Carol Black

10. Death Star

We called it the Death Star. A city block sheathed in gray concrete and black glass, the hospital was termite-tunneled with long corridors, labyrinthine, windowless, eyeless, dead-ending in gray double doors that said NO ADMITTANCE and DANGER RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS and LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA VOI CH’ENTRATE. Later they redecorated with blond wood and teal and rose upholstery, but in our day the room where you checked in on the Labor and Delivery wing looked like nothing so much as my father’s office at the Naval Ordnance Research Center, gray metal chairs and fake walnut desks and gray linoleum. There had been a nurse who appraised me with the tired apathy of a highway toll collector, checked my dilation, a measly four centimeters, told me to walk. She seemed vaguely annoyed, as though I had bothered her in the middle of something more important.

I had taken my birthing classes and practiced my breathing but as I walk the gray halls it all falls away and a disembodied feeling descends. Time passes in a kind of gray limbo, twilight sleep. The contractions go on and on. The pain is not severe as pain, but more as a sense of foreboding, a queasy, off-center, angled pain, slightly nauseating, like a splinter under a fingernail. And then, solid as a memory, although it could not have happened, I see myself in the stall of a bathroom, blood everywhere. It could not have happened, or the doctor would have been called, things would have been set in motion. And yet I see it, with the exact weight and texture of a real memory; blood puddling on the floor, streaked across the metal stall, staining my clothes, my hands.

Two people don’t deserve to be this happy.

Finally I am assigned to a delivery room; a new nurse appears, hooks me up to a monitor. The needle traces a jerky line on a roll of paper as the contractions rise and fall. The nurse seems ill at ease, her chit-chat too random, her smiles too forced. I can’t remember her name but I don’t want to ask. Some small decelerations, she says. Nothing to worry about.

You’re the kind of person who will always get caught.

At four in the morning the doctor finally comes in. He’s one of those guys who thinks it’s cool to wear a Hawaiian shirt to the delivery room; he hasn’t bothered to put on his scrubs yet, he’s in no rush. Dark hair curls up out of his shirt collar. His face and neck are smoothly shaven, fragrant, his blue eyes clear, laughing, just a bit ironic; his lips are pretty and full. He looks at the print-out, scanning the roll of paper with quick assurance. His mother’s golden boy, always an honor student, always top of his class. His track record is perfect.  

Nothing to worry about, he says.

Two people don’t deserve to be this happy.

The pain is not severe as pain, and yet something is intolerable; I have no name for it. Finally I give up and ask for the epidural. I lie on my side and curl into the fetal position as the anesthesiologist inserts the delicate needle into my spine.  

Now I feel nothing. Nothing. 

She’s too thin.

This is my first thought when I see my baby held up in the air above me. Her little legs dangle limply, curved and soft and dusky blue. “Come on Eva, come on!” The nurse’s voice is childlike, singsong, pleading. The cord is quickly cut and they take her across the room. “Come on, Eva!” she keeps saying. Later David tells me the oxygen machine was not working. And yet coached to relax, to ignore fear, breathe away panic, I trust that they will handle this, that they know what to do, it will be fine. Other people enter the room, they are doing something over there. To my baby.  

And then she is gone, and a woman is beside me asking questions and filling out a form. Did you use recreational drugs during your pregnancy? Cocaine? Prescription medications? Alcohol?

No, no, no.

Space is opening out around me in circles. I need to recenter. I need to take a shower. Get clean. The doctor is stitching up my body where it is torn. He is saying something, his voice is strange; I don’t hear the words, just the strange sound. David is gone, following the baby. I need to get back in my body, my body, split open like a melon, broken, vacant, wind whistling through it. My ears are ringing. Time is not moving. I cannot gather myself.  

Gone.

My baby is gone. Space ripples out in concentric rings. Everything is rolling out from the center, nothing can get in. 

Then I’m in a room, I’m wheeled in, I’m trying to stand. A new nurse is moving around the bed rapidly, a strange person, folding back the sheets, moving an IV stand, she has yellow hair that stands out from her head in surprised curves and spirals, it shakes when she walks. Her lipstick is bright pink. She is saying something odd, I don’t understand her; they have taken me to the gynecology floor, not the postpartum floor. So I won’t have to see the other mothers. Instead I am surrounded by cancer patients. Women getting hysterectomies, women with fibroid tumors. The nurse seems proud of this, as though it shows great cleverness.

They ask if I want to go up to see the baby but I say I want to take a shower. I don’t understand. How can they not know that I need to take a shower.

