A man arrives, introduces himself as Dr. Franklin and takes us to a staff elevator. The ride is freaky because no one says a word, and when we step into a dimly lit hallway, we face a door sign reading: NEUROLOGY ICU. Dr. Franklin says, “Before I take you in to see your daughter, we need to talk.” He leads us into a small cubicle, sits us down.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Mom asks.
“We’re still running tests, but yes.”
He doesn’t even bother to say soothing words. I hold my breath.
Dr. Franklin leans forward, his hands pressed together like someone in prayer. “There’s no way to sugarcoat this. A blood vessel has burst in your daughter’s brain—an aneurysm. Apparently it was a congenital defect, totally undetectable until now. Sort of a mini time bomb she’s carried since birth.”
I struggle to grasp his explanation. A bomb went off inside Bree’s head?
“It can happen to anyone. One day, often without warning, the vessel pops and the person—” He stops the explanation and in the silence even I understand what he’s telling us.
“Briana’s dead?” Mom’s voice quivers. “My daughter is dead?”
“An MRI shows massive irreversible bleeding in her brain. And her eyes are fixed and dilated. Her pupils don’t react when I shine a light in them.”
“Can’t you fix her?” I don’t realize I’ve spoken until they both look at me.
Dr. Franklin shakes his head. “We can’t.”
“And her baby?” Mom asks.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.” He waves his hand, and almost at once, a woman enters the cubicle, closing us in like a spider snagging flies.
She manages a smile, holds out her hand, introduces herself as Dr. Kendrow, head of neonatal intensive care for the hospital. I can’t get my mind around what Dr. Franklin has said, and now there’s another doctor to face. “The baby’s alive and well,” Dr. Kendrow says. “Briana’s on a ventilator and that’s keeping her organs working. Her heart’s strong and young. Youth is on her side. As long as she’s kept alive, as long as she remains on the vent, the baby will be safe.”
Mom looks frightened, and as pale as paper. “Okay.”
I’m still digesting the news that the baby’s all right, and that a machine is keeping my sister’s body working normally. It sounds like something in a sci-fi movie.
Dr. Kendrow reaches for Mom’s hand, holds it loosely in hers. “We estimate the baby to be around twenty-eight to twenty-nine weeks old—too young, too underdeveloped to be born healthy right now. If we perform a C-section tonight, the baby has a poor chance of surviving. Or if she survives, she’ll spend months in ICU and could be permanently handicapped.”
Fresh tears sting my eyes. My sister is dead and her baby is doomed.
“And if you don’t do the C-section?” Mom’s voice is trembling.
“I’m suggesting that Briana remain on the vent for as long as possible. To give her baby a chance to continue developing. Because every day, every hour, every minute the baby can remain in utero, the better her chances for living a normal life once she’s born.”
I think about what she’s saying. A life without a mother. How normal is that? Then I recall the times Mom has encouraged Bree to give up her baby. I hear their arguments. I see the lawyer who came to our home, remember all the times Mom wanted Bree to track down Jerry. My heart pounds and my palms are soaked with sweat. It’s Mom’s decision! Bree’s baby’s life lies in my mother’s arthritis-crippled hands.
She says nothing and I stare at her, waiting for some cue, some kind of signal that she won’t do the unthinkable.
Dr. Kendrow says, “This isn’t without precedent, Mrs. Scanland. In other cases, medical science has kept pregnant women in comas hydrated and nourished until their babies were ready for delivery. We can do the same for your daughter.”
“And then?” Mom’s voice falls to a whisper.
“And then we turn off the machines,” Dr. Franklin says, “and allow her body to join her spirit.”
The air in the cubicle has grown stale and for a moment I feel dizzy.
Mom struggles to her feet. “I want to see my daughter.”
I jump up beside her. “Me too.”
Dr. Franklin nods. “Of course. But let me emphasize…no matter how good she looks to you, a machine is doing the work of Briana’s lungs and is keeping her alive.”
