She knew two other words. “Day-yay” was “Daddy.” “Mumum” was “Mom.” And I think she knew things about these two people that she couldn’t express with words. Day-yay liked to play Where’s Sabrina while he was dressing her. He liked to play Little Piggy. He liked to play Got Your Nose. Lots of times, Day-yay wasn’t home; he was away at school learning how to be a grown-up. Mumum took Sabrina for rides in the car sometimes in the middle of the afternoon; sometimes Mumum cried before these rides. One time Sabrina screamed “Mumum” over and over as loud as she could and Mumum forgot to answer even though she was sitting right there with her eyes open. Day-yay loved Mumum, but he was afraid to talk to her unless she started talking first. I think she knew all this. I believe these were her thoughts.
I studied the children in Intensive Care more carefully now. They had slow heartbeats, blue fingers and toes, sluggish—sometimes nonexistent—responses to the doctors’ slaps and prods, low birth weights, malfunctioning internal organs. They were born with port-wine stains on their shoulders, strawberry marks across their faces, swollen eyes leaking pale yellow pus. This one had thrush. This one had jaundice. This one did not have a startle reflex. Sometimes the only thing wrong with them was that they just wouldn’t grow— failure to thrive, it’s called—and I found these to be the most disturbing; I wondered if, maybe, they were rebelling, psychosomatically saying No as they tried to crawl after Michael.
According to their corrected ages, the preemies were each minus zero; sometimes minus one month, sometimes three, none of them were born yet. They were here, they were out, but they were still gestating. I wondered who would be the next to fail to survive, and if this could truly be called a failure. Maybe, until they were zero years old, the preemies were not yet fully alive and though they were out in the world, breathing through machines, eating through plastic tubes, their beings, their essences, whatever it was that constituted their incorporeal parts, were as unprepared for life as their bodies were. And maybe, because they were younger than the youngest baby, they were also older than the oldest septuagenarian—the aged always look like infants. Maybe they were ageless, and from this vantage they could see their futures and choose to accept or reject them. Maybe those whose bodies stopped pressing toward life were opting out while they still had a choice.
And maybe that glimpse I’d had in the cafeteria of Michael’s future was more than my imagination. Maybe I saw what he’d seen, or a portion of it. Maybe he’d meant for me to see the sadness his life had promised him. Why? To what end? To make me a better nurse, I thought.
I searched the preemies for glimmers of personality, for visions similar to those Michael had shown me, but I saw nothing. Life begins when the spirit inhabits the body, when the body is able to survive and thrive on its own, with the help of its nurturing parents. Science was keeping these bodies going, and I believe their spirits still hovered on the hand of God, a perch from which they could see me searching for them. So they hid. They still weren’t sure if they wanted the lives these bodies would give them. Their pain still floated in the what-might-be and they didn’t need me to see the what-will-be. They could take care of themselves.
I wish now that I’d paid more attention to the full-term babies. They might’ve been more communicative. I try to remind myself that the ailments they suffered were physical, and that I’m more concerned with the bloodless ruptures, the spiritual ailments, in my patients’ lives. I try to convince myself that the distressed bodies of the full-term babies in the NICU will ensure that they are attended to, cared for and comforted throughout their lives, but I know this isn’t true. There must have been one, at least one, for whom I could have done good. Even the physically handicapped fall prey to shattering sadness. Even the kid with the hole in his heart might one day find that heart too heavy. At the time, though, I still didn’t understand my calling.
Sabrina’s father began to have trouble accessing his emotions—he knew they were inside him, even knew which ones he needed to feel, but they wouldn’t come out. He was so alone that even his own feelings refused his company. He wandered with plodding steps, like a nomad, across the cracked earth of his home. The way he described it, his bones felt like they’d been emptied of marrow, the blood in his veins as thick and rank and slow-moving as sewage. It took all of his effort to form the simplest thoughts:
change the baby; feed the baby; rise above yourself and play with the baby now.
