The technician who has run tests on me before this recognizes me right away: “I thought you’d be out of here by now.”
“Don’t get me started,” I tell her. She works efficiently, running the same probe over the same area that she did previously. And before too long, I am back in the hall waiting for someone to transport me back to my room.
“Someone will be here to take you up shortly,” the receptionist says, pushing my wheelchair closer to the wall.
And now I wait.
A TV in the hall blares a Mexican telenovela, which engulfs the voices of some of the other waiting patients. It seems like I’ve been waiting forever. I clear my throat loudly to get anyone’s attention. There are women behind the nurses” station talking about the crab season in Maryland, and I wait, and while I wait, another wave of workers passes me, one of them pushing a tall metal cart of linens with a loose wheel. I think I’m never going to get out of this basement. I think that if I get out of this basement, I could possibly go upstairs, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t think I will ever get out of this hospital. And that baby, what if that baby never has a mother? What if I died right here in this hospital? I’ve thought about dying before, of not waking after an operation, of the funeral I might have and who would be there. But this was different. This time, someone—a helpless, lost being—is looking for me, is waiting for me. That is what I am thinking now in this hallway, with the crab discussion happening in the background. I think I could die here, and no one would find me, not my parents, not Birdie, not Charlie. And now I am suddenly aware of my breath, which is sharp, stabbing at my chest, and while I try to slow it down (deep breath, I think, deep breath), suddenly from my mouth comes the ugliest sound I think I’ve had ever heard myself make. “Urgha!” It wavers in the air like a deflating balloon. And I don’t think it was loud enough for anyone but me to hear, but before I know it, it comes out again, louder. Then suddenly, the nurses call out from the desk. “Miss, you all right, miss?”
“When am I getting out of here?”
“Soon, we’re just waiting for you to have two more x-rays.” Exactly then, tears stream down my face again, and the crab ladies scramble to find someone to push my chair upstairs.
Was this a mistake? That is the question that keeps reemerging when I sit in the room. When I’m back from the basement and suddenly back in the bed I’ve been in for three weeks. I hate myself for considering this question, for even entertaining the thought. How can I think that brilliant, shiny little baby could possibly be a mistake? That she could be anything other than alive, breathing, and loved in this world? And yet, I think, if I lose this kidney, if I lose the one thing that Charlie entrusted with me, maybe it was the wrong decision to get pregnant.
My father rushes into the room. “Babe, your daughter is going home!” His eyes are glassy like marbles, and his laugh is girlish.
“When?” I ask him, trying to smile.
“Today,” he says. “Tonight, I should say.”
This is good news, I tell myself. She was supposed to stay in the NICU for three months past her original due date in June. And now, in the middle of May, she’s going out into the world without me. In a few hours, she’ll see our home, the home that Charlie and I have made for her. The room suddenly gets crowded. Charlie comes in and says, “Did you hear the news?”
“Yes!” I say, feigning excitement.
My mother is on a cell phone with my mother-in-law making a list of all the things they need to buy before tonight. “Changing table,” she says. “Oh, and diapers, formula ... Charlie, do you have any bottles? ... I will check to see what they use at the NICU.”
Charlie and my father make arrangements over keys and when Charlie will drive her and who will spend the night helping him. A nurse comes in to check on my IV fluids. I watch them all from my bed, and I want it all to stop. I don’t want Birdie to go home without me. I want to be there. I want the world to stop until I get out of here. If I get out of here.
They leave in a hurry, kissing me on the forehead on their way out. “I’ll be right back,” Charlie says. “I’m just going to install the car seat. But I’ll be back before I pick her up.”
As soon as he leaves, I press the call button and tell the nurse on duty that I am in pain. I just want that feeling in my shoulders again.
When Charlie comes back, I’m out of it again.
“Did you take another one of those pain meds?” he asks.
I nod.
“Hello? Can you even speak?” he says, his jaw tensing up. “Enough of this. No more.”
