Audio: Matthew Klam reads.
In the morning, the blinds let in light. I lay on a recliner against the wall, with my coat wrapped around my head, and heard the nurse pump the blood-pressure thing. I’d set up a barrier, a towel hanging over the back of a chair, for privacy. I’d been reclining here, listening to ice blow against the window, since about four. Kathy sat up in bed, looking pale, with blue lips and a puffy face. She was still on morphine and seemed serene and angelic.
Another nurse walked in, pushing a cart, and wanted to know if she’d felt milk coming out. Kathy stiffly undid her robe and both her hands trembled and I saw the funny webbed bandage across her belly. It was sort of threatening and serious and a little sickening, but I was so happy I didn’t care. I got up then. My pants were open. I shut them.
The second nurse wheeled the cart to the edge of the bed. She wore red lipstick and hoop earrings, and had her hair in a tight bun that stood straight up on her head like a bowling pin. She stepped back to let the first nurse, who was older, explain the breast-pumping machine. The older nurse was tall but stooped, and wore a short-sleeved blouse with kittens on it.
Kathy’s breasts looked full. She put the cups up to her boobs and the machine started sucking. There was nothing. Then the first drop of milk, bright yellow, dribbled down into the bottle. “Oh, my God,” Kathy said. “I’m a fountain.” Then another drop. The dairy had come in. What we needed now was a baby.
The baby had come—two months before her due date—after a late-night run to the emergency room, where it became clear that, for some reason, Kathy was in labor. We’d planned on spring, the beautiful explosion of April, the full, ready, ripened flowering, but it was February, and she’d been having contractions, undiagnosed, for two days, and then it was two o’clock in the morning and snowing like crazy, and she’s lying there in our bed at home, moaning. I suggested the possible psychosomatic reasons for her pain, urging her to reflect on any anxiety that could be causing it. But when she called the E.R. the doctor was alarmed.
We put on our boots and got in the car and plowed across Western Ave. in silence, the only ones on the road, shocked at the sight of it—street signs half buried and fences swamped in drifts, each spindly vein of every branch articulated in gloppy white, and more coming down. The airport was closed, power lines bowed in swooping arcs, almost to the ground, and we held ourselves steady, a little dumbstruck, passing stuck city buses and evergreen boughs lying broken in the street, and finally spun up the hill toward a glowing “Emergency” sign, under a great overhanging deck, and a tall security guard in a rabbit-fur helmet took Kathy inside while I parked.
The E.R. nurse seemed alarmed, too, and called an emergency-labor specialist, and they tried over the next few hours to get it to stop but couldn’t. And the baby was facing forward, which was wrong, and was breech, also wrong, appearing onscreen with her hands and feet pushed against the front of her bubble as if she were driving a truck. A new doctor appeared, an older man, an expert in premature birth, who looked out the window and clapped his hands and said, “There goes my golf game.” He was worried that the cord might suffocate her, and that once he got her out her lungs might not work, or, after those first breaths, other things, even at this venerable gestational age of thirty-three weeks. He said the name of something, then told you what it meant; nothing was too dark or devastating to divulge—brain hemorrhaging and colon perforations and invading bacteria, rips in the insulation around her nerves. And, as she grew, it might be months, or years, before we knew the whole story—a higher incidence of cerebral palsy, mental retardation. It had begun wrong and now the wrongness would never end.
After some hours of labor, they tested the oxygen level in the baby’s blood to see how she was doing. During the worst parts, Kathy attacked the wall with her claws. In between contractions, it got quieter, because there was nothing left to say. I’d jog to the nurses’ station, to complain for her, stopping on the elevated pedestrian bridge where the ancient, red-sweatered volunteer ladies looked out over the hospital grounds, cataloguing the snowfall with immense concentration. They were trapped, too. We agonized over how much weight the roof could take.
Then the doctor did another test and suddenly new faces rushed into the room and put Kathy on a gurney while she signed papers.