There is a sink by the door to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit; I am told to scrub my hands. I have to scrub them hard, for several minutes, over and under the nails. The soap smells chemically-floral. I dry them on a paper towel and throw it out in a metal waste can. I have to step on a pedal to raise the lid. It is difficult because I am swollen; something happened; something was torn; I’m not sure what or how.

David steers me through a room filled with clear plastic boxes. They are called isolettes. In each isolette is a baby. Tiny, fragile, little insects. He takes me to an isolette on the right side of the room.

There she is. I can’t grasp it. She is a stranger, hooked up to machines, a needle in her tiny arm, IV tubes, electrodes on her tiny chest, wires spidering out. A monitor traces a ragged line; the pattern is random, up, up again, down, up-down, hardly a pattern at all.  

She is beautiful. Her lips curve in a perfect bow, up at the corners, like my brother’s. Her eyes are tightly shut. She has a sweet drift of soft dark hair, infinitely soft. Tiny fingers delicately curved, tapered, perfect.  

Pierced, trapped. A butterfly pinned under glass.

David says we can touch her but I am afraid to. What if I hurt her? It might be better not to touch her. He seems to expect it, so I reach in, through a round hole in the plastic, touch her cheek with a finger. Stroke her arms, her tiny hands. I can’t connect it. These are not my hands. An alarm sounds; the monitor goes flat; she has stopped breathing. People appear around us, we are asked to leave the room.

We wait in a suspended state, trusting. We stand in the corridor, waiting, hoping; they let us wait, hope; let us know it by degrees. They already know.

Apnea, they say. Bradycardia. Vital functions unstable. Loose skin, muscle wasting. Too thin. Hypoxia, they say. Everything depends on the extent of the hypoxia. We won’t know for three days, they tell us; when the brain is deprived of oxygen, it doesn’t show up on the CAT scan for three days.  

She begins to swell. Her face, her arms, her legs. Her sweet face bulges; her skin is tight, stretched, raw. Edema, they say. Kidney malfunction. Perhaps some injury to the brain stem.  

Three days. In three days the damage will be visible. In three days we will have a precise map and measure of the hurt.

The parents were still in shock, the social worker said. They were “grieving the loss of the anticipated child.” Or “grieving the anticipated loss of the child.” Inez couldn’t remember which one she had said; both probably fit this case. They had been told the facts, the social worker said. It was not clear how much they understood.   

The mother was a small woman, compact, short dark hair, green-brown eyes. Her eyes were empty. Tears streamed from them on and off, she hardly seemed aware of them. It was her first child. She moved in a vague, disembodied way; Inez’s grandmother would say that her soul had left her body. This concept had no place in the western scientific paradigm, of course, but it was nonetheless perfectly obvious. It had fled when her baby was removed. This caused so many problems.   

Inez had graduated at the top of her nursing school class; her training was impeccable, her scientific thinking precise, her professionalism beyond reproach. But she understood that in the end life operated by the laws of her grandmothers. The best neonatologists recognized the value of this, although they did not understand it. Their training was impeccable; they performed their procedures, they ran their tests, they followed their protocols. But would the baby live, or would the baby die? When Inez had transferred to the NICU from the regular nursery, outcomes began to improve. Babies gained weight faster. They got fewer infections. They tolerated surgery better. Their pulmonary function improved. 

This was not magic. Inez knew that babies did better if they were held by a human being instead of being left in the isolettes. They slept better; their breathing was deeper; their heart rate stabilized; they grew faster. Any ‘illiterate’ grandmother anywhere in the world could tell you not to leave your baby in a plastic box, but it had also been well documented, in multiple studies, for over ten years. Most of the studies were done by nursing schools, however, so the doctors generally ignored them. Most of the nurses ignored them, too, to be honest, since it was more convenient that way. In truth they preferred to have their domain to themselves. Mothers were in the way.

Once she had talked to Dr. Rao about it; she was one of the ones who understood. It seemed almost criminal, Inez said. Why don’t they do something about it? Inez asked. It makes no sense. 

Dr. Rao raised her eyebrows. Well, she said. Neonatal intensive care is a profit center for the hospital.

White people, Inez thought. There was no end to it.

The parents had drifted in and out of the unit all day; she would see them in the corridor, talking, then back in the unit, staring through the clear plastic at their child. She could feel the mother's agitation rising, a low vibration. By the end of the day her body was a haunted house.  

She did not touch her child again. 

Finally they left. Fled. 

When they arrived the next morning the mother’s eyes were the eyes of a trapped animal. 

