by Holly Cupala
I thought I would be able to recognize Lexi anywhere, a mirror of my own self. But I had only seen her for a split second, covered with white fuzz, before they’d whisked her away from me. Now, faced with twenty possibilities, I wasn’t so sure.
But there she was, in the ventilator and cushioned by folds and folds of white blanket, a plastic tube taped to her nose and a diaper looking like it might swallow her whole. Skin so gold-eny pink, like mine after a summer visiting my dad’s parents in Arizona, brownish hair sprouting in a damp mass from the top of her head and feathering into wisps on her forehead. A lot of hair, like Kamran—the color a cross between mine and his. Sweet, tiny lips. Eyes closed. A circle of cord taped where her heart would be.
I was in awe.
“I’ll check if you can see her.”
“Is it okay? Or is she too…” I didn’t know what. I only knew I was afraid to go anywhere near her, afraid she might shatter.
The nurse went to talk with the NICU staff while I watched through the glass.
A warm presence came up beside me, and I turned to see Shelley there, smelling like pancakes.
“Sorry I left while you were sleeping. I had to call my family and grab a bite.”
“DaShawn!” I had forgotten all about him. “Oh my gosh, it’s Christmas. You have to go home.”
“I’ll go soon. But I wanted to check in on you first. She’s a beautiful baby. She has the look of you, I think. What’s her name?”
“Lexi,” I answered, like a magic spell threatening to break.
“It’s a beautiful name. Does it mean something special?”
“It was my sister’s name. Alexandra. Xanda.”
“Xanda’s Angel.” A look of knowing passed over Shelley’s face. “You must have been close.”
I couldn’t get past the lump in my throat to answer.
“I talked with your mom when I came in yesterday. Before I realized…” Her voice trailed off. “I hate to leave you here by yourself on Christmas. Do you want me to call someone for you?”
The nurse signaled through the glass. Lexi was waiting. “No thanks, I’ll spend Christmas with Lexi…but will you come back?”
“Of course. Can I bring DaShawn?”
I nodded as the nurse came to wheel me into the NICU.
Thirty-nine
Shelley came back with DaShawn—the day after Christmas, and the day after that, and nearly every day until New Year’s. I wasn’t quite sure what to say to DaShawn, so I bought his eternal loyalty with Popsicles from the hospital fridge. When I asked about my job, Shelley said, “Don’t worry about it, we’ll get a temp to fill in for you. The job will be yours whenever you can come back.” DaShawn brought his stuffed giraffe for Lexi, because, he said, “I don’t really need Raffe anymore.”
Lexi made it through the first, critical forty-eight hours—with me sitting by her ventilator for most of them. Wrapped in wires and tubes, she looked like one of Kamran’s cyborg sci-fi heroes. I used up another bar of cell-phone battery taking pictures of her and ran across the picture of stained-glass Jesus. I forgot it was there, all this time.
“If she can make it through the first few days, she has an excellent chance,” the NICU nurse told me. “And the more time you spend with her, the better she will do. When she’s stabilized, you can hold her skin to skin.”
Until then, I could stay by her side. They moved me out of Labor and Delivery and into Recovery, then to a tiny room with a cot down the hall from the NICU. “You can stay here until we need the room.” A nurse gave me a tour of the area—a shower in the restroom, a coffee maker, a vending machine. After six months of chowing my weight in peanut butter, I couldn’t bring myself to eat a bite.
I watched my daughter in the ventilator, where nothing could touch her but the wires and needles, taped to skin as thin as paper. She was even smaller than the giraffe I was holding—pink and mottled with hands like a doll’s.
Xanda was a preemie, too. Had my parents been in my place, wondering if their baby would live or die? I couldn’t picture it.
“You can talk to her,” said my ob-gyn when she dropped by. “She knows your voice—she’s been hearing you for months.”
“What do I say?”
“Anything. Sing her a song. Tell her you love her. Tell her about your life. If you can’t touch her skin, you can touch her with your voice.”