The inside of the unit looks like the images I’ve seen on TV of a space station. A desk in the center is lined with monitors and machines, peopled by nurses dressed in green lookalike clothing. Beds seem to float in the semidarkness, the patients tethered by wires, cords and IV lines. The room sounds mechanical, a spaceship housing human life-forms caught in some weird medical dance. Briana’s bed is pushed off to one side near a wall beside a machine that hisses rhythmically. She lies flat, a contraption taped over her mouth with a hose linking her to the raspy machine.
She looks exactly like she’s sleeping, a princess waiting for her Prince Charming to come and wake her with a kiss. Her hair sprays out wildly on the pillow, her eyes are closed, her belly a swollen mound beneath the covers. Her skin is pale; her hands lie flat on the bed on either side of her body, the nails glowing vivid pink with Luscious Flamingo, her newest favorite shade of polish. I watched her paint it on two nights ago. She’s still wearing her Wal-Mart uniform.
I fight to get my head around the idea that although she looks alive, she isn’t. How can the doctor be so sure? Tests can be wrong! Last year Melody’s mother was told that she had breast cancer. But she didn’t. The lumps were cysts. I remember crying with my friend, then jumping up and down for joy when the truth came out.
I watch Mom pick up Bree’s hand and squeeze it. Bree’s fingers are limp and unresponsive. Mom chokes out, “Oh, my poor baby girl.”
I’ve seen Mom cry over Bree, her wild child, but this time it’s different. Long ago, Mom was pregnant with both Bree and me. Inside Bree’s body, another baby girl lies waiting to be born. That truth twists in me like a knife. I want to save her, keep her safe.
Dr. Kendrow says, “If you decide to maintain your daughter for the sake of the baby, we’ll do a tracheotomy and place the vent tube into her throat. That way her face won’t be obscured by any medical devices.”
Is this the doctor’s way of saying that Bree will look like herself? I think about her being nothing more than a mechanical windup doll, everything looking normal, but without the spark of life. It seems impossible. My tears plop on top of the covers, making a water stain on the dry fabric. I don’t even bother to wipe my eyes. I don’t care if the moisture soaks clear through to Bree’s skin. She’ll never feel it.
Mom says, “She has an obstetrician….”
“We’ll handle everything,” Dr. Kendrow says. “You’re Bree’s mother and she’s a minor. You can speak for her.”
Mom’s hand begins moving tenderly over the contours of Bree’s body. I’m staring at my sister’s abdomen. The blanket jiggles, startling both of us. My breath catches in my throat and I want to shout, See! You’re wrong! She’s not dead!
“The baby’s moving,” Dr. Kendrow says.
My heart sinks as I recall watching Bree’s belly jump while she watched TV beside me on the sofa, and how she would groan and say, “She’s on the move. I’ll never get to sleep tonight.”
I place my open hand atop the blanket spread across Bree’s belly, feel the quivering movement shiver against my palm. Mom puts her hand on mine. Our eyes lock. My mother says, “Keep the baby inside her. Give her every chance to live.”
I’m so grateful that I cry fresh tears.
News about Bree spreads like lightning and within twenty-four hours, casseroles, fresh-baked bread, homemade cookies, cakes and pies begin to appear on our porch. People we hardly know send us cards, notes and flowers. Employees from Wal-Mart show up with a truck on Saturday and unload every piece of nursery furniture that Bree had put on hold at the store.
“We all ch
ipped in and paid for it,” her manager explains to us. “We’d like to set it up for her baby in the nursery. Bree told us all how pretty it is. We’re real sorry about what’s happened to her. Maybe someday her baby will know that her mother chose this just for her. You’ll tell her, won’t you?” Mom and I say we will.
At school, Melody and Stu surround me. They chase away nosy kids with dumb questions, answer questions from teachers and the front office so I don’t have to and help organize a special table in front of the school office for a Bree fund.
My problem is that I start crying when I least expect it. I leave the music room twice when we’re rehearsing the Christmas music. The second time, Mr. Mendoza follows me out. “Susanna, do you want out of the Christmas program? It’s all right if you do. Tiffany Banks can take over your instruments’ parts.”
Tiffany Banks! She can’t play a radio! “I—I can do it, Mr. Mendoza,” I say. “It gives me something to look forward to, you know?” It’s a white lie, but learning the complicated pieces from The Nutcracker keeps my mind busy with something other than my sister and her baby.