I saw it all, the seven layers of skin and tissue, the yellowish fat, the muscle wall, the wall of the uterus, the blood. I hadn’t known what to expect, so when the baby emerged, blue, screaming like a maniac, it was whatever I’d been feeling plus relief, ratcheted all the way up. Her lungs worked, she appeared to have all her parts, and they took her away. Kathy gave me a crimped smile, just a head behind a sheet, flying high on morphine.
Out in the hall, I didn’t think about the night before, as the quiet of a cool, gleaming hospital at dawn helped me push those feelings far away. Instead, I thought of the T-shirt I’d thrown on back home in the dark, which said “Donald Trump,” with “Fuck” in smaller script above it. A new mother walked toward me from the nursery, the lady from the room next to ours, haggard in her big pink nightgown, pushing her baby in front of her. The baby, a day old, lay flat in an open tray, and looked gigantic, ten or twenty pounds, at least. It was as long as a tuba and its face was pinkish white and its cheeks rested on its shoulders. No veins on its head, its skin wasn’t mottled, it didn’t have a wrinkled, wizened, thoughtful grimace. It looked sturdy enough to be drinking a glass of gin. I’d seen the grandparents the night before, trim and tanned in matching V-neck sweaters, celebrating. The new father, as luck would have it, had been moping around with a full-length cast on one leg, the moron, but now the mother was alone. Her belly was still large, and she walked by, head down, with an exhausted, shell-shocked, stumbling gait.
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On the seventh floor, I scrubbed to my elbows and entered the sanctity of the nicu. The baby was sleeping in a plastic case, on her side, wrapped in a blanket, machines bleeping and whooping around her—breathing on her own, with the monitors above her. The apparatus around my kid, the oxygen tube in her nose, the crooked little hat on her head, her wormy pallor scared me. Behind me, two big men in soccer jerseys came through the door and crowded the nurses’ station. In the corner, a young doctor with a shaved head and a young doctor with a three-day beard stood chuckling, their arms folded.
The first time I saw her, she was the size of a lemon, fourteen weeks old, swimming and slithering in magnified staticky grays. As the technician slid the thing across Kathy’s belly, the parts ballooned, dissolved, flowed together like mercury. “Bladder, kidney, thigh bone,” she said, as she captured their images and checked them off on a list. A black circle for the stomach, a foot, the arm bones, two tiny rows of what appeared to be teeth, curved into a smile—the spine. But the woman couldn’t find the nasal bone or the heart. The baby was positioned so that her skull cast a shadow. The O.B. entered the room and frowned; the photos were no good. Then Kathy pressed her fingertips into her side, and for a second I saw the baby’s four-chambered heart, blood moving in a trapezoid, like the ocean patterns around North America.
Kathy’s pregnancy ushered in a new period of mystery, and was as unstoppable as the time that came before it, the months that stretched into years of hoping and trying and failing to make a baby.
We’d met as housemates, over the breakfast table, and, in the first endearing sign, sought approval for other lovers, her guy in the white leather jacket with fringes, my scowling Teamster lawyer. Kathy worked in neuro P.T., with people who’d injured their brains, and she was some years from having a doctorate. She was blond, Lutheran, selfish, thin, and Nordic. She watched violent cop shows at night, identifying (I assume) with the victim. Every so often, she knocked on my door at bedtime, looking overheated and bloodshot, and sat on my bed on a crying jag.
Her father died when she was a kid, and an older brother was killed in a car accident. Kathy’s mom, in a state of dissociation from her remaining children, moved out to the beach with a new boyfriend, dropping off groceries once a week for Kathy and her younger siblings back home. Kathy’s own brushes with death soon followed, on the backs of motorcycles, in cars that rolled. She was, understandably, braced for disaster. She’d been traumatized by her calamities and had a low tolerance for suffering. Or high—I couldn’t figure out which.
After the second miscarriage, we became intolerant of people who were pregnant or had small kids, and of people with their own health problems, and of people who did or said anything that got in the way of their boisterous commiseration with our struggle. Eventually, there was just my old friend David, now wealthy from developing shopping centers, and another barren couple, Tom and Jessica, and my office buddy, Maria, a loud, unashamed Greek woman who looked like Fred Flintstone and told hilarious stories of her one-night stands, and Kathy’s Watergate hairdresser, Amistad, and his shiny boyfriend, Rick.