Inez came to her and touched her arm. Their eyes met. “I can bring you a rocking chair so you can hold your baby,” she said. 

The mother’s eyes registered fear. Inez saw it. 

“Is that okay?” the mother said. “I mean, is it safe?”

“Yes,” Inez said gently. “It’s very safe.” 

“Okay,” the small woman nodded. “Thank you.”

Inez brought the chair and placed it by Eva’s isolette. “You sit here,” she said to the mother. “I’m going to unhook her from the monitors so you can hold her.” She adjusted a dial on one of the machines.

The fear returned. “Are you sure it’s all right?” 

Inez looked her in the eye. “I’m sure.”

The baby had been having spells of apnea on and off. Her heart rate was unstable, accelerating and then slowing down precipitously. The edema had subsided; she was a pretty baby again, a beautiful child, but she had no gag reflex, no oculocephalic reflex, no somatosensory response to noxious stimuli. Nothing.

Inez knew that her patient now was the mother as much as the child.

“If you’re worried I can leave the heart monitor on. That way you can see if there’s a problem. You see, her heart rate’s been a little slow, she’s a tiny bit blue right now. But you hold her. I’m right here if you need me.”

Deftly she swaddled the infant in a pink flannel blanket, running the heart monitor wire out through the opening at the top, and placed her in her mother’s arms. Then Inez stood back.

The mother sighed deeply when the child was in her arms, the air moving in and out of her like a soft breeze when a window is opened. Inez busied herself with some paperwork at the nurses’ station. The mother circled her arms around her hurt child; gravely; slowly; then, with a movement like a sunflower turning its face toward the sun, she bent her head, for the first time kissing her baby’s head, like any mother, like a doe her fawn. Like a wolf her pup, she nuzzled the silken hair, feeling its softness against her lips, breathing in her newborn smell. She kept her face there for long minutes.   

Another deep sigh moved through her. This breath, Inez could see, flooded into the child.

The heart monitor began to show a steady beat. The baby’s breathing grew deep and regular, her cheeks pink. A few more minutes, Inez thought.  

She moved quietly around the room, replacing the IV fluids for two premies, changing their diapers, adjusting their position, making notes on their charts. When she looked back, it was done.

The mother’s face had softened, her eyes cleared. She was back inside herself. Her strength was pouring into the child. 

After a while Inez came over, gently put a hand on her shoulder.  

“How are you doing?”

The mother looked up. She glanced at the monitor, then back at Inez. “Her heart rate is regular now,” she said quietly.

Inez looked at her. “Yes.”

Their eyes met. Inez patted her arm. 

“You’re a good mother.”

Anita wept, power flooding back into her body.

In the afternoon they met with the pediatric neurologist, Dr. Rao. David kept asking: What were the chances she would recover completely? Or at least be more or less okay, with just a mild deficit, or a moderate one? Statistically, what were the chances––

Gently the doctor interrupted him. ––It doesn’t really matter what the statistics are, she said softly. Her face was tired, kind, smooth with a delicate tracery of lines, like a leaf. That morning she had seen five patients: a toddler with cerebral palsy, one with chronic seizures, a premie with bleeding in the brain, a newborn with hydrocephalus, and a five-year-old with a fast-growing brain tumor.  

—Your baby is going to be the way she is going to be. She is going to be exactly as she is, nothing else. Statistics won’t change that.

David was silent, suspended. So that was it.  

Exactly as she is.  

Dr. Rao’s voice was so kind, her heart so large with the crushing of dreams and the love that flows in when dreams are crushed, Anita felt strangely soothed, as though cool hands were gently stroking her skin.  

She began to imagine their life together. She would quit her job, quit everything, hold her baby, sing to her; show her insects and stars. Let her smell coyote brush and sage-blossom; let her feel the heat of the sun, the cool of night.  

Eva would be exactly who she was, exactly that and nothing else.

By day three the routine of the NICU is familiar, as though we have been part of it for a million years, and every other routine of life is a thing of the distant past. We know the babies, their names, their conditions. They wear tiny diapers and tiny knit caps made by the NICU parent support group volunteers; their isolettes all have little signs with their names on them in hand-done calligraphy. There is Jason with a heart malformation, pale and a little bluish, who will need seven surgeries before the age of twelve, and Emily recovering from meconium aspiration, who will be fine, if a little asthmatic. A room off to the side has phototherapy lights for the jaundice babies; the unexcreted bilirubin in their blood makes them look suntanned and healthy, as though they are relaxing in a tanning salon. In a day or two they will be out of here and home. In the back, half-screened with a curtain, is Timothy, hydrocephalic skull pale and bulging like a giant mushroom on the forest floor, blue veins mapping the globe of translucent skin, tubes and wires spidering out in every direction. In two days he will have the first surgery to relieve the pressure on his brain.  