He nods. “Listen, Susanna, I’m really sorry about your sister.”
Instantly tears spring to my eyes.
He looks at the floor. “Okay. Back to work.” I know he doesn’t know what else to say. Who does? What can anyone say when a seventeen-year-old girl is declared brain-dead in the prime of her life?
Melody comes over one afternoon, and when Mom goes out, we creep into Briana’s bedroom. I haven’t been inside since her incident, which is what they call it at the hospital. Mom has shut the door and has told me, “We’ll deal with this later.” My sister’s room is a wreck. We see clothes tossed everywhere, the bed unmade, a few kitchen plates with dried food (and ants) and her CD collection stacked atop her dresser on her bedside table and on the floor. “Whoa,” Melody says. “Major earthquake.”
To me it looks as if Briana will be back any minute. When she ran off with Jerry, the room looked sterile and picked over, everything neat and tidy. This scene is the real Briana, and that makes my heart hurt. I begin picking up her clothes, which I either hang up or put away in her dresser.
“Should I help?” Melody asks. She stands in the doorway, looking nervous.
“I’ll do it.” There’s something I want from the room, and picking up stuff will help me find it.
“Are you sure we should be in here?”
“Why not? It’s my sister’s room.”
“Yes, but—”
“If you don’t want to be in here with me, wait in my room,” I say, cutting her off.
“No. I—it’s just kind of freaky, that’s all.”
“Not for me. It’s just stuff, Mellie. It’s not like she’s lying in the bed watching us.”
We both stare at the bed, half expecting Briana to rear up from under the covers.
“If you say so.” Melody wanders around as if she were lost, while I keep working. “What will you do with her stuff?”
“No idea.”
“You all can probably sell a lot of it on eBay.”
I give her a wilting look. “We’re not selling Bree’s things on eBay.”
Melody blushes. “I guess I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No. You shouldn’t have.” I throw off Bree’s bedcovers and find what I’ve been searching for buried under her pillow.
“What’s that?”
“Bree’s booklet about pregnancy called Watch Me Grow. It tells what’s going on with a baby inside the mother week by week.”
“Let me see.” She leans over my shoulder.
This irritates me, but I flip through the booklet and stop at a line drawing of an upside-down baby curled into a ball, its arms crossed and its legs folded against its chest.
“What’s it say?”
“It says, ‘By week thirty-one your baby’s turned around and head down, getting ready to be born.’ It says that ‘the fetus secretes a liquid from a new cell layer that prepares it to breathe air when it’s born.’”
“So it’s breathing water now? Like a fish?”
I roll my eyes. Melody knows so little about babies in utero. “Babies aren’t fish. They can’t breathe at all until they’re born.”
“But it’s still too soon for her to be born, isn’t it?”
I nod. “She doesn’t weigh very much and her lungs need more time to develop. Bree and I keep—” I stop myself. “We kept track of how her baby was growing together. Did you know that a baby can hear noises when it’s inside its mother?”
Melody shakes her head. “That’s awesome. What else?”
I notice that Bree has made notes in the margins of the book—things like I’m getting so fat and It’s a girl and she’ll wear pink and green every day. Hope she gets Sissy’s hair, not kinky like her mama’s, and Wow! My baby moved today! It feels funny, like tickling from the inside out. Suddenly I don’t want to share anything else. My sister’s comments seem too intimate. “We’ll talk about it later.” I tuck the booklet into the band of my jeans and begin making my sister’s bed.
“Why are you doing that?”
I’m not sure myself. “Neatness factor,” I finally say. Yet it does seem stupid. Why make a bed for someone who will never lie in it again?
By November, the mountains turn cold and all the autumn leaves have fallen off the trees. They look naked and hunkered down for the coming winter. The grass turns a dry, dull shade of brown. In Duncanville the annual craft fair is over and the stores are decorated for both Thanksgiving and Christmas at the same time. Thanksmas, Stu calls it. Our band is preparing for the huge Christmas tree sale we hold every year to raise funds for new uniforms, and everyone is asked to sign up for shifts as Santa’s helpers—parents, kids, anyone who can move. The lot is set up next to the gym and the trees are shipped in from Canada. “Extra credit!” Mr. Mendoza says.