He presses the call button and asks to see my nurse. I hear him tell her that I can’t have any more of this medicine. He won’t allow it.
“It’s written in the doctor’s orders,” the nurse says. “I’m her husband, and I’m telling you it’s making her crazy,” he says.
Birdie has been home for four days. She has had a parade of visitors, and my parents tell me that my niece Genevieve has tied pink balloons all along our brick porch to celebrate her arrival.
Charlie reports back from the first ride home from the hospital with his baby girl in the backseat. He says he is convinced that 65 percent of the drivers on the road are completely drunk and trying to kill him and his daughter. A guy nearly sideswiped her side of the car on Roland Avenue, he says, and I imagine Charlie taking big, exaggerated turns so the car doesn’t come near the curb, and I picture him driving cautiously slow, like an old man, down a busy street with the cars honking at him, unmoved by other drivers” curses and gestures. He says he got her home safely, and with his mother’s help, learned how to spend the night giving the Little Bird tiny bottle feedings every few hours.
I am happy that he is learning the ropes, but I am so jealous. Even though I know I am alive, I feel like I am dead. I feel like I died in childbirth, and Birdie will grow up to be one of those motherless children who has to be raised by someone other than the woman who gave birth to her. What good is a mother if she is not there, if she misses those vital first days? Birdie needs to come home, but I do not want her there without me.
This illness is making me selfish. Shouldn’t a mother be selfless? Shouldn’t a mother want what is best for her child? This illness is making me cruel. Is this the person I have become?
The doctor who speaks in whispers and circles has stopped coming around, and another doctor—a young, good-looking Chinese man—enters the picture. Before he speaks, he walks into my room in his lab coat one night and paces back and forth by the foot of my bed. He rattles the change in his pockets. Behind him, a fluorescent light is shining on Birdie’s picture, her little face.
“I’m feeling a little pessimistic about this kidney coming back,” he says. He stops his pacing and looks at me squarely across the bed. “I think we’ve tried everything we can.”
At first, when I hear his words, I only feel relief. I am losing Charlie’s kidney and the first thing I think is: Let it go. I can feel my shoulders fall.
“You’re young, you’re a new mom. You’re the perfect candidate for another transplant, so I’m confident you’ll get one.”
“I don’t even want to think about a transplant right now,” I tell him. “I just want to get home to my baby.”
“Understandable. But, really, you should. You’re not going to want to be a mother and have to go on dialysis. I’m going to recommend you to the transplant coordinator.”
Transplant, coordinator, list, whatever. I can’t conceive of a transplant right now. I can’t quite yet conceive the idea of someone replacing Charlie’s kidney.
I tell Charlie the news when he comes in that evening.
“About time,” he says. Then he stands up and lifts the bedding off my legs. “Let’s go!”
“Wait, they’re getting my paperwork. They’re trying to find a dialysis center for me to go to.” I’m excited to go home, but when I say this, it hits me what else I’m going home to. “Dialysis again, Charlie.”
“It might be
temporary. Maybe the kidney will kick back. And if not, remember, you’ve got a baby girl waiting for you. She needs you right now. And dialysis—we’ll get through it.” He stands there already looking exhausted, yet undaunted by what’s ahead.
“Who’s going to take care of her while I’m at my treatments? How am I going to get to dialysis? We’ll need lots of help. I’ll need help just holding her.”
“I don’t care what it takes,” Charlie says. “I just want my Moonface back.”
Chapter Seventeen
The Ornithological Wonder in the Sphere of Possibility
I am almost scared of her. My parents drive me home from the hospital, and I walk into the house that night with all my clothes in a plastic bag. The balloons Genevieve had strung along our porch for Birdie’s homecoming are now deflated and barely hanging above the ground. There are packages addressed to “Nico Carmen O”Doyle” on the porch. This person gets mail. She owns things. She probably has a checkbook.
Inside, I feel like I have just missed the party, that the main attraction has come and gone. There are more boxes on the living room floor filled with tiny outfits with the tags still attached. The dog is asleep on gift-wrapping paper.
