CHAPTER TEN
Something huge was inserted into his tiny throat. A cord was implanted in his raw belly button. He was covered in white stickers. A net of cables and tubes was woven between him and many loud, beeping machines. There was hardly enough baby to accommodate all the things that had to go into him.
“Do you think they know?” Clee whispered from her wheelchair.
We were gripping each other’s hands between the folds of our white hospital gowns—a small hard brain formed by our interlocking white knuckles. I peeked around at the nurses. Everyone knew that this baby was up for adoption.
“It doesn’t matter. As long as he doesn’t know.”
“The baby?”
“The baby.”
But there was no thought more horrible than this baby fighting for his life not knowing that he was completely alone in the world. He had no people, not yet—legally we could walk out the door and never come back. We stood there like mesmerized criminals who had forgotten to flee the scene.
My own brain and its thoughts were just distant noise. What mattered was that every few seconds she or I would tighten the fist, which meant live, live, live. A bag of blood was rushed in; it was from San Diego. I’d been to the zoo there once. I imagined the blood being pulled out of a muscled zebra. This was good—humans were always withering away from heartbreak and pneumonia, animal blood would be much tougher, live, live, live. A beefy man in scrubs motioned us over.
“He’s critically stable. If he starts to desaturate you’ll need to leave him alone.”
He showed Clee how to put her hands through the holes in the clear plastic incubator. The baby’s palm miraculously curled around her finger. That’s just a reflex, the man said. Live, live, live.
Clee was mumbling a rolling chant that I could barely hear; at first it sounded like a prayer, but after a while I realized it was just “Ohhh, sweet boy, oh, sweet baby boy,” over and over again. She only stopped when the head doctor came over, a tall Indian man. His face was gravely serious. Some people’s faces always look this way, it’s just how they’re raised. But as he talked it became clear he wasn’t one of these people. Meconium was repeated several times; I remembered the word from birth class: excrement. Meconium has been aspirated leading to PPHN. Or PPHM. He was talking slowly but it wasn’t slow enough. Nitric oxide. Ventilator. We nodded again and again. We were actors nodding on TV, bad actors who couldn’t make anything look real. He finished with the words closely monitored. We forgot to ask if the baby would live.
A toothy young nurse with glasses suggested Clee lie down in a receiving room on the Labor and Delivery floor. Clee said she was fine and the nurse said, “Actually, you’re bleeding a lot.” The back of her gown was soaked through. She fell back into the wheelchair, suddenly not fine at all. Her eyes were strangely sunken. They would call us, the nurse said, if anything changed. We looked at each other darkly. If we didn’t leave, then we couldn’t get a terrible phone call.
“I’ll stay,” I said, and Clee was rolled out the door.
I was afraid to look at him. There were ten or fifteen other babies, each one hooked up to a beeping machine that regularly burst into alarm; the alarms overlapped, creating an undulating chaos. On the other side of the NICU another team of doctors and nurses surrounded something small and unmoving. Its parents stood apart from each other to let all of us know the other one was to blame and would never, ever, be forgiven, for all eternity. Their prayer was rage. The mother looked up at me; I looked away.
Without Clee’s hand to hold, my thoughts were terrifyingly unbound. I could think anything. I could think: Why am I here? And: This is going to end in tragedy. And: What if I can’t handle this, what if I lose my mind? I started crying giant wet tears.
Ha. I was crying.
It was easy now, stupidly easy. I wiped my nose on my hands, contaminating them. I went back out to the foyer and washed them again; the hot water on my skin made me homesick. This time I was asked to sign in. For Relationship to the baby I wrote grandmother because that’s who everyone thought I was.
I forced myself to look at the tiny gray body. His eyes were shut. He didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t deduce, from the beeps and the sound of feet on linoleum, that he was in a hospital. He didn’t know what a hospital was. Every single thing was new and made no sense. Like a horror movie, but he couldn’t even compare it to that because he knew nothing about the genre. Or about horror itself, fear. He couldn’t think, I’m scared—he didn’t even know I. I shut my eyes and started humming. It was easier to do back at home, when he was still inside her. That time now seemed like a silly TV show, the three of us floating in a daze, believing we would always be safe. This here was real life. I hummed for so long I started to get dizzy. When I opened my eyes, he was looking right at me. He blinked, slowly, tiredly.