At some point, when it wasn’t going so hot, I went to South Carolina to write a report for the coalition I worked for, on liquor-store employees who slip on wet floors, fall on their own guns, and shoot themselves. I left home again for a bulletin on the rights of undocumented immigrants being harmed in industrial settings; it would be part of a booklet we’d wave at Congress when our bill came up, and ship to news bureaus in our expensively illustrated year-end portfolio. I met a man who’d been crushed in an accident at an engine-casting factory near the Ontario border, which the insurance people refused to cover, then I spent two weeks at the factory where he’d been crushed, sitting at a card table by a two-story stamping machine, freezing my ass off. At night, I’d relax at the dining-room table in my bed-and-breakfast and talk with the proprietor, sipping her rum, thankful to have this work that was so removed from reality.
Back home, there were blighted starts and an ectopic pregnancy. We took a break from trying, and rode our bicycles together, and sat by the river in Georgetown and chatted. “I guess I’ve got a couple of good follicles,” Kathy explained, and so we started again. She had appointments and things to inject herself with. “You should jerk off today so we can do it Friday, F.Y.I.”
We were forced to apply all kinds of porn to the problem.
“Do you think any of them are attractive?” she asked.
“Santa’s helper.”
She didn’t lay a hand on me when we did it anymore, and afterward I was sorry to have to put her through this insemination. When we weren’t conducting our marital affairs, I was cordial. As a couple, we were finished, though still copulating. Between the dirty footage and the dregs of hope, the furtive inelegance of our biological necessity, we stayed in business.
That summer, I travelled to a liquefied-natural-gas ship in the Gulf of Mexico, and when I came home there was nothing left to fix, nothing left to want, and I sat shaking like a coward. But she had news. Then she was ten weeks pregnant, and twelve. . . .
We got the chance to leave our history behind, transcend our suffering through a whole new language, one without freighted insults, and threats to end things or to bankrupt the other and cut off his dick. We traded old problems for new ones as the pregnancy blossomed into another kind of misery that I could only witness: an acid stomach at the end of her first trimester, so powerful she had to sleep practically standing against a wall; mysterious pains that shot down her legs, an agony that drove her, crippled and pantsless, into sobbing pleas for Vicodin. She became clumsy, forgetful, and fun. We were both a little amazed, and she ate like a crocodile, and laughed at her belly, and her anguish gave me traction. That she held my DNA mattered, and I caught myself staring dreamily, and smooched her for no reason, and sniffed her hair, and did her laundry, and anytime I heard her in the other room, breathing hard as she attempted to put on her shoes, a nameless euphoria overtook me. Something was happening to her, for our sake, and she became more, somehow—more willing, more sturdy, tenderly accepting of whatever I did to comfort her. At last, it wasn’t her fault, and it wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t the kid’s fault. The kid was invisible, though unapologetic and a little cruel, considering. We’d have a baby soon, it would be as simple as that; it wouldn’t be anybody else’s, although I had no idea what it would be.
The nurse appeared, holding a bottle of formula the size of a tube of lipstick, and asked if I wanted to do the feeding. Before I could start, we had to do the diaper. Before that, I had to put on a gown. The nurse opened the hatches of the isolette and I reached in. A green plastic splint was taped to the baby’s right arm to hold it flat for the shunts of her I.V.s. There were five very thin wires stuck to her chest with sticky pads, and one thicker wire taped to her ankle, and the wires draped down to the floor and then up to a monitor above her. I had to dodge all those to get the diaper on my kid, as her body wilted in my hands. The top parts and the bottom parts didn’t seem connected. The middle was the droopiest. And then she began to wail, a faint, crackly sound, thrashing weakly, and kept going and wouldn’t stop, because I was standing on the wires, ripping them off her skin. The alarm blasted, signalling heart failure. It was the same bone-jangling shriek that comes out of a fire alarm. Another nurse appeared, but mine waved her off, pressed a button to stop it, and then helped lift the wires out of the way.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s all right.”
