“Three weeks.”
“Ok, she would have been taken to the pediatric ER.” The woman gave me directions and I was off. I found the entrance and picked up the phone to get admittance. I told the person on the phone who I was, and who I was looking for. She told me the room number Mattie was in and the door next to me made a buzzing noise. I hung up and pushed through the door.
The hallway I entered was lit brightly with florescent lights and smelled exactly like a hospital should: stale, clean, and like chemicals. My eyes darted to the numbers next to the doors on each side of the hallway. I kept walking, forever it seemed, until I finally found the room I was looking for. I pushed the door open and what I saw nearly broke me.
My eyes first found Mattie, so small and so pale, cradled in Susan’s lap. She had two sensors on her chest, wires coming from them connecting them to a machine that beeped rapidly. Her tiny, fragile hand was wrapped with something blue, and through it I could see another tube coming from her, and an I.V. that was attached to a bag of fluids. She was sleeping, but she looked different. She looked sick.
The next thing my eyes took in was Ella, standing in the corner of the room, facing the window, looking out over the river and the Portland skyline.
“Baby,” I tried to say, but it came out a strangled whisper. She heard me and her head whipped around to find me and then we both lost our composure. She ran across the room to me, crying the instant her head met my chest. I cradled her against me, gripping her so tightly to my body, thankful to be together in this moment. “I got here as soon as I could,” I said against the top of her head, my lips moving against her hair, my tears dropping into the blonde locks.
“Trust me,” she said, still crying against me. “You didn’t want to be around for what happened earlier.” My body steeled at her words, fury raged through me, worried that she’d had to endure something terrible while I wasn’t with them to help or to comfort. I held her, my hands rubbing up and down her back, trying to offer her anything I could, even though I knew in this moment there wasn’t anything that could take away the fear I felt, which I was sure she felt deeper than even I did.
I loved Mattie, with everything that I was, but I could also concede that Ella loved Mattie in a way I could never understand. Ella’s love for our baby wasn’t better or worse than mine, it didn’t take anything away from how I felt about my child, but the connection I witnessed between Ella and our daughter was inarguably the deepest tie I’d ever seen two people have to each other. It made me love Ella that much more.
After a few minutes of crying with each other, I pulled away and used my thumbs to wipe the tears away from Ella’s face.
“What do we know? What’s wrong with her?”
Ella shook her head. “They don’t know yet. They think it’s some sort of infection. They said babies her age don’t get fevers unless it’s an infection. They tried to take her blood at the clinic . . .” Her words cut off and new tears sprung from her eyes. “They couldn’t get a vein, and Mattie was just crying, and I wasn’t in the room.” She leaned into me again. “I could hear her crying from down the hall. They took her from me and I wasn’t with her.” Hearing her words, feeling her body shaking against mine, broke my heart all over again. I knew it didn’t compare, but if someone had tried to keep me away from Ella in the same position, I wouldn’t have stood for it and I would have been just as broken as she sounded.
“Babe, it’s ok.” I tried to soothe her, but I knew what she’d experienced today was something she’d likely never forget. “You got her to the doctor and now the hospital, where they’ll take care of her.” I pressed a kiss against her temple. “You did everything right.” She pulled away again, wiping her newly shed tears away and I turned to see Susan still holding my girl.
“May I?” I asked, motioning towards Mattie.
“Of course,” Susan said automatically, smiling down at her granddaughter. She stood up slowly and let me take the chair, then gently laid my girl in my arms. When we got her all situated, being careful that none of the wires or tubes coming from her were tangled, Susan walked to Ella and wrapped her arms around her.
I tried to keep my eyes off of the pair of them, watching Ella cry was hard enough, but watching her cry into her mother’s shoulder was another level of gut-wrenching. Instead, I focused on my angel, trying to make sure she was as comfortable as possible.