I waited until we were alone in the ward, except for the occasional nurse scurrying past to check one of the monitors on the babies. The one in the jacket had jaundice, the light helping his body to process the excess bilirubin. Lexi’s skin was still too delicate for the light jacket, too raw for even the lightest touch. Another had a huge hematoma on the back of her head, but at least she was fat and healthy.
The shaking baby was gone. I didn’t know what happened to him.
Sing a song, the ob-gyn had said. She didn’t know what she was asking for. I can’t sing. Not in church, not onstage, not in an empty hospital wing with only an audience of infants. But the babies didn’t care. They just needed a song.
I tried out the lines of Xanda’s favorite Splashdown song. “‘If they try to clip your wings…’” My voice cracked. The baby in the light jacket’s chest raised and lowered, alone under the UV lamp. “‘Fly away, far away,’” I sang again, “‘I know why the caged bird sings.’”
Lexi lay there, maybe listening, maybe not. Please God, I thought as I breathed out another line of the song, let her hear me. Maybe you can show me she’s listening. I watched for some sign from her, wrapped in all of those tubes and wires. An IV in her leg seemed thicker than her fingers. My leg ached, too, where the needle stuck out of her, getting in the way of my song.
“‘I’ll await my next escape to meet…’” The words stuck in my throat. “This is stupid. You can’t hear me.”
“‘To meet with you again.’” I broke off, pressing my hands against the glass and willing her to feel them. “‘You can’t go, baby.’” The words escaped at little above a whisper.
This wasn’t about Xanda anymore, whether or not the baby was her gift, or if she was the beginning or the end. Lexi hooked into my heart with tendrils like talons, tearing it out with every breath she couldn’t take on her own.
I didn’t know it would be like this.
In that moment, she stretched her neck, wrinkled like an elephant’s trunk, and rolled her head toward me. The eyes, closed in tiny, lashless slits, opened—slightly at first, then all the way. Pupils, bright blue—the color of hope.
“Can you hear me?” I whispered. She blinked. Once, twice. Still looking, waiting for me to speak.
This labyrinth I had been traveling wasn’t Xanda’s—it was mine. My own daughter, who I thought was the bird to transport me away, wasn’t the bird at all. She couldn’t transport anyone, not even herself.
That was the beginning of my conversations with Lexi. As the jaundiced baby and the hematoma baby’s parents came and went and new babies came through, I stayed with Lexi, quietly pouring out my heart. I drank coffee to keep myself awake, to keep myself talking. Singing. Telling her everything. By now the nurses knew better than to tell me to eat or rest. I couldn’t tear myself away.
I took as many pictures as I could, until the battery on my cell phone went dead with the rhythmic vibration of seventeen messages waiting.
They brought a stack of board books. I couldn’t read Goodnight Moon, or any of the good-night stories, for that matter. I focused on the love stories. Guess How Much I Love You. The Runaway Bunny. She was my bunny, trying to run away. But I wouldn’t let her. Morning and night, I stood by her ventilator and touched the glass for days, for weeks, hoping she could feel my presence cradling her.
“Is it helping?” I demanded when the ob-gyn came to see me.
“Yes, it’s helping. It’s important just for her to know you are here.” Her lips tightened. “You’ll have to keep coming even now that you’re discharged. You can stay as long as you like, except for during the nur
se rounds and nights.”
“Wait a second. You’re kicking me out?”
She nodded grimly. “This is a busy hospital. You’ve been here for three weeks now, a lot longer than—”
I knew I couldn’t camp out indefinitely. But now? “What about Lexi?”
“You can still use the parent facilities when you’re here, and there’s the waiting room.” She picked up the copy of The Runaway Bunny and thumbed through the pages. “The nurses said your mom came by again.”
“I don’t care.”
“I’m sure you could go home, if you wanted to.” She opened to the page with the bunny on the tightrope wire. “Your mom cares about you, even if she doesn’t know how to show it. Just like you care for that baby.”
“She’s nothing like me,” I spat. “She would be happier if this baby died.” Wasn’t she happier that Xanda died?
