Philadelphia
The exact moment Jorgenson saw for the first time that bloody, screaming little creature that was his daughter, he fell in love with her.
The doctor had just cleared her windpipe with a textbook tap, and everything went fine. No Caesarean section, no unexpected happenings: the birth was perfect and Mary was now lying pale in her bed, her hair al black and sweaty, but she was smiling.
“It’s a girl – said the doctor – and she is perfectly fine”
Jorgenson burst into tears like a child, he was laughing and crying at the same time, while he continued to shift from one foot to the other, in some kind of weird dance, while the doctor passed the newborn to her mother and he looked at them both.
“They are both very fine, mister Jorgenson. You should calm down. Everything's fine”
Virginia Jorgenson, just born, had a large head, her eyes closed and screamed like someone had just skinned her alive.
But once clean, dried and wrapped inside some white blankets she calmed down, and the way she looked around was simply gorgeous.
“My darling...” he said
“My dear” replied Mary, looking at her husband.
He came close to her and went to lean is forehead over the sweaty one of his wife. Then the two smiled at each other, one lowered over the head of the other, while the new-born baby cried between their arms.
“My dear” she said again.
Jorgenson was now crying.
A cry with no sobs, as if just his eyes were crying, not really him. He petted his wife's cheeks with both his hands and stayed just like that, staring into her eyes motionless.
Oswald – Jorgenson's uncle – had stayed back until then, on the room's doorstep. Then he softly asked the doctor if he could take a picture with his camera.
“Of course” the doctor said, and he stood aside.
Oswald took three pictures, but Jorgenson and his wife didn't notice a thing.
The creature Jorgenson didn't even have the courage to touch looked like some kind of miracle in his eyes, or witchcraft.
The blood tie had just taken him over with unbelievable power.
For that new-born baby girl he would have killed the whole world, if necessary, and for his wife probably even worse.
The power of his feelings at the time was completely inexplicable to him.
With the Fifth Special Forces pay and SOG too, the kind of life waiting for them was going to be a fairly good one. This way, they were going to be able to afford to buy a house for themselves, and she could stop working.
And most of all, his daughter was going to have a proper childhood, and with no help from her mother's parents.
A real life, and their own one.
Not like the one I had - Jorgenson thought, without really wanting to think such a kind of thought Not like the childhood I had inside my father's sawmill.
Jorgenson was then overwhelmed by a turmoil of painful feelings and memories, and let himself completely go.
He wept loudly this time.
Then he dried his tears with the back of his hand, while inside himself he talked to his daughter.
You are not going to have the kind of childhood I had, my love. You are going to have a proper mother and father, not like the ones I had, Johnny had.
You are going to be happy, my sweetheart.
Our love will make you strong, serene and happy.
That's a promise... You are going to be better than me.
I love you, Virginia Jorgenson.
I love you more than anything else in world.