The baby seemed to be sleeping again.
“There’s poo on her foot,” the nurse said. “And you’ve got the diaper on backward.”
The diaper had a picture of Baby Elmo on the front. I had to pull the tabs to the edge of the picture.
Then the nurse slid a U-shaped pillow around my waist and tightened the strap and I wore it like a guy selling peanuts at the ballpark. She showed me how to keep the baby upright with one hand, bottle in the other, one finger of that hand pressed up under the baby’s chin, to remind her to suck. I did that. She started eating like crazy.
In order to eat, a kid needed to suck, swallow, and breathe at once, but the brain wasn’t wired for that until it was fully cooked. In this case, that was two months away. So with possible choking and asphyxiation looming, the idea now was to not kill her. I had to hunch about ten feet over to see what I was doing. I got a crick in my neck. She needed to eat every two hours, or things would spiral down from here and a new plan would go into effect. She’d been doing O.K. so far.
“What a cutie,” said a woman in a rocking chair a few feet away, holding her baby. It was the first compliment. It was such a lie that it hurt to hear. My kid was purple and scrunched and writhing, with a crabby look on her face like that of a guy on line at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
“Thanks.” I felt ridiculous. “She’s a little bug.”
A man leaned over the woman’s shoulder. “Well, now,” he said. He also held a kid, wrapped tight. He swung it around in the crook of his arm like a salami.
“I’m Lizzie,” the woman said in a high-pitched voice, waving her baby’s hand. “What’s your name?”
“I don’t know.” My kid didn’t have a name yet.
They’d been in the nicu for eight weeks. They had twins, a boy and a girl. Until today, the boy had been across the hall in an even more intensive intensive care. They explained how to read the monitors, and pointed out the stash of sticky pads for the wires, and told me how much this place cost a day, and laughed because they couldn’t pay for it and their parents were dead. The woman was short and svelte with dark eyes, and the guy was tall, bald, and heavyish, and looked like a hippopotamus. As they laughed, the boy baby’s breathing dipped onscreen. When the number turned red, the woman stood and killed the siren as the dad waved a wand in front of the kid’s nose, casually, as if he were misting a fern.
“That’s apnea,” the dad said. “That’s normal. It’s what we all do—we stop breathing between breaths.”And it was especially normal in infants, he said, and even more in preemies.
The twins had been born three months early, barely a pound each, and had been put on ventilators, feeding tubes, the works. “One kid across the hall didn’t make it,” he said calmly. “But this guy’s tough. He’s a liver.” The boy had already had surgery twice, “to get a valve clipped,” whatever that meant, and for a blood-vessel malformation in his back, and the woman said he had an infinitesimal chance of brain damage.
While my kid drank her bottle, her little sea-monkey hands fluttered beneath her bib. When I let my finger roam away from under her chin, she slacked off and lost interest. I kept it tight against her.
Whenever I saw another baby struggle, I felt relieved, and I’d stare up at the big monitor with my kid’s oxygen level. My kid was in better shape than that one, although she was on some of the same drugs, so there was a feeling of camaraderie, but also of competition. By the end of that first day, or the next day, or the day after that, I could tell by the amount of equipment around an incubator what kind of shape a kid was in. When a new kid arrived, with, like, two hundred feeding tubes, I couldn’t look, but I’d assess anyway, hourly, making trips past the new people to count their baby’s toes or explain how to read the monitors.
The woman put the girl back in her case, and, as she changed her diaper, she squeaked down at her, “Who’s got nasty pants?,” touching the girl’s nose. “Do you want your Pooh Bear? Do you want your kitty?” she asked, and sang “Kookaburra.” The girl’s name was drawn on colored paper, stuck on the wall above the monitors, decorated with silver stars.
The dad weighed the boy and put him back in his case, then he picked up a backpack, looking scared.
“Did you just do that?” the woman asked.
