”
I told her that was cruel.
She shrugged. “You can pretend he’s capable of everything because he’s your brother. I have to be realistic.”
The worst came during Sophie’s first family photo.
Jamie wore the blue shirt our mother bought him before she died.
Claire looked at the photographer.
“Can we get one with just the immediate family?”
Jamie blinked. “I am immediate family.”
Claire sighed. “I just want one normal picture.”
His smile disappeared.
After that, Jamie stopped asking to hold Sophie. He only brought her little gifts from his paycheck and waved from across the room.
One rainy Saturday, he stayed for dinner. The roads were dangerous, so I told him to sleep in the guest room.
At 2:13 a.m., Sophie’s scream exploded through the baby monitor.
Then came a thud.
Claire and I ran barefoot toward Sophie’s nursery.
“Jamie!” she screamed. “Get away from her!”
The nursery door was half open.
The crib was empty.
Jamie was on the floor beside the crib.
His hands were shaking.
Sophie lay on the rug in front of him, frighteningly quiet after that awful scream.
Something small was clenched in Jamie’s fist.
Claire’s hand flew to her mouth.
“Oh my God…”
I rushed toward them.
Jamie suddenly looked up.
“Don’t pick her up yet.”
I stopped.
“Jamie… what happened?”
His face had gone completely pale.
“Call 911.”
PART 2
Jamie’s fist opened, very slowly, and I saw what he had been holding.
A tiny black plastic bead, the size of a pea, still wet.
“She was blue, Ben,” he said. His voice was shaking, but it didn’t stop. “Her eyes were open and she wasn’t making any noise. So I counted. Like the teacher said.”
Claire made a sound I had never heard from her. I dropped to my knees on the rug beside my daughter, my hands hovering, afraid to touch her, and I saw what Jamie had already seen. Sophie was on her side, her cheek against the carpet, her small chest rising and falling in quick, uneven, wonderful breaths. Her lips were pink. Her eyes, wet and startled, were looking straight at the ceiling.
“She’s breathing,” I whispered.
“I put her on her side,” Jamie said. “That’s what you do. You put her on her side, and you don’t pick her up, and you wait for the ambulance. Even if she’s okay. Because sometimes they’re not.”
I had my phone in my hand. I don’t remember dialing. A calm voice on the line asked for the address, and I heard myself reciting it, as if I were speaking from underwater.
Sirens reached the end of our street in six minutes. Two paramedics came up the stairs with a bag and a small orange case, a broad-shouldered woman named Rosa and a younger man named Mike. Rosa knelt beside my daughter, checked her airway, her color, her pulse, and glanced at Jamie.
“Who did this?” she asked. “The back blows?”
“Me,” said Jamie.
“What did you do?”
He swallowed. “Five back blows. Heel of the hand, between the shoulder blades. Then I turned her over and did five with two fingers on her chest. Then it came out. It was a bead from her bunny. The eye.” He held out the small black bead in his open palm. “I counted out loud. I’m not supposed to panic. You’re supposed to count.”
Rosa looked at him for a very long moment.
“Who taught you?”
Jamie reached into the back pocket of his pajama pants. He drew out a worn brown leather wallet, the one our mother had given him on his eighteenth birthday, and removed a small laminated card. He handed it to Rosa with both hands, like a man presenting credentials.
American Red Cross. Infant and Child CPR/First Aid. Issued to: James M. Whitaker. Completed March 12.
I stared at it. March 12 was three months ago, the Tuesday after Jamie had asked to hold Sophie for the second time, and Claire had said no.
“I took the class at the community center,” Jamie said, looking at the floor. “I paid for it. It was forty dollars. I practiced on a doll. I wanted to be ready, in case.” He glanced, very briefly, at his sister-in-law. “I didn’t tell anybody. Because Claire said I wasn’t allowed.”
Claire had sunk down against the wall beside the crib, with both hands pressed over her mouth. She was shaking. Her eyes were fixed on the little black bead in Rosa’s gloved fingers.
Neither of us said a word.
PART 3
Sophie was seen at the pediatric emergency department at 3:04 a.m. A doctor named Lena Park, small, brisk, tired, examined her thoroughly, listened to her lungs, and ordered a chest X-ray as a precaution. The pictures came back clear.
“She’s going to be fine,” Dr. Park said, gently, to the three of us gathered in the corridor outside the exam room. “No injuries, no aspiration. Because someone got that bead out within seconds, and put her in the right position afterward, we have no complications.” She looked at Jamie, who sat on a plastic chair at the end of the row, in his rumpled pajamas and rain boots, with his hands folded in his lap. “Honestly, in my experience, it’s the difference between this conversation and a very different one.”
Jamie stared at his boots.
“Thank you,” Claire whispered.
Dr. Park nodded and left.
For a long time, none of us moved. It was 4:10 in the morning. Outside the window, the rain had stopped, and the first gray light was spreading slowly over the parking lot. Down the hall, a vending machine hummed.
Claire got up. She walked down the row of plastic chairs and sat beside my brother. She did not look at him. She looked at her hands.
“Jamie,” she said, in a thin, cracked voice. “I called you unpredictable.”
“It’s okay,” said Jamie.
“It’s not okay.”
“I wasn’t mad.” He glanced sideways at her. His face was open and puzzled. “I was sad. I just wanted to hold her.”
Claire’s shoulders began to shake.
“I had a sister,” she said. I had never heard this. In seven years of marriage, I had never heard it. “Emma. She was fourteen months old. I was nine, and my mother asked me to watch her for ten minutes, and I went to get a juice box. She was in her high chair. She’d gotten hold of a grape.”
The corridor was silent.