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
But she didn’t know what I knew. Andre didn’t kill Xanda—she jumped. She pulled the door open, she jumped from a moving car. Maybe escaping to Hollywood wouldn’t have been enough. Maybe she had to escape forever.
I watched Lexi in the ventilator, struggling in the tangle of threads keeping her tiny heart pumping. Every moment she lived meant another gram of hope.
She was going to live. We were both going to. And we were going to go where Xanda couldn’t.
Forty
I spent the next couple of weeks living at the hospital like a homeless person—taking showers in the NICU bathroom, using hospital soap, wearing a hospital gown, pants, and robe and swapping them out whenever I could, using the shampoo left behind by other NICU parents. I slept in the NICU waiting room until the security guard started hounding me. Then I moved to Oncology, Cardiology, Urology…anywhere I could find an empty bench and a security guard out to lunch. Going home was not an option.
Coffee and Jell-O from the hospital fridge kept me from starving, plus whatever Shelley brought me when she visited—usually a bag full of pretzels, fruit roll-ups, and trail mix. She couldn’t come into the NICU with me, but we could sit together at the window outside.
I had just come from a ketchup and cream cheese raid in the cafeteria when I heard a voice that could freeze my soul: “But I’m her grandmother!”
I stopped in my tracks and backed around the corner. As far as I knew, there was no alternate route to the NICU—my mother formed a wall between us. I peeked around the corner. I had a quarter view of her face—enough to see the tightness of her mouth and the judgment in her eyes. She wore her navy wool coat and clutched a paper bag brimming with clothes.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” a nurse was saying, “but you could be the president and we wouldn’t be allowed to let you in without the parent’s express permission. And she has asked for privacy.” The nurse shook her head, brows downcast. “I really am very sorry. I wish there was something I could do.”
“Well, there is. You can tell her—tell her, her mother…her mom came by to see her. And the baby. A girl? What’s the baby’s name?”
The nurse sighed. “Lexi,” she said.
My mom’s face turned white, jaw dropped. “As in, Alexandra?”
“I think so. But really, I’m not even supposed to give out that kind of information.” The nurse began to turn away. “I’ll tell her you were here.”
“Thank you.”
“But…you should keep trying. She might change her mind.”
My mother huffed. I was already backing away, before she could storm right into me on her way to the elevator. I ducked into the restroom around the corner and locked myself in the farthest stall.
Seconds later, the door opened with a whoosh.
Damn.
Slam. She was in the first stall, yanking toilet paper out of the holder like Rapunzel’s witch mother yanking on her hair.
“I don’t believe this,” she muttered, but the end of the sentence caught. All the things she used to say to Xanda echoed in my head: dressed like a streetwalker…playing with fire…don’t you see what you’re doing to your life?
I knew what I was doing, and Lexi would be with me.
Her door swung wide and crashed into the block of stalls, rattling the metal walls around me like a little earthquake. I imagined her peering through the half inch of space between the stalls with X-ray eyes—suspicious, hungry.
Instead, she went to the mirror. And what I saw was the last thing I expected.
The mask she wore, tightened and steeled against the world, slipped as she stared at herself. She blotted her eyes—rimmed red—with the wad of tissue and wiped the hair away from her face. She looked more than sad. She looked frightened, the same face I had seen on myself the day I came home last summer. Then the moment passed, making me question whether I had seen it at all. One final sniff, and she had disappeared behind that old door—NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY.
I stayed in the stall until my legs tingled, long after she was gone. But her presence was still in the room, a pair of eyes watching. I didn’t dare look into the mirror as I rushed out of the bathroom. Who knew what eyes would be staring back at me.
Nik would show up in a few hours. Maybe by then I wouldn’t be shaking.
She brought me a curried egg-salad sandwich from home. I scarfed it down while we looked through the window at Lexi. The baby had gained a pound since she had been born, going from a scrawny pink stick baby to a slightly less scrawny peachy one. Some days they put her in the light jacket to keep her from getting jaundiced.
“If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” said Shelley. “She’ll be like that for the rest of your life.”
“You mean parenting?” I asked, rolling my eyes. Suddenly everyone had parenting advice for me.