“What are we talking about?”
“Where do you think you’re going?”
He waved his fingers at the twins. “Bye-bye. I’m late.”
“I love this crud,” the woman said, alone now, washing the skin beneath her daughter’s chin. “This is my favorite part.”
When the woman left, I sat there for a while with my kid sleeping on me. The hat on her head was bending her ear. A flake of skin sat on her eyelid. I rested her on my shoulder and guarded her head from falling back. Her whole body fit in my hand and pulled down my shirt like a soaking-wet corsage. She didn’t seem small to me, except when I compared her with something. Her forearm, for instance, was the size of my thumb. Then she sneezed. It was identical to a real sneeze, but on a smaller scale. And now she had hiccups. She wouldn’t stop making noises. Her head smelled like an apple. “I have dirty pants!” I said to her. Then she grabbed her hat and shoved it to one side. Goddam hat!
The nurse came and took the baby from me—time to put her back in the case—and stepped aside for a doctor, who stood behind my chair, a distinguished-looking man I hadn’t met before. He had a lengthy title embroidered on his coat and about sixteen pens in his breast pocket, and was tanned and bald with platinum wisps. He put his hand on my shoulder and walked me away from the incubators to some place between the nurses’ station and the security doors.
“Your daughter had an EKG this morning,” he said. “She also had a sonogram on her heart.”
He held a small pad with a simple drawing of a heart on it. “This is a gap between the right and left atria. It’s an abnormality.” He drew the abnormality with his pen. He told me the medical name for it. And then I noticed that the next piece of paper in the pad also had a sketch of a heart—it was an entire pad of preprinted hearts. “And here is the pulmonary artery. And here is a partial blockage of the artery.”
I held my chin very tightly with one hand, as though I were here only for his benefit. We were standing outside the nicu now, by the sink. People in street clothes rinsed their hands without looking.
The opening went between the two upper chambers. “It’s supposed to close in the womb.”
“So it’s not closed?”
“No.”
“Why is that?” Orderlies came past, their I.D. badges swinging, their voices full of life.
“We don’t know why that is.” He drew the blockage now, explaining the development of babies with normal hearts. He was exquisitely sincere and informative. What would I do when I went in there again, and saw her sleeping in her box, smirking in her dreams beneath her jaunty cap?
“So you go in there and fix it?”
“No. Not that.”
“I see.”
“We don’t operate on either of these things.”
“Why don’t you operate on it?”
“We don’t even track it.”
“You don’t track it?”
“No.”
I didn’t know what I’d just asked him, and I didn’t know what he was saying back to me. “What?”
“It closes up eventually. It fixes itself.”
He wanted to leave now, so he put a medical form in front of me and I signed it. He gave me some more exact and elucidating percentages, and said she’d outgrow it in six months. “One in a million doesn’t close right. The rest of them are fine.”
“Great!”
“Fine.” He wanted his pen back.
“How about one in a billion?!” I was so relieved now that I patted him on the shoulder, as if to congratulate him, which he visibly hated.
Back inside the nicu, I stood beside her, holding the little sketch of her heart, shaking with gratitude, maybe, as the nurse redid the splint, shunts, and tubes with bright white tape.
“CUTE, HUH?” I noticed I was screaming. “Who’s the little gumdrop?”
We stood there. I waited to see her fall into a peaceful slumber, although she was kind of wriggling, thrashing, trying to sleep, half crying between hiccups. There were blips on the monitor, and I knew exactly what each one meant. I studied her chart, the list of antibiotics, and somehow the word “caffeine.”
“You’re giving her caffeine? Like in coffee?”
“It’s a very safe, very small amount.” She was the day-shift nurse in charge, a young, dark-haired woman with geographically interesting lips, chapped and full, and a terrific nose, with wide nostrils. “There are very few side effects.” Her nose was challenging me to look inside it. I turned back to my writhing kid.
“What’s it for?”
“It reminds them to breathe.”
“Or else they stop breathing?”
