“In where?” Into the baby, of course. I immediately regretted asking.
In medical vernacular, accessing the vein with an IV is “getting in.” The baby’s low red cell count meant many other things. But to that nurse, on that shift, the primary thing it meant was that she had to thread a needle into a very, very thin vein. Placing an IV into a severely anemic five-pound infant is an art spun out of skill, luck, confidence, and faith. If only we’d left that rubber hose in her belly button; it had been removed just the day before. No central line. No obvious way in.
4
My mom and my best childhood friend, Cassie, met me at the airport. Cassie had found a sublet for me in Berkeley until my mom could persuade her tenant to move out and let me have the studio. The sublet was a concrete loft, cold, dusty, but available immediately. Cassie had swept the floor, bought flowers, stocked food: roasted almonds, eggs, rice cakes, milk, juice, chocolate, and fruit (so much fruit, in a giant blue bowl). Under the flowers she’d left a note, “Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy. Virginia Woolf.” After the quote, she’d added, in her tiny, precise script formed with authority, “And vice versa.”
I put the note in my wallet and zipped it closed. Cassie. My mom. Suzi. Maybe I would be OK.
I got into bed and picked up the only book that looked remotely readable, The Hobbit. I tried to focus on poor Bilbo’s plight. I imagined myself ensconced in a hobbit house with a round blue door, not pregnant, not miserable, not even human. Sign me up. I’d be a microbe. Anything but what I was, 2,904 miles away from Brian.
I dreamt in fitful sequences, a string of thwarted activities—running in snow with no sense of direction, no destination. And then a baby, my baby, born healthy with a vigorous cry and pinkish skin, perfect in every regard except that when you held her up to the light you could see right through her. She was translucent and fragile, nothing more than a sheet of vellum.
If a baby is the unfathomable concoction of two people, what happens when one of those two, upon discovering a baby is under way, changes his mind? I was physiologically bewildered; carrying around, in my body, the genetic material of someone who had said no to fatherhood. Meanwhile his genes and my genes were sketching the blueprint of a person. If I was constructing a human out of a reluctant set of building blocks, with genes that lay themselves out with reservations and regret, in sequential order, step by step, but under duress, what then?
*
The nurse, drinking yet another can of apple juice, said, “I’ll just call another nurse to hold the baby.”
“I’ll hold her.”
“It’s better if another nurse holds.”
“No thank you.”
First she tried to place the IV in the baby’s hand, poking in multiple places without success. My job was to keep the baby’s body completely still as the needle searched the vein. Every time she was punctured, the baby howled a new howl I’d never heard before. She’d been alive less than a week and was rapidly expanding her repertoire of sounds for pain.
After twenty minutes of jabbing various locations with sweaty determination and what I feared was the slimmest hint of enjoyment, the nurse reluctantly gave up and said she would call the pediatric IV team. The team? The TEAM! There was a fucking TEAM? Somewhere in this hospital was a team of people specifically trained to place IVs into children, and she’d just spent twenty minutes pincushioning her? Later I learned that hospital policy allows only two “sticks” per nurse. It is commonly understood that if you don’t get in quickly, the building tension and anxiety hinder further attempts. Two sticks, and you’re out. But I didn’t know that yet.
When the IV team arrived, they were “in” within minutes.
The blood was ordered from the blood bank. “Make sure the blood is washed and irradiated,” the resident on duty said. I wrote down, “Blood 2B washed and irradiated,” again with no idea what it meant and no energy to ask.
“They know what they’re doing,” my mom had said the day before. “They are keeping all these babies alive.”
The washed blood arrived, was hung, and began to flow into my girl. She’d been pale, but after a few hours she pinked up. My favorite Irish nurse, now back on duty, came to check on us. “They are running it slow, so as not to overwhelm her heart,” she said. I liked this: her heart, not the heart. She was, I realized, even younger than I’d thought. Maybe twenty-two, twenty-three? Surely she didn’t have kids, but she had a fantastically wide smile. Warm, genuine, with dimples. I was so grateful to her and so unsure of everything that I wanted to take her hand. I wanted to ask her to take mine too, while I held the baby’s hand. In some alternate universe, maybe this was possible. We could sit in a circle, holding hands—she and I and the baby—and that would constitute healing.
In this universe, the best I could hope for was a chance, later, to thank her. In the notebook: “cookies 4 irish nurse.”
*
On the night my labor began, I was living with my little sidecar, as yet unnamed, and my mother’s dog, Lulu, in a studio (formerly the garage) beside the house I grew up in, on an acre of land my mom had bought for $70,000 in 1977 in San Anselmo, a small town at the center of Marin County. This was not the Marin of my youth. It had lost (almost all) of the funky cottages with flaking pastel paint and the hippies playing Hacky Sack in front of the health food store. It had succumbed to the abrading effects of money, chiefly: overly landscaped yards and overly sculpted people. But it was still Marin, rolling gold hills and eucalyptus trees and Lake Lagunitas. It was home and thus where I hoped to give birth.
By the time my labor began, I had adopted, publicly, the identity of plucky single mom but fell asleep most nights sobbing, wondering what Brian was doing. Was he washing his dishes? If so, his head would be propped against the cabinets above his sink, an oddly restive, thoughtful posture. As though, while washing, he was also working out a new social order. Was he wondering when he would meet his child?