Familiarly.
Kubelko Bondy.
I smoothed my hospital gown and tucked my hair behind my ears.
I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t know it was you until now, I said. He gave me the same warm look of recognition that he’d been giving me since I was nine—but exhausted, like a warrior who has risked everything to get home, half-dead on the doorstep. Now it was unbearable that he should be lying untouched except by needles and tubes. I opened the circular doors and carefully held his hand and foot. If he died he would die forever; I would never see another Kubelko Bondy.
See, this is what we do, I began, we exist in time. That’s what living is; you’re doing it right now as much as anyone. I could tell he was deciding. He was feeling it out and had come to no conclusions yet. The warm, dark place he had come from versus this bright, beepy, dry world.
Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn’t representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works. And in case he wasn’t into nature, I added: And it’s a really wild time in terms of technology. You’ll probably have a robot and that will be normal.
It was like talking someone off a ledge.
Of course, there’s no “right” choice. If you choose death I won’t be mad. I’ve wanted to choose it myself a few times.
His giant black eyes strained upward, toward the beckoning fluorescent lights.
You know what? Forget what I just said. You’re already a part of this. You will eat, you will laugh at stupid things, you will stay up all night just to see what it feels like, you will fall painfully in love, you will have babies of your own, you will doubt and regret and yearn and keep a secret. You will get old and decrepit, and you will die, exhausted from all that living. That is when you get to die. Not now.
He shut his eyes; I was wearing him out. It was hard to lower the pitch of my mind. The Asian nurse with the glasses went on her lunch break and was replaced by a pig-faced nurse with short hair. She looked me over and suggested I take a break.
“Get something to eat, walk around the block. He’ll be here when you get back.”
“He will?”
She nodded. I didn’t want to push it by asking if he was going to live in general, or just until I got back. And if I didn’t go would he still live?
I’m going away, but just for a short time. It was impossible to leave him.
I left him.
My guilt was cooled by relief: it was good to be out of that terrifying, earsplitting room. I followed the signs to Labor and Delivery, dazed by the calm hallways filled with business as usual.
There was some confusion at the nurses’ station.
“What did you say her name was again?”
“Clee Stengl.”
“Hmmm. Hm, hm, hm, hm, hmmmm.” The chubby nurse clicked around on a computer. “Are you sure you have the right hospital?”
“They told her to come down here, in the NICU, she was—” I gestured to the back of my pants to indicate bleeding. I remembered her sunken eyes and suddenly felt that Clee was in great danger, fighting for her life at this very moment. An older nurse was reading a magazine and watching from a distance. I leaned my body over the counter.
“Are you searching . . . widely?” What I meant was maybe she was in an emergency operating room, or the ICU, but I didn’t want to say that. “Stengl. You might be adding a vowel between the g and the l? There’s no vowel there, she’s part Swedish. Very blond.” And just in case it would help, I added, “I’m her mother.”
The older woman put her magazine down. “Receiving,” she said quietly to the other nurse, standing behind her. “Two oh nine, I think. Home birth.”
The door to 209 was half-open. She was in a mechanical hospital bed, wearing a smock. A tube ran from her arm to a hanging bag of liquid. She was asleep, or not asleep—her eyes were fluttering.
“Oh good,” she said when she saw me. “It’s you.”
I sat next to her, feeling strangely meek and nervous. Her hair was in two braids—I’d never seen it like that. I thought of Willie Nelson or a Native American person.
“I guess he’s okay for right now. A nurse said I should go.”
“They told me.”
“Oh.”
It seemed like she had been in this room forever and knew everything about the hospital whereas I had been staggering around like a beggar.
“What’s that bag?”
“It’s just saline, I was dehydrated. Dr. Binwali checked me. He said I’ll be fine.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah.”