She said that there was information on the new parents’ bulletin board. I felt the temperature rising in my face. For ten years, I drank coffee. Every morning, I’d drink it, two cups, black, then go through the roof and crash by eleven, with a headache and diarrhea for the rest of the day. At night, I was so agitated I couldn’t sleep, so exhausted I wanted to cry, lying there trying to get some rest.
“I wonder,” I said. “I can’t drink coffee.”
“I drink too much,” she said.
“It took me a long time to quit,” I said.
“I take heart medication,” she said, “because I have a heart palpitation, and I shouldn’t drink more than half a cup, and I still can’t resist those chocolate-covered espresso beans. And if I eat too many of them it’s, like, ‘Ugh, I’m dying!’ ”
“I know,” I said. We stood there. I asked when the next feeding would be, and dumped my gown into the laundry pail and went over to the bulletin board, but I couldn’t see anything except warnings about fluoride and shaking. I walked out. I had nothing to do for two hours. It was almost 7 a.m.
Luckily, a soda machine sat right there in the nicu waiting area. I bought a Coke, what the hell, and stared across the hall through the windows of the more intensive intensive care. A man in a blue blazer sat in a rocking chair by a stack of machines, with a blanket on his lap. My eyes blurred and I felt dizzy. A Russian-sounding family had taken all the seats in the waiting area, three long-haired women, a balding man, a teen-ager with a mustache, and a little kid on the floor, so I rested there for a moment by the elevators on what I came to see was a helicopter-ready baby life-support gurney, with shiny alloy struts and screaming-yellow waterproof monitors, resuscitators, and a defibrillator. Holy fuck, but also thank God. I threw my empty Coke can in the pail under the gurney and took the stairs down to the cafeteria, in the basement.
Food servers with loose condoms on their heads stood behind a steam table draped with garlands of plastic fruit. Across the cafeteria, a red-faced guy in a necktie chewed in a trance; a garage attendant leafed through a heap of newspapers. At this end of the room, an elderly man in a lab coat with the large head of a New Hampshire politician avidly drew some kind of diagram for the young couple across the table. He seemed to be outlining a jailbreak.
I had two cups of coffee, a stack of pancakes, bacon, eggs, and a bran muffin. Two surgeons in their timeless pajamas wandered by with trays. The coffee made my feet sweat, and I took off my shoes and then my socks. Chewing, eating, I was alive! Then I put them back on and ran up six flights of stairs.
I opened the door to Kathy’s room and sat lightly on the edge of her bed, careful not to crush her injuries. She’d slipped down a foot or so from where I’d left her, with the things still on her bosoms and the TV on in the dark. She looked washed out, bluish, and greasy. Her I.V. was beeping.
“She has your mouth,” I said.
“That’s nice.”
“And your long, elegant feet.”
“Aww.” Kathy gazed at me. She was more relaxed than I’d ever seen her. The breast-pumping machine huffed beside her. Yellowish liquid drizzled into the bottles. It amounted to almost nothing.
I asked how she was feeling. She said the epidural hadn’t worn off yet and she couldn’t move her legs.
On the table next to her head was a handwritten list of baby stuff. I wrote down the brand name of a type of baby bottle the nurse said worked for preemies. Beneath that, I wrote the date and time of the baby’s birth, and the weather. The last thing Kathy had written was “hats and booties in cheerful colors,” and my eyes welled up. What else did we need?
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” I folded the paper and put it away. “We’ve already got a lot of this coming from my brother.”
She let her arm drop, and her head fell back as she lay there immobile, sighing. “When the baby gets out, I’m hiring a night nurse. You can pay for that.”
I reached over and held a suction cup in place. The door banged open and a nurse came in.
Kathy grabbed the remote. “God, Darryl, how do I change the channel?”
The nurse gauged Kathy’s post-op pain, gave her some Demerol, and left a bowl of vanilla ice cream.
