The nurse promised to bring her right back. Without her, I was at a loss. I motored the bed up and down, edgy, unfocused, waiting for my fix. An hour later the nurse came back empty-handed. “Where’s my baby?” I said, sounding, even to myself, absurdly panicked.
He gave me a pointed look, half sympathy, half crowd control, and said, “We’d like to run a few more tests.” At the door he added, “The doctor will be in to talk with you in a few minutes.” I didn’t know anything about hospitals yet; I didn’t know enough to be terrified that an actual doctor would appear bedside before daybreak.
When I had imagined threats to my future children, they’d been external. Strangers hovering at the edge of playgrounds in loose, gray sweatshirts; rotting rope swings fraying over jagged rocks; cars, everywhere, callous, steely-eyed killer-cars. These were possibilities I could conceive of. Illness had never slunk across the screen of my anxieties, with its curved spine and sallow cheeks. I probably wouldn’t have recognized it even if it did. Serious illness, life-threatening illness, was outside the realm of my imagination. If pushed to consider the question, I might have responded that I was protected from the possibility by the mere fact that it had never occurred to me. I might have said, “If I can’t imagine it, how can it happen?”
*
On my first date with the father of this five-pound girl we went to an intimate place on the corner of Jane Street in Greenwich Village. The kind of place where, to reach your table, you’re obliged to wedge sideways and apologize to strangers whom you’ve brushed with your hips. Seated, we leaned over the small table to breathe the same air and figure each other out. He said he’d read recently that everyone has a personal “happiness quotient,” that your happiness in life is essentially set, regardless of circumstances. He reckoned his was low, and guessed mine was high.
I’d never heard of a happiness quotient. I’d never stopped to consider happiness as anything other than an assumed default state, a place to return to after the occasional thick fog. If, as a kid, I had been asked to state the one thing I believed to be true about my future, I’d have said, “I’ll have a happy life.”
Not that I’d had a blindingly happy childhood. I hadn’t. I’d had a childhood of being profoundly loved amid serial chaos. I grew up as the only child of a warmhearted, fleet-footed single mom who was always exploring her options, in men, jobs, lifestyles. It was California in the 1970s. For a while I attended school in a geodesic dome on a hilltop. A herd of goats grazed on long, golden grass outside the open door. Sometimes we ran among them without shirts, boys and girls alike. One of the male teachers enjoyed watching, too much. Everything in my world moved fast, and my job was to hang on. Still, I’d emerged with the idea that my own adult life would be happy and essentially free of adversity. The optimism of youth, which I’d somehow hung on to until thirty, thirty-one even.
A happy life, at the time of that Jane Street first date, did not include, from my point of view, being the mother of a child who required extensive neonatal medical care. Or spending a pregnancy alone, heartsick. Those possibilities weren’t visible from the corner of Jane Street; all I saw was the man before me in a pressed blue dress shirt, delivering literary jokes with a shy, sly humor. The amused look in his eye when I chirped with surprise at the arrival of our salads. “Do you always greet your food so enthusiastically?” he asked. “Not always,” I said. “Only sometimes.” Only now.
*
The 4 a.m. doctor was short and bespectacled with a round, soft face. A pleasant-looking bearer of bad news; he seemed personally pained by what he was about to say. He started by explaining the baby had high levels of something I didn’t catch, emphasizing the need to transfer “the patient” to a larger hospital. “Right,” I said, trying to muster a little dignity in my flapping nightshirt. “But what is actually wrong with her?”
“Your baby is at risk of brain damage or”—he paused and glanced around the room as though looking for something he’d mislaid—“death.”
I felt embarrassed for him; clearly he was in the wrong room. He’d confused my baby with another baby. I tried to break it gently, “This is the baby born at seven p.m., the five-pound, five-ounce girl, with a strawberry on the back of her neck.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
Still, I refused to apply these words—death or brain damage—to my swaddled and fabulous-smelling daughter. Death was ludicrous. And brain damage was out of the question. Way, way, way out of the question. In fact, the question and brain damage didn’t even know each other. The question was: when can I take her home? Still, the doctor was in earnest. I decided to play along. “OK,” I said. “OK, right. OK. Then what do we do?”
He explained that her red cells lacked stability and were breaking apart in the bloodstream. The iron inside each cell was spilling into the blood and floating freely throughout her body, at risk of lodging into the soft tissue of her brain. “So you are saying what, exactly?” I said. “She’s at risk for rust head?” He looked at me, appraising. A long silent moment went by. “That’s humor,” he said finally, “common coping mechanism.”
At the door he added, “We need to clean her blood immediately. We’re transferring you to UCSF Med Center. The ambulance is waiting.” University of California San Francisco Medical Center, the place I’d elected not to give birth. The big-city hospital. The tall, silver fortress on top of the hill, across the Golden Gate. The last place on earth a brand-new baby wants to go.
*
On our second date, we ate at a bright, loud diner along Seventh Avenue. If harshly lit Formica can feel romantic, I told myself, then this is foreordained. He asked me to list my “diner worries,” those anxieties so slight they could be jotted onto the waxy parchment of a placemat. I have no idea what I said. I likely made things up, things to make me seem Frenchly philosophical or politically courageous or, failing all this, mysterious. I was young, I owned an apartment in New York City, had a good university job, and was on the cusp of what might be a relationship with a serious, kind man. Diner worries were in short supply.
But I loved that he asked, that he wanted to etch a record of my preoccupations onto a placemat. Later I would learn that he often took notes about things his students said, their goals, their literary heroes—to keep them straight, to accumulate an understanding of what they hoped for. At first this seemed excessive. But later it struck me as intrinsic to his way of being. He wanted to know, understand, remember who people were. How they were. And the best, truest way he knew to burrow toward the truth was to write things down. On the page he could add up a girl’s diner worries and see what they amounted to.
*
The ambulance driver told me to ride up front.
“What about the baby?” I asked.
“She’ll ride in back, with the paramedics,” he said.
“The paramedics are great,” I said, “but they don’t really know her.”