But of all the newborns in the dozen and a half isolettes, most are premies, tiny babies no more than four pounds, three pounds, two — incredibly, less than two –– human beings who would fit in the palm of your hand, tiny fingers opening and closing like sea anemones in a tidal pool. They curl their bodies and suck their thumbs, eyes shut tightly against the hard white light.  

A young woman comes in and stands at one of the isolettes. Her face is rounded, cherubic; her eyes light brown, clear, outlined in dark eyeliner. It’s hard to tell if she’s as young as she looks or if it’s just her face. She wears jeans with embroidery on the back pockets, a pink baby-doll style tank top. Her purse is mint-colored cotton, with a butterfly embroidered on one corner. The baby is tiny; face wizened, skin slack as an old man’s on tiny arms and legs. Her name is Taylor.

Every once in a while Taylor sighs and moves slightly, one leg kicking out, quivering slightly at full extension, tiny toes curling under, then coming to rest.  

Inez appears with a cushion and a pink flannel blanket in her arms. She moves a rocking chair close to Taylor’s isolette. “Okay, Tanya, let’s get you set up. Are you ready? You need a glass of water?”

“No, thanks, I’m all right.”

Inez helps her into the chair and puts the cushion in her arms. “It helps to use a cushion to support her because she’s so little.” Inez gets Tanya settled in comfortably, her words flowing in a steady stream of reassurance, confidence, calm brisk pragmatic cheer. She lifts the baby gently out of the isolette, monitor wires trailing behind her, and places her in Tanya’s arms. The baby’s eyes are screwed tightly shut.

Tanya lifts her top and nestles Taylor against her soft stomach. The baby is so small beneath her swollen breasts that it seems she will disappear. 

“I’m scared I’m gonna squish her.”  

Inez puts a gentle hand on Tanya’s shoulder. “No, you’re not. You're a good mother. You just keep an eye on her and make sure her nose is clear, like this.”

Inez helps Tanya find a comfortable position, one hand supporting the baby’s head, the other supporting her breast. Taylor makes a tiny fretful sound, wrinkles up her face. Instinctively Tanya coos to her, soft as a dove. Then, following Inez’s instructions, she touches her nipple to the baby’s face.  

A drop of milk falls like a pearl on the tiny cheek.  

A spark lands on something a million years old.  

The little eyes blink open and then closed, once, twice. The spark ignites: the little head turns once, twice, a movement a million years old; the tiny mouth forms an “o,” closes, opens. Misses the mark a couple of times, and then, in a surprisingly quick firm move, finds the nipple and sucks. Tanya takes a quick soft breath. The little cheeks work, saying:

Again, again, again, again.  

Saying: 

Life, life, life, life.  

Slow light dawns over Tanya’s face. 

The light of the sun is flowing through her body to her child. There are no words for this, but she feels it, and I feel it, watching her. We sit together, companionably, like any two young mothers, as Taylor drinks her fill and then falls asleep, blissful, sweet milk puddled between her lips. 

That afternoon they do the CAT scan of the brain. It comes back as the doctors had expected. Everything is gone.

Gone.

Inez nudged her shoes off and put the diet soda and the carryout container of moo shu pork on the coffee table. She found the remote between the sofa cushions and flipped on the TV. A rerun of Taxi was on; fine. The man in the white jumpsuit was sort of funny, and the little short man. Carefully she unrolled the soft pancakes, filled them with the savory meat and vegetable mixture, squeezed out the little packets of plum and chili sauce. She stretched her toes; her feet hurt. When her daughter was still at home sometimes she would rub her feet at the end of the day, smoothing on lotion that smelled like honeysuckle or roses. Now she was in college in San Luis Obispo, studying media and communications. Her son worked for an oil company in Houston. She saw them at holidays, if they could get away.  