Christmas trees are scheduled to begin arriving Thanksgiving week, and when the sign-up sheet is passed around, I see that Stu has written his name next to every Saturday-afternoon slot until Christmas. I know for a fact that Melody has dance classes on Saturday afternoons, so that means Stu and I can work together without her. With my heart thumping, and feeling guilty for not wanting my best friend with us, I hastily write my name below his. I haven’t been alone with him in forever, and I want to be. Despite all I’m going through, I can’t get my feelings for him totally out of my head. He still makes my pulse jump and my insides go squirmy when I look in his eyes.
Mom and I visit the hospital once during the week and again on Sundays.
“You don’t have to come, Sissy,” Mom tells me the first time she prepares to go.
The school bus has dropped me off, and I’ve walked up our dirt driveway from the highway. “I want to come.” I quickly hang my backpack on the newel post of the staircase.
“It’s not like she’ll know we’re there,” Mom says.
“After the baby’s born, I won’t see her again, will I?”
“No.”
“Then I want to come with you every single time you go.” It isn’t as if I can go by myself. For the umpteenth time, I wish I was old enough to drive by myself.
Mom ties a scarf around her neck and tucks the ends into the neckline of her old wool jacket. “If that’s what you want to do, okay. I’ve never tried to cushion you from the hard things in life, Sissy, and you’ve seen your share of hard things. I just want you to know that you have a choice about this one.”
I can’t explain to her that the baby brought Bree and me closer. We talked more than ever before while reading books about the upcoming birth. I found a stash of our old read-aloud books in the attic, and we dusted them off and laughed like crazy over the silly rhymes and goofy pictures. Bree was grateful because I painted the nursery, and because I played my flute over her tummy, and rubbed her feet when they hurt after she’d stood all day long. The past few months have closed the age gap between us. I can’t leave her now. I have no choice at
all.
At the hospital, Dr. Franklin has decided to keep Bree in Neuro ICU because visitors are allowed almost round the clock. True to his word, the tube connecting Bree to the breathing machine has been removed from her mouth and placed in a hole cut into her throat. She lies flat on the bed, her eyes half closed, her skin as smooth as vanilla pudding. “She looks so peaceful,” Mom said the first time we saw her like that.
I touch Bree’s arm. The IV has been removed and a feeding tube inserted so that her baby can be nourished with food and vitamins. Light from the wall beside her bed casts an eerie glow on her pale skin. Her wild hair has been smoothed away from her face and tied back with a red ribbon. I wonder who did that for her.
With the bed and the ventilator and the machines and wires hooked to electrodes monitoring the baby, it’s a tight fit inside Bree’s cubicle. Mom and I stand across from each other with the hissing sounds of the vent squeezing out all other noise. In the large outer room, the nursing staff works. The beds fill and empty routinely as patients pass through. Doctors and lab technicians appear and disappear like smoke. It’s like watching time-lapse photography through the clear glass walls when we visit. Healing is happening all around us, except in this cubicle. In here, my sister lies dead. But within her body, she shelters life, a being that still cannot survive outside her body without a hard-fought struggle and extraordinary medical intervention. In here, my mother and I watch and wait for a child to be born.
Melody’s mother invites Mom and me to join their family, Stu’s family, plus assorted in-laws and cousins for Thanksgiving dinner. This beats our recent Thanksgivings every which way. The Thanksgiving feast was Grandma’s favorite holiday and Bree and I would help her cook, but since her death it’s all changed. Mom roasts a small turkey—a chicken one year—mashes some potatoes, warms some rolls, opens a can of cranberry sauce and presto! Thanksgiving dinner is served. When I see what Melody’s mom and relatives lay out, I miss the old days even more.
Melody, Stu, a cousin and I sit at one of five smaller tables, while Mom and the other adults home in on the main table. No one asks about Briana, which is a relief because I couldn’t talk about it without crying. The only time my sister is brought up is when Melody’s father offers me and Mom a ride to the hospital anytime we want to go and don’t want to drive. He works in the city and says he’ll be glad to drop us off and bring us home after five. I can’t imagine hanging around the hospital all day with nothing to do except listen to my sister’s machine breathe for her.
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