“She died in the ambulance,” Claire whispered. “My mother never blamed me. She never said a word. But I’ve been afraid for thirty years. Not of you, Jamie. Of me. Of being the one who couldn’t stop it.” She pressed her palms against her eyes. “And I took it out on you, because you were easier to be afraid of. Because you couldn’t say no.”
Jamie was quiet for a very long moment.
Then he reached out, with enormous care, and patted her arm.
“I could’ve said no,” he said. “But I didn’t want to be rude.”
She laughed, a short, wet, broken sound, and then she was crying in earnest, with her face against his shoulder. My brother held very still, as if he were afraid of startling her, and then, awkwardly, wrapped his arms around her.
I sat at the end of the row with my hands over my face.
PART 4
They kept Sophie for observation until noon. When Claire and I carried her out through the sliding doors into the pale, rinsed light of morning, my brother walked a half step behind us with his hands in his pockets, and I realized that for the first time in eight months, he was not waiting to be asked.
“Jamie,” Claire said, at the car. She was holding Sophie against her chest, the baby’s face tucked against her neck. She hesitated, then held her out. “Would you like to hold her?”
He didn’t move. He stared at his niece, and then at his sister-in-law, and I watched his face change in a series of small, careful stages, like a man testing ice.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He took her as if she were made of glass. Sophie opened her gray-blue eyes, looked up at him, and, for the first time in her short life, smiled at someone other than her parents.
“Hi, Sophie,” Jamie whispered. “I’m your uncle Jamie.”
I turned away and pretended to look for the car keys.
The next three months were different. Claire, to her enormous credit, did not apologize once and then go quiet. She attended a counseling group for parents of children lost to accidents. She wrote my brother a long handwritten letter and left it, folded, in his lunch bag. She made him a standing Wednesday invitation to stay for dinner, and on the first Wednesday, she set out an extra place at the table and asked him to say grace.
Jamie became, within a month, Sophie’s favorite person in the world.
Sophie’s first birthday party was held in our backyard on a bright Saturday in June, with balloons, paper streamers, and a cake in the shape of a bunny. Claire’s mother, Patricia, a tall, silver-haired woman who had flown in from Phoenix, arrived at noon with a gift bag and an expression of polite, careful reserve.
I found her in the kitchen, after the guests had gathered.
“Ben,” she said, quietly. “I’d like a word. About Jamie.”
“What about him?”
“I’ve heard what happened,” she said. “And I’m grateful. Truly. But I think we should be sensible. A child that age needs consistency. I’d feel more comfortable if he weren’t left alone with her.”
I opened my mouth. Before I could speak, I heard footsteps behind me.
“Mom,” said Claire.
She stood in the doorway in her yellow sundress, holding Sophie on her hip. She was very pale.
The photographer, a young woman named Tess, whom we had hired for the afternoon, appeared behind her, holding a camera. “Mrs. Whitaker?” she said, gently. “We’re ready for the family photo. Do you want just the immediate family?”
Everyone in the kitchen went still. Patricia’s eyes flicked to Jamie, standing at the edge of the patio, in the blue shirt our mother had given him, with a paper party hat on his head.
Claire looked at her mother. Then at the photographer. Then at the baby in her arms.
PART 5
“Yes,” Claire said. “Just the immediate family.”
Patricia’s shoulders relaxed, a tiny, satisfied movement.
“So that’s me, Ben, Sophie,” Claire said, in a clear, ringing voice that carried across the patio. “And Jamie. Jamie, would you come stand beside me? You’re going to hold her.”
My brother, across the lawn, went completely still. The paper party hat slid slightly sideways on his head.
“Me?” he said.
“You,” said Claire.
He crossed the grass slowly, as though afraid he might be mistaken. When he reached us, Claire placed Sophie into his arms, and stepped back, and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Mom,” she said, without turning around. “I love you. But Jamie is Sophie’s uncle, and her family, and the reason she’s alive. If you can’t stand next to him for one photograph, you can wait on the porch.”
Patricia opened her mouth. I watched thirty years of private, quiet fear cross her face, followed, slowly, by something I had never seen on it before: an unguarded, startled recognition.
“Claire,” she began.
“He saved her life, Mom,” Claire said. Her voice broke. “He did what I couldn’t have.”
Nobody spoke. Down the lawn, a bee drifted lazily through the hydrangeas.
Patricia crossed the patio, very slowly, and stood in front of my brother. She was seventy-two, formidable, in a navy linen dress and pearls. She looked at him for a long moment.
“Jamie,” she said. “I owe you an apology.”
“It’s okay,” said Jamie. “Do you want to hold her?”
My mother-in-law’s eyes filled with tears. She nodded, and Jamie, with great solemnity, shifted Sophie gently into her arms.
Tess took the photograph. It’s on our mantel now. Claire is on one side, laughing, with her head tilted toward my brother’s shoulder. I am on the other. In the middle, in a blue shirt and a lopsided paper party hat, my brother stands with his niece in his arms, beaming, with a smile so huge and so entirely unguarded that I can’t look at it without my eyes stinging.
Jamie received a certificate of recognition from the city council that autumn. He wore the blue shirt. He stood at the podium for exactly forty seconds, adjusted the microphone, and said, in his slow, careful voice: “I took a class. It cost forty dollars. You should take one, too.”
The audience gave him a standing ovation.
He babysits for us every other Friday now. Claire pays him, at his insistence, and he has a laminated card in his wallet, refreshed every year, that reads Certified. He teaches Sophie the names of the plants in the garden center. He makes her soup, which she refuses to eat and adores.
On a winter morning, when Sophie was eighteen months old, I walked into the nursery to find her standing in her crib, one hand on the rail, jabbering at the doorway, where my brother stood with a coffee in one hand and a stuffed bunny in the other.
She pointed at him and said, in a high, clear, triumphant voice, the first word she ever spoke:
“Jay!”
Jamie dropped the coffee.