“I mean the feeling that her life is out of your control.” She smiled and patted me on the head, “Which is to say, yes. Parenting.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, actually,” I said, taking another giant chomp of the sandwich. “Oooh, you brought chips, too. Thanks.” I dove into the bag and crunched happily. I guess I was hungrier than I had realized.
“I just wondered…you’ve been coming here so much…is it bothering you to see Lexi and me? I mean, this has got to be painful. I don’t know,” I finished lamely.
But Shelley didn’t grab the chips or take off running. Instead, she put her arm around me and squeezed my shoulders. “You’ve come a long way to ask that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I think you have to get to a certain place, get past your own needs to care about somebody else like that. So, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I shrugged, loosening my grip on the chips. “What I wanted to ask, though…remember what you said about the future?”
“You mean when you were screaming?” She smiled.
“Yeah. Well, I wanted to know what you meant.” All at once, everything juggling in my head for all these months came spilling out. I told her about Kamran’s wormholes, and about the whys and hows of choices, hoping I managed to make sense.
“So what you said—about reasons being in the future,” I finished in a jumble, “what did you mean?”
These were Nik kinds of questions. The kind you could ask someone who had lost something huge. A sister. Or a baby.
“Life is constantly weaving together, and we can look back and see all of the threads. Like your boyfriend’s wormhole theory, except backward. We don’t always know why things happen until down the road. That’s what I meant.”
My head was spinning like it did after Lexi came and I didn’t have enough blood in my veins.
“Maybe she’s going to die because I messed everything up. Living with me would be a punishment anyway.”
For the first time, Shelley looked like she might very well hit me. “Don’t talk like that. Living is not a punishment.”
“It takes a lot of faith to think like that.”
“Yes, I suppose it does.”
I was skeptical.
Even though I wanted to believe what she was saying, to give some meaning to what happened to Xanda, what was happening to Lexi. “What about Micah James? Do you think you’ll find some reason for him?”
I knew I sounded angry, and I was—for Xanda’s death, the randomness of it, at Xanda for making the choice to jump out of the car, at my mother for driving Xanda away, at my father for introducing Andre to us. At the wrong turns I had taken, landing me without a sister, a friend, and a boyfriend and leaving me with a baby I wasn’t even sure I could take care of, one that may or may not live. How could she talk about reasons?
“If something happened differently,” I said, “maybe Micah James would still be here. Maybe Xanda would be, too. Why do these things happen?”
“I don’t know. But I do know if it wasn’t for Micah James, I might not be here with you.”
Forty-one
Lexi went from the ventilator to the incubator, upgraded out of critical status. I could hold her close to my skin, tucked onto my chest, helping to stabilize her breathing, heart rate, and the strange twitches the nurses told me were common to premature babies who didn’t yet have muscle control.
“Now that she can breathe on her own,” said the pediatrician, “you’re almost out of the woods. We’re pleased with her progress so far. Another month, and she might be able to go home.” Until then, the more I held her, the faster she grew. When I wasn’t evading the hospital security guards or the nurse rounds, I spent a lot of time in the NICU rocking chair.
The day they declared Lexi could have visitors was the day Shelley brought cupcakes—plus her old “skinny” pants (still huge on me) and a couple of First Washington Credit Union T-shirts. Gold wasn’t my color, but it was better than stolen hospital gowns. When I told her about my mom’s visit, she said sometimes people’s sadness looked like anger and judgment. What I didn’t tell her about was the security guard finding me in an empty patient bed and chasing me all the way to the cafeteria.
On her eight-week birthday, Lexi was almost old enough to graduate from the hospital. The doctors were guessing another week, as long as she passed a critical series of tests. I dropped several hints to Shelley that brownies would be an excellent way to celebrate. More and more hours of the day were spent rocking Lexi, touching her skin tenderly and singing softly—every song I could think of, and when I couldn’t think of any, I made them up. I was singing “Happy Birthday”—quietly and off key—when the nurse came into the room and said, “You have a visitor.” I cuddled Lexi further into myself and sang, “Happy brownies for meeeee, happy brownies for meeeee.”