Still overweight with fluid, I cannot yet carry my weight gracefully. But I make my way upstairs, with my father’s help.
“One step,” he says, one of his hands holding mine and the other one under my elbow. “Another step. Slow, babe, one step at a time.”
When I get to the top of the stairs, I see her nursery that we had painted bright orange and the crib that I had begged Charlie to assemble for months. He finally put it together one Sunday, and three days later, Birdie was born. Once, in the hospital, he said, “See, I should have waited ten more weeks.”
Her room is filled with our moving boxes that have never been unpacked, a desk, a file cabinet. Her room is not yet hers.
Our bedroom is blue, and it glows with a soft reading light in the corner. Next to the bed is the small bassinet in which someone has laid out a soft pink flannel blanket. And on the bed, Charlie lies down on his side and curls up next to Birdie’s small mound. She sleeps with her nose pressed to his arm.
“Here she is! There is Mommy!” he whispers. I am scared I will make her cry, or that she will not remember me, or that maybe I am someone different now than on the day she was born. Maybe twenty-six days apart has made us strangers. But when I slide in next to her, there it is: that face! Her eyes are tiny bulges still, bubbles on her skin. Her lips are thin folds, moist with milk. Her nose is enormous compared with the rest of her features. She breathes so quietly. I hold her under her neck and under her diaper, and set her head against my chest. She rolls her face back and forth into my skin, but she does not cry.
My parents” feet are creaking on the floorboards downstairs as they escape and let us be alone together. I hold her for as long as I can before she gets hungry, and then Charlie and I spend the rest of the night hunched over her bassinet like two kids looking into a box of baby chicks.
Charlie has to go to work the next morning, and he tells me that someone will be here to help me with the baby, but they won’t arrive until ten or so. “Who will it be?” I ask him.
“I don’t know. The grandmothers have it worked out.”
He is supposed to leave at eight, so I have two hours of being a mother on my own, though I don’t know where to begin. Charlie teaches me her morning routine. He teaches me how to be a mother. He gave her the three and six o’clock feedings the night before, and I watched him, now an adept father, hold her head in the crook of his arm and put the tiny bottle gingerly to her lips.
“Bottles first,” he says, taking little prepackaged bottles from a shopping bag and placing them on the nightstand. “She’s up to ten CCs of formula. Isn’t that great?”
“Yes!” I say, trying to remember how many CCs she drank in the hospital. The truth is that I don’t know how much better ten CCs of formula is than what she had at the hospital. When I left her, she wasn’t yet drinking from a bottle.
“Just make sure she finishes the whole amount. She’s almost five pounds, Moonface. She’s getting up there. I’ve been telling her she’s got to drink more. I say to her, ”What if you grow up and you want to be a lawyer? What are you going to do? Be a five-pound lawyer all your life? Who’s going to hire a five-pound lawyer?” ”
I picture our Little Bird in a tiny business suit, toddling around on skinny legs, and holding the smallest attache imaginable. Just then, she farts loudly into my hand.
“Oh, and she farts a lot,” Charlie chuckles. “A chip off the old stinky block. Now here’s how you swaddle her,” Charlie says. “We’ve got all these blankets that the NICU sent us home with. The nurses said that Birdie feels better when she’s swaddled because it simulates the womb.”
“I hope it’s a more welcoming womb than mine,” I say under my breath.
“I don’t think it was your womb that was the problem, Debbie Downer. Now watch. You go like this.” He lays out a blanket in a folded triangle. “Here,” he says, reaching for our baby. I pass her to him, and the hand-off is awkward. “You put her in here.” He gently places her in the middle of the upside-down triangle, and then folds one end over the other.
“That’s too tight,” I say.
“No, she likes it.” Then he hands her back to me. Her lips begin to suckle, then relax. She is still asleep and having tiny baby dreams.