Time moved so slowly. There was too much of it. Sabrina’s mother came home sporadically. He couldn’t tell her to change her lifestyle. He couldn’t tell her anything. She’d put up with him, and now it was his turn to put up with her. Already she claimed it was unfair for him to demand that the changes she was making stay outside the house. “When did you get to be so high and mighty?” she said. When he tried to explain it wasn’t for his sake, but for Sabrina’s, she wouldn’t listen. He had no credibility.
Sometimes she took Sabrina out with her—he’d come home from school and find the house empty. Then time stopped moving completely. He lay on the futon staring at nothing, thinking of nothing, becoming as close to nothing as he could, waiting for time to move again or, if not that, to end altogether.
He knew he’d eventually get past this numbness. Something would happen, then time would speed up and crash into his emotions, knocking them loose, maybe shattering them. The emptiness wouldn’t matter as much if he could have Sabrina with him, if he could carry her everywhere on his hip, if he could always be sure she was okay.
After my stint in the NICU I was rotated to the maternity ward, where I eventually was given a full-time job. I worked there until yesterday. The maternity ward differed from the NICU in a variety of ways, chiefly in that the babies there had passed their Apgar tests, which meant they were healthy, physically prepared to thrive in the world. Three of us, Kim and Cheryl and I, worked two at a time in staggered night shifts.
Cheryl was older, in her late forties. She was a light-skinned black woman, with freckles that rose from her cheeks, and was deeply involved with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. She never slouched, and her head rode high on her neck like that of a teacher obsessed with discipline. Her personality was like her posture, strong-willed, rigid and certain. She impressed and intimidated me. She had none of the cracks that I connect with in people, nor did she abide these cracks in others. In my first few days she seemed to take glee in correcting me, mostly about minute procedural details.
When you burp the children, you fold the towel like this, not like that, you don’t want gunk all over your scrubs. Throw the wet wipe out immediately, don’t put it in your pocket and spread germs around to the other children, we can’t have that.
Part of me aspired to be more like her, to be convinced of the rightness of my methods, but another part of me wished she’d just leave me alone.
Kim had boyfriend problems and a cigarette addiction. She exhausted me. She spent most of her time in the windowed room off the nursery, listening to her Walkman and leafing through the new issues of the complimentary magazines,
People
and
Parenting
and
Cosmopolitan,
even
GQ
and
Sports Illustrated,
using them up before dropping them back into the Formica cubes in the waiting room. I minded this less than when she chose to talk to me; then the air thinned out, and I suffered from lack of oxygen and vertigo. The topic was almost always the same: she wanted advice on her boyfriend, but if she got it, she’d decide the advice was wrong.
I kept my distance from both of them and gave my attention to the babies. At this age they were all the same, barely sentient lumps of flesh, covered in vernix caseosa and a downy layer of lanugo, needing almost nothing, only food, warmth. Each started wet and, while drying out, slowly solidified. They burped up mucus and embryonic fluids. They leaked sludge-like meconium into their diapers. Their bodies made so many after-the-fact preparations. The points at the top of their heads receded. Their skin darkened and thickened, eye color deepened, noses and ears changed shape, firmed up, realigned. They hardened as their bodies primed for the future, and if they’d been seals or fawns or kittens this would’ve been enough; but they were born human and as such they’d eventually start asking questions that had no answers, searching for patterns that didn’t exist, falling prey to dangers of their own creation, from which instinct could not protect them. They slept and slept and slept, and upon waking, they tired quickly, fleeing back to sleep after five minutes of consciousness.
Most mothers roomed in. They had rooms with windows and flowers and mounted TVs, with collapsible curtains that could be unfurled for privacy while they nursed. They planned ahead and made various demands: no pacifiers, no bottles, hard-to-come-by foods and visiting rights for their extended families, no nurses. Their babies were the culmination of long-held dreams. But the children in the nursery had problems. They were the children of frail, wealthy women in need of extra recovery time, or poor women there without family, or women whose husbands were out at the bar, whose boyfriends were in jail, whose handful of lovers had no idea—and never would—that they’d just given birth; these were the children of children who would never see them, of women who would never want them, of parents already beginning to feel guilty for being less capable than they knew they should be.
