My mom stared at her, looking for the penis. Maybe because we’d all secretly wanted a girl (it seemed so much easier to imagine raising a girl as a single mom), we’d hedged against disappointment by believing I was carrying a boy. Plus I’d dreamt it was a boy. Several sage-ish women had confirmed this. When the baby materialized, penisless, we were disbelievers.
“It’s a girl,” the midwife said again. A true girl. A brand-new girl. A girl totaling five pounds, five ounces. A healthy baby girl. The midwife lifted her to my face, and I touched her cheek, slick with wax and blood. She was not crying; her clouded blue-brown eyes were open, as yet uncomprehending, but open. We looked at each other. Hi. My heart leapt and sang and did an Irish jig.
*
Two days after the baby’s first blood transfusion the Red Team decided we could go home. They still had no idea why the baby couldn’t “hold her numbers,” but they had stabilized her. She had enough blood to last for a few weeks and they hoped that, whatever her red cell problem was, it would fix itself. Plus they were tired of looking at each other with blank faces every morning at our bedside.
The blond doctor said, “I’m referring you to an excellent hematologist here at UCSF. It’s quite possible your daughter will require another blood transfusion soon, but for now she’s stable and she’s taking up space.” I wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or relieved that we were leaving without a diagnosis. It was like a fable without a moral lesson. But I didn’t argue.
At last I got to dress her in the outfit I’d bought months before, a white sack with small rosebuds around the collar and a matching hat. She was so petite the dress nearly swallowed her, but she was in store-bought clothes, a massive improvement over hospital issue.
When my mom saw the baby in her own clothes, she burst into tears. “She somehow seems more real,” she said.
I knew what she meant. Stripped of the arm band and ID bracelets, the myriad wires leading to multiple monitors, the baby at last looked less like a subject in an experiment on pain and more like what she was: a week-old infant on her way home.
My mom and I rode the elevator down to the lobby in a giddy state, cracking jokes about getting away before they could change their minds.
Outside I was surprised to find weather. I’d forgotten about weather. San Francisco was draped in its famous fog. I kneeled, shivering, in the backseat of the car, trying to install the car seat, while my mom waited with the baby in the lobby. On one side of the seat was a small color-coded dial with a needle, which indicated if the seat’s angle was safe; green was good; red bad. I put us squarely into green, but the steep hills complicated the whole procedure. As my mother drove, I sat in back, frantically adjusting the knob. This was a crash course in baby safety and also in the irrational fears that were now going to trail me, a collection of cans clanging at my heels.
If I had glimpsed the horror that lay ahead for this girl, I would have wanted to jump out of the car. But I couldn’t see anything, except the baby as she was now, head tossed back, sleeping, listening.
What I had to give her included my useless, cyclical worry. True. But also joy. Happiness—slippery, mobile, sneaky, and spry—enters the most unlikely rooms, unbidden. It can sneak up on you nearly anywhere and likewise wisp away. She was alive; she was wearing her soft cotton clothes, her rosebud hat, breathing in the car in the dark as a light rain touched everything with what e.e. cummings once described as “such small hands.”
SAN ANSELMO
5
Arriving back at the studio in the dark in the rain, with the baby asleep in her carrier, felt miraculous. Ten days before, I had crawled on my hands and knees out this door as, more or less, one person. Now two of us passed back through. It was a dove-from-a-hat act; the world’s greatest magic trick.
I looked around the room. In the corner was the rocker I’d hoped to whitewash before going into labor. It was a hideous pool-floor blue, but it rocked. In my arms now, the baby was sleeping. My girl, Gracie. I had settled on a name, splitting the difference and hyphenating Amelia-Grace. I crept over to the bassinet and poured her down in the careful choreography that kept her asleep, head, shoulders, torso, legs, tiny feet, lowering her into gravity. Her bones, leaving my hands, were a set of fragile sticks.
I sat down in the rocker and tried to take in our good luck. The baby was OK, and we were home. Lulu was sniffing circles around the bassinet, sniffing the baby’s carrier, sniffing the baby’s stuff. It was an olfactory feast; a new creature to profile in her scent catalog.
“Lulu,” I said, “she’s a girl like you. Can you believe it?” Maybe Lulu knew this before I did. Maybe dogs could detect gender in utero? I gave her a dog treat. “Why didn’t you warn me, wonder dog?” She looked up with her concerned eyebrows, her open-mouthed smile.
My mom came over with dinner, arms overfull with roasted veggies from Whole Foods, a steak (“The baby needs you to eat red meat,” she’d said), and an entire chocolate cake. We clattered around the kitchen as the baby slept. The doorbell rang as we were eating, flower delivery from my dad and his wife. A huge bouquet of white lilies and a note: “Welcome home, Baby Grace.” I held one blossom to her nose. “Smell what your grandfather sent,” I said. But on she slept.
After dinner my brothers, Evan and Dylan, showed up, bearing gifts. They are almost a generation younger than I am; my mom had me at twenty-one and then had Evan at thirty-seven and Dylan at forty. They came in shouting at each other, punching arms, half wrestling, a couple of self-appointed, badly behaved Magi.
Dylan shouted, “Evan, shut up, the baby is sleeping.”
“You shut up, Dyl,” Evan replied. “I’m mad ninja quiet.” He mimed tiptoeing. The baby still slept.
Dylan was carrying the oddest-shaped gift; it looked like a small, crooked man in a padded suit. “I brought her something,” he said. “What do you call her, Amelia or Grace?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
“OK, for the baby.” He handed me the gift. Dylan can make wrought-iron stairs, outstanding blackberry ice cream, an entire album of original folk music—pretty much anything. I couldn’t imagine what this was. I ripped through the paper to find … a little hat rack. The bottom was shaped like a free-form pond, painted pink, and from that rose a sturdy white spool with lots of little pegs for her collection, already growing, of pint-sized chapeaux. I love hats, and he’d been teasing me, through the pregnancy, about how I’d impose them on the baby.
“Thanks, Dylan,” I said, and tried to sound more gruff than teary. That’s what my brothers liked, keep the sloppy stuff at bay.
Evan was less handy but equally devoted to being an uncle. He’d come with a gift wrapped in paper towels, tied with a rubber band.