“Onward! Diapers! Our moms bought a changing table. It’s ugly, but we can buy another one later. Come in here.”
He walks toward her room, and Birdie and I follow. She is lying across my arms, her neck on the inside of my elbow. I trail behind Charlie, and I forget that the doorway that leads to her room is narrow. As we pass through, her head knocks against the wooden doorframe and she lets out the cry of a squeaky toy being stepped on. I don’t want Charlie to hear what I’ve done so I cough and clear my throat until she stops.
“You okay?” he says.
“Yup,” I say, holding her head to ease her pain.
The table is ugly and not what I have dreamed for her nursery, but on it, Charlie shows me how to put the diapers on her and how to sponge bathe her. As he gives me instructions on how he prefers to do things, I think I could be the babysitter right now, the one getting the run-through of what to do while the parents are gone.
I am scared when he leaves.
“You’ll be fine,” Charlie says.
I nod.
“It’s easy. Just be with her. That’s all you have to do. One of our mothers will be here by ten, so you’ll have help. They’ll know what to do.”
After he leaves, I lay her down on our bed and we sleep until help arrives.
It’s a Friday, so I have the weekend to rest and be with her until my dialysis treatments start on Monday. I lie down in the bed beside her, but my mind doesn’t rest trying to put the pieces of this bleak picture together. My parents have practically moved into the hotel down the street, but soon they’ll have to get back home to Pennsylvania. They will have to get back to their own lives. My mother-in-law lives an hour away, but she has not yet retired from her job. Charlie has taken so many days off over the past weeks. I still can’t drive because of my wound and the cumbersome fluid under my skin. I can’t bring Birdie to my treatments with me. Right now, we are two needy babies; neither of us can fend for herself.
She is five pounds, but I still lift her with some effort. A lump in my arms. Because my trunk and my legs are still so watered down, I can’t navigate my body like I used to before I was pregnant. In the mornings, when it’s time to make a bottle for her, I hold her and we practically slide down the stairs together, my back pressed against the wall for support. Slowly we go, sidestepping the whole staircase. Our nights are broken up into three-hour intervals, and for every feeding I try to lift her out of the bassinet, almost pulling her body across the soft edge and onto our bed.
I have a dream one night. I dream that I am wading in
water. It must be an ocean, but the water seems more brown than blue. There is a pier extending from the beach. I can’t see Charlie or Birdie, just some men on the shore. One man has long hair and a beard. A wave rises and falls. But then another wave comes and it does not stop. I try to hold my ground, but it just keeps coming, and it seems like the rush of water is never going to end. When will this wave break? I think to myself, as I push against the water with my arms so my head doesn’t go under. The man with the beard calls out, “Duck out, everyone!” I know at that moment that this is a tsunami and that this wave will probably not break anytime soon. My eyes must be filled with panic because the man with the beard reaches over to me, grabs my hand, and says, “This way!” We swim underneath the pier in search of an air pocket or somewhere to breathe. Soon we are underwater, and I am holding my breath. All I can see is the brown water and sand particles floating past. I am waiting for us to come up for air. Waiting, waiting, being guided by this man’s hand the whole time. I’m not sure if we never come up for air or if I wake up before we have a chance to.
In the morning, I sit up against the headboard before Charlie wakes.
“You okay?” he says as he stretches and yawns. “Is it nine o’clock already?” He looks over me and into Birdie’s bassinet. “Is she breathing?”
I shake my head, but not at his question. “I just can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’m on dialysis again. I can’t believe the kidney failed. How did this happen?” I say.
“Well,” Charlie says, pulling himself upright, “you’d better believe it. You’re on dialysis for now. You’ve got to accept it, Moony. I feel bad about it. I’m so sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Because my kidney didn’t make it. The little German didn’t pull through. It’s a shame.”
“But that’s not your fault,” I tell him.
“Yeah, well, it’s not your fault either. It just happened. Things have to happen to make room for other things.” He stretches and yawns again, still trying to wake up.
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