These days her mind, circling more widely in their absence, looped back to childhood. She had been eleven when they left home, leaving her grandmother and all the family behind. The shock of it had felt like a physical wound. She missed her grandmother, missed the sounds of the birds in the trees that she listened to every morning before opening her eyes, lying there pretending to sleep; the loud squawking ones, the little chi-chi-chatty ones, the ones that burbled like water running over stones. She missed the smell of the air, the cool of the mist off the river, the smoke of breakfast fires. LA was so vast; hard; glaring. It all felt unreal. Actually, to be honest, what she felt was that she was no longer real. Her body moved from place to place, doing what it was told to do; but she was no longer in it. In the end she found that focusing her mind on school, bringing everything down to that laser point, helped to tune out the rest. When she started to bring home good grades, then graduated near the top of her class, then was accepted to university, then nursing school, her mother and father had been so proud, saying with satisfaction that it had all been worth it, repeating it to each other, over and over. Now they were gone, her grandmother was gone, Héctor was gone, her children were gone to lives of their own. She had the condo, a new automatic drip coffeemaker, moo shu pork in a plastic container, and Taxi. America.

Her grandmother had been a midwife, the most respected in the village; people would stop to kiss the back of her hand when she walked down the street. Inez used to go with her on her errands, visiting young mothers, buying herbs in the market or collecting them along the trails that wound up the mountain. Children were not allowed to see a birth, of course, but once she had peeked as her grandmother attended a woman who was almost ready to deliver. The baby was in a breach position, and the mother, a young girl only seventeen, was frightened. Her grandmother massaged the girl’s belly with firm gentle strokes, soothing her, relaxing the muscles, communicating strength and calm through her voice and her hands. The whole time she kept talking to the baby, her voice low and murmuring, guiding the baby, reassuring him, easing him around. Inez heard the mother give a little gasp and then saw the baby turn, one foot pushing out in an arc across the moonlike belly before settling back in like a cat curling up to sleep.

The next day the baby was at the mother’s breast, calm, quiet, little cheeks working, eyes shining brightly. He turned and looked right at Inez as though he had known her for a hundred years.

She never forgot that look.

She had had her own children in the hospital, of course, the same County hospital where that woman had hemorrhaged and died in the ER waiting room while her husband desperately called 911 for help. The whole place was in a constant state of overload and burnout, everybody always right on the edge. Some of the white staff there didn’t even try to hide their racism, although when they realized she was training as a registered nurse their attitude shifted, slightly. She would know if they made a mistake, did something wrong. 

Her grandmother had said that Inez was born with the birth sign of a midwife. At home it was not a job the way it was here; it was a vocation, a calling. You did not charge money for your services. People gave what gifts they could, food, handmade items, what services they could offer in return. Of course, at home, the midwife took care of both mother and baby; to care for them separately made no sense. Here it was a dozen different people at each step of the process. Three shifts of labor nurses, postpartum nurses, pediatric nurses. You had to pick your little piece of it. 

In the end Inez liked taking care of babies better than mothers. Some of these L.A. women could be very cold. There was something stiff about them, something off-kilter, uncentered, nervous. They pulled and pushed their babies at the same time, talked and talked about how terrible it was to give birth, terrible to get fat, to change diapers, to lose sleep, all that. It seemed they learned this from their mothers. The babies felt it, poor things, and fretted so miserably. Her friend Véronique from postpartum, an LPN from Côte d’Ivoire, was one of the few people she could talk to about it. Once when Inez had done a shift in the regular newborn nursery, she brought a baby to a patient of Véronique’s who was about to be discharged from the hospital. The woman had piles of gear, car seat, stroller, baby clothes, books about parenting written by men, and she could not stop complaining about her child; zestfully, with a hard whine to her voice, she was complaining in advance about how the child would keep her up at night, it was not a “good baby,” she was going to be “a wreck.” She was going to be “a basket case.” She couldn’t wait to “get her body back,” to “get her life back.” For just a flicker Veronique’s eyes had met Inez’s; no smile breached their lips. Later Véronique had her in stitches over it; did the woman not know how babies were made? If it was so horrible to have one, why not just avoid it?

The babies, of course, cried loudly, they struggled, they fought for what they needed. Their mothers joggled them furiously in their plastic car seats, poked at them with plastic pacifiers. The babies turned their heads away and howled. It was exhausting to watch. 

More and more her ideas went back to the old days. At home the babies were calm, quiet, alert; they slept or watched everything from their mothers’ backs, while the mothers went about their business unhindered. Here it was all such a production. Her sister, of course, loved all that, loved the high-tech paraphernalia, the electric baby swing, the wireless baby monitor, the microwaved soy formula. When they had gone home for their grandmother’s funeral her sister had looked down on the cousins, their old-fashioned ways, their "superstitious" beliefs; she lectured them about everything, listened to nothing. 