I wondered how healthy these babies really were. Physically, yes, they were fine, but that was small comfort. Only a few hours out of the womb and already they were deficient. For a host of reasons, their lives were already difficult. This one bawled when his arms were trapped in his swaddling blanket. This one had two pre-teeth wobbling in her gums, abrading them, causing soreness and bleeding and unending agony. This one blinked so slowly it seemed that the world might end before she next batted a lash. This one wouldn’t take a bottle. This one didn’t cry. Already, they were individuals.
They made me sad. I mixed their formula. I stuck thermometers into their armpits. On my rounds I tried to treat them tenderly, but I felt like a fraud; with every kind act I promised a lie, set an impossible precedent. What happened after they were taken home was out of my control. The temperature would no longer be fixed at a constant 65°. The length of the day would no longer be decided by the rheostat. The institutional stability of the hospital would be replaced by messier, less controllable circumstances.
For a stretch there, Sabrina refused to eat. She had constant colic, screaming and squirming and shaking, her whole body quivering, skin blushing with so much blood it looked like it might pop. Her parents were frightened. She lost weight and they worried that she would suffer irreversible damage if she didn’t start to eat again soon. She might die of malnutrition. I think she was frightened, too. I think she was disappointed by what she’d encountered on this side of the birth canal and was refusing to grow. I think she was looking for mercy. As she howled, she turned to face the sun and raising her palms, she begged for deliverance, for release, for eternal returns.
Some nights, when I was restless and done with my chores, I trolled the aisles between bassinets and watched the babies sleep. I paused over each child, prayed for him or her. I was all that stood between them and the wild and I was not enough. Within a few days they’d be out in the world. They’d be on their own, at their parents’ mercy, and forever after they’d have to struggle for the simple things I provided them with. Two arms around them. A purr in the ear. The nudge of a nose on the cheek. Undivided attention.
On one of these nights, I found myself returning over and over to a particularly frail, small, dark-skinned boy. He was marked with a nevus high on his left cheek. His face twitched as he slept and he kept waking up. I held him on my lap, bouncing and rocking him for most of the night, but it didn’t help.
I was on with Kim that night, and the noise annoyed her. “I don’t know why we can’t sedate them when they get like this,” she said.
“Why don’t you go smoke a cigarette?” I snapped.
On her way out, she rubbed the boy’s head. “Poor baby,” she said and he started to wail. She waved him off and kept walking. “Fine, be like that,” she said.
When she was gone, he calmed down. He gazed at me— oddly, urgently. I kissed his forehead. We were sitting in the shadows of the unlit nursery, and I saw something dance in the space between his face and mine. A darkness on top of the darkness. I couldn’t make out what it was, but I had a sense of what I couldn’t see. The arc of his life. Any happiness it contained would be secondhand, stories he’d tell himself after the fact. Happiness is what he would call those moments that, when he remembered them, seemed less sad in contrast to the rest. I grabbed a blank chart and jotted down some notes.
Jones, BB
u32.3691550
He will be miserable most of his life, and when he’s an old man he’ll curse having ever been happy.
I knew what I’d written was true. I wished there was some way to cure him of it.
I managed to get him back to sleep before Kim returned, and I laid him gently into his bassinet.
“All better?”
I nodded, averting my eyes, and busied myself disinfecting bottles as she lingered, hoping for small talk.
“You don’t have to do that right now,” she said.
“I know.”
“You want anything from the candy machine?”
I shrugged and she left again.
The scalding water focused my mind. Why hadn’t the Jones boy, like little Michael, chosen to flee from his future? I tried to work out the metaphysics. As long as he was in his mother’s womb, his body was controlled by hers. Michael had a choice because, as a preemie, the normal birth process had been disrupted; his mother had relinquished his body before the groundbreaking due date at which he would have begun to forget the life of which he’d seen the outlines; in this window of time, he’d had the chance to abort the project. The Jones boy did not have this option. Now that he was out, the process of forgetting was in full swing. His urgent gaze had been a plea for help, a last look around before he succumbed to the tedium of time, the inevitable life ahead of him.