Kathy reached for the ice cream, and I held both suction cups in place while she ate. Her breasts were as firm and round as the end of a baseball bat. She pulled the spoon out of her mouth, ice cream half eaten, and slid it back in. She was not herself. Normally, if I listened carefully, I could hear a sound coming out of her head like a humming refrigerator. Now there was nothing. It was the drugs, or the new sensations taking over, or the relief of knowing that the baby was safe. I put my shoulder on the pillow next to her and leaned my head back.
“Were you sleeping somewhere?”
“I was up in the nicu, I told you. I gave her a bottle.”
She looked at me strangely. “Did something go wrong?”
“You mean with me?”
“Upstairs.”
“I haven’t slept in two days.” I kept forgetting Kathy hadn’t seen the baby yet, except for this Polaroid taped to the bed rail.
She picked up the remote again and pointed it at the TV. “You’re very magnificent,” she said calmly. On the screen, a famous singer was singing outdoors somewhere with a new haircut. “Were the nurses helpful?”
“Amazing.”
“And you burped her when you finished?”
I said yes.
“And they weighed the poop?”
“Yes.”
“What color was it?”
“Green.”
“I just need a minute now with nobody inside me for once. Do you know what I mean? I need to have nobody in me or on me for a minute.”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Does that make me a terrible mother?”
I said no.
“I’m still sad I wasn’t there. There are mothers who think the nicu is a day-care center. I’m not going to just lie here and let them do everything.”
I was relieved to hear her say that. I’d hoped that she’d be a great mother, but I’d worried that she’d be a terrible mother, and I was looking for signs that she’d get off on the right foot.
“What’s it like up there?”
“It’s fine. I was just in the cafeteria, which is nice, although you wouldn’t want those people running the nicu.”
“Anyway, I’m glad you were there.”
“I’m good with children.”
“It’s so important for a girl to have a good relationship with her father.”
“Let me write that down.”
“You’ll be spending a lot more time with her than you thought.”
“I have nine business days off, counting today.”
“I hope that’s O.K. with you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Once I can walk, I’ll do everything.”
“I’ve already factored in bonding with my own kid, F.Y.I.” I stood and pushed the recliner back in place and straightened the blinds.
She explained how the brain developed, with neurons, specific ones, that were created when the father was around. “The presence of the biological father delays the onset of puberty. Having the father in close proximity.”
“If we break up now, she turns into a slut.”
“If we stay together, she can learn the clarinet.”
I threw away newspapers and Styrofoam takeout boxes with old Caesar salad falling out of them, and slid the garbage can out into the hall. Then Kathy put in her earrings and I went down the hall and got a wheelchair.
We made our way to the elevator, Kathy holding her I.V. pole, me pushing the wheelchair. In the nicu, the nurses introduced themselves, moved furniture, rolled her up to the incubator, and put the baby in her arms. The neonatologist, a little round woman, arrived. “You can start breast-feeding any time you’re ready,” she said. “She might go for it.”
“They said I could wait until tomorrow.”
“Why don’t you give it a try?”
Kathy opened her robe. The baby slid into her armpit. She grabbed her left breast and aimed it, as a nurse took hold of the baby’s shoulders and pushed her closer, and the neonatologist forced the baby’s chin down, to open her mouth. Already, it wasn’t like on TV. Kathy landed her nipple near the baby’s lips. The baby was asleep. Also, her head was at the wrong angle and wouldn’t form a seal. The nurse turned the baby’s shoulders, and I held the lower part of the baby and lined it up, as the neonatologist rubbed a warm washcloth over the baby’s face to try to wake her. The baby woke for a second and moved her mouth, then passed out again. After a while, the neonatologist switched to a cold washcloth.
All we needed now was seven more people and we’d have enough for a hockey game.
“It isn’t working,” Kathy said finally.
Now what? We had to feed the baby what she was supposed to eat, every gram. Or we’d be stuck here, with a sickly kid on a feeding tube and a million drugs, not getting bigger, like Lizzie and her brother, in the next slot over.
I got some formula and shook it up and removed the baby from Kathy’s arms, then put the rubber nipple to the roof of her mouth and held her upright, one hand cupping her head, a finger firmly under her chin, and she began to suck terrifically. The baby’s tiny tomato face fell smushed against my thumb. Kathy sat there, her gaze going slack.