But more and more Inez saw it differently. During her medical training she had been respectful, almost obsequious, in awe of the technology that was available. A cleft palate could be repaired, a heart valve, an obstructed intestine. Deadly metabolic disorders could be identified and treated. Children who would have died in the village could be saved. It had truly seemed miraculous.

But then there was the other side of it. Most of the medical “miracles” were, after all, plumbing problems. Simple. Mechanical. Things you could fix with complex technology and an understanding of life that was crude, rudimentary. Where medicine stumbles into the complexity of life, the balance of things, it can be like –– what was the phrase? Like a bull in a china shop. One intervention leads to another, a tumbling cascade of drugs, procedures, consequences, complications, one after another. A tiny body is placed in a plastic isolette, where her respiration becomes unstable, so she is put on a ventilator, which causes lung damage, so she is given a steroid, which leads to infection or gastrointestinal bleeding or damage to the cerebellum, which leads to — sometimes it just kept going, and didn’t stop, and you had to wonder how this baby would have been if you had not done any of this, if you had just held her and prayed.

Once her grandmother had delivered a baby who came too early, a tiny thing, maybe three pounds. She had put the little creature on the mother’s breast and wrapped them together in warm blankets. Then she went up on the mountain and came back with plants to brew infusions, murmuring prayers and blessings in low tones. The baby had survived. Now scientists had discovered that a woman’s breast could change its temperature by up to two full degrees in response to her baby’s need; if the infant got cooler the mother’s skin would get warmer, and vice versa. They discovered that when a baby is in contact with her mother’s body her cortisol levels go down, her heart rate stabilizes, her blood oxygen saturation improves. When would scientists discover the physiological difference between blessed and unblessed babies? How much longer would that take?

Inez laughed silently. The doctors, of course, would mock her for such a thought. But after all these years spent in the place where a human soul comes into the world, flickers, and then either burns brightly or gutters out, you began to see. Something else is at work, something that has no name in English. 

So much had been forgotten. Inez and Véronique and others like them remembered fragments; the way an old woman’s hands moved, the timbre of her voice, a few of the sayings, aphorisms, herbs. But the heart of it had been displaced; replaced with textbooks on anatomy and physiology and pharmacology. Inez looked down at her hands. The bones and veins were beginning to stand out the way her grandmother’s did when she was a little girl. 

So often she wished she could ask her grandmother’s advice about a patient. She wondered what her grandmother would think of the NICU, the rows of plastic isolettes, the monitors and wires and beeping and lights. Inez did what she could to subvert the chilly mechanical feel of it all, to bring another dimension to her care. What would her grandmother have said? What would she have done? At moments, Inez felt she knew; then she did not know. Sometimes she was almost tormented by this, by the feeling of knowing, and not knowing, like a dream that slips away in the morning before you can remember it.

I am in the way here, the mother says. Is there no other place for us to be?  

She has been sitting in the NICU for long hours every day, holding her little one, in a chair squeezed between the isolettes. Millions of dollars of high-tech equipment in this hospital, Inez thinks, but no place for this woman to sit with her dying baby. 

A small room at the end of the corridor is being used for storage. Inez gets an orderly to move the piles of equipment and boxes of supplies over to one side, squeezes in a hospital bed and a chair. She disconnects the baby from all the tubes and monitors. The mother lies there for hours, holding her little one. She looks almost happy.

Love fills the little room.

Like the odor of food, of flowers, it wafts out into the hallway.

People walking by the room feel it; look over, curious.

Inez hears the parents talking quietly. The father looks questioning, uncertain. The mother’s face is clear, confusion fallen away like rain.

If we had lived two hundred years ago, she says, would it have been better? Or worse?

Later, when Dr. Rao makes her rounds, she says:  

We want to take her home.  

Inez looks at Dr. Rao; Dr. Rao’s look is almost eager. The three women’s eyes meet. Dr. Rao sits down.

Do you think you can do it? 

Yes. The mother repeats it. Yes.

They tell her what will happen; what she will need to do; how it will go. Can you handle it?  

Yes.

Inez can see: this mother is no longer alone. All the trappings of a modern hospital have dissipated like mist on the river at dawn. Gathering around her now, shadows in the little room, are a million mothers who have cradled dying children before her, and a million who will come after. The strength of a million women flows in her veins. There are no words for this, but they all feel it.

It will be exactly how it will be.  

That night I dream I am outside, standing on the street, looking up at the black hospital, at the sky beyond. Then, crossing my field of vision, a skyblue bird flies up and to the right, wings beating the air, free.