“Good job, good job,” I said.
Kathy watched me, slumping a little. The baby ate, panting between swallows. Then she dropped off, a line of milk dribbling down her chin, and I pushed the nipple against the roof of her mouth once more and held it there. I kept the finger tight against her chin. The bottle was almost empty.
She coughed. The siren screeched. How long did it take for the two nurses manning the nurses’ station to get out from behind it? I got to my feet and the breast-feeding pillow that had been around my waist fell to the ground. I took the bottle out of her mouth.
“Is that us?” Kathy asked. “Is that ours?”
I looked over the wires. The nurses stood on the other side of the cart. It was the kid next to us, Lizzie’s brother. Kathy was somehow standing, her robe still open, her tits not put away.
“Watch his head,” the nurse said.
“Come on, come on,” the other nurse said. I held my barf towel over my kid to shield her from the noise. The boy recovered and the number went back to green.
Afterward, the nurses turned to the monitors and conferred. They touched buttons and asked each other questions.
Then the first nurse stopped by and told us what to do if we heard our alarm. She read the record of apnea events on our chart, and showed us that our alarm had gone off an hour earlier, and twice the night before. I finished the feeding and wiped off the baby’s chin and we exited, in defeat, to wait by the elevator.
“Oh, my God.”
“They should’ve told us.”
We went back two hours later and fed her again.
We were out of our gourds. We didn’t know how much to worry. The baby was in there for two weeks. After a few days, they sent Kathy home to sleep, and we used the nicu like a day care, and at home I painted the little corner room, my former office, bright yellow, and threw out the old window shades. When we finally got the baby home, we brought the monitor, too, fourteen pounds, a shoulder-bag model, which we slept by and hauled around for the next month. In those days, we took pleasure in knowing that the people who pitied us were wrong. Our kid was like an old person living backward, dying a little less every day, trying to get up to zero. I slept downstairs with her, so Kathy could heal. In the morning, sunlight poured in, and the heat from the radiators made the curtains float. It was warm.
At first, anyway, having her home was its own triumph. It was almost easy. It was almost fun. When the alarm blasted, it was usually because the little sticky pads had come off, and I’d hold her and rock her and put her back to bed. Alone in the middle of the night, I discovered that, if I changed her diaper ahead of the feeding, she got so hungry she went nuts and ate too fast and puked. If I waited and changed her diaper after the feeding, she threw up from lying on her back.
At dawn, I was so relieved to see the sunrise, I’d stand beside her changing table, captivating her with show tunes, singing into her sock monkey as she stared up at me—“Oklahoma,” which she loved, and “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two,” from “Oliver!” This was before I figured out that if I hadn’t started belting out songs at 5 a.m. she might’ve gone back to sleep. This was before I accidentally brushed my teeth with diaper cream.
I learned to switch on the music box and drop softly to the floor and crawl out of the room, evenly distributing my weight to keep the floor from creaking. I learned to ignore her screams and cork off, with a long splash of barf down my back, gauging the screams in my sleep—the buzz saw, the blood curdler—before getting up again and heading back in there. By then, her crying seemed ordinary and vindictive. I remember how, on one of those nights, I fed her two bottles and burped and changed her and cleaned her barf, and it took an hour and a half, but I couldn’t soothe her, couldn’t sit in a chair, kept feeling myself sliding, slumping over, so I put her back in the crib, still wailing. I defied her, and put a pillow over me and dreamed about her screaming, and finally picked her up roughly and brought her, flailing, into bed. She came to rest about an inch from my face. I turned and that’s when I saw, with a shock, her eyes, as big as bocce balls, those puffy lips, how beautiful she was. I held and kissed her. She’d taken a break from screaming. I held her little cheeks and stared into her big brown eyes, and breathed while she breathed, telling her everything would be fine. In the morning, I found a blue bruise on her neck that I guess I’d given her the night before, but she’d already forgotten, or forgiven me. ♦
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