This is it, I thought. I was finally going to meet my little girl.
20
July 2001
“You’re doing beautifully,” the nurse said in my ear. “Push! That’s it. That’s it. Good, Caroline. Very good.”
I held the nurse’s hand in a death grip. I would never let her leave my side. I couldn’t remember her name. Donna? Diana? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was there. At that moment, her voice in my ear, her hand in mine, was all that was keeping me sane and grounded against the pain. I was having a quick labor, she’d told me. A short labor. Progressing very well. It didn’t seem short to me. It seemed to last a lifetime and the pain was the least of it. I knew Joanna was fine inside me, but I was terrified about sending her out into the world where I could no longer control what happened to her. I felt unbearably alone. The desperate longing I felt for Joe to be there with me seemed never-ending. I wanted him to be the person whispering in my ear that I was doing well. I wanted him to tell me he was right there with me. Right there. There were moments—crazy moments—when I actually thought he was there. Behind all the medicinal smells of the labor room, I was certain I detected his aftershave.
I reached for Joanna when she was born. Reached for her beautiful, glistening, pale—too pale?—little body. Someone held her close enough to me that I could touch her foot, but that was all I could do before she was whisked away into the hands of the gaggle of pediatric specialists waiting to examine her.
I must have fallen asleep after she was born—had they given me something? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I woke up in a room by myself, attached to an IV, the sound of babies crying in the distance. I gasped, remembering. Joanna. Where was she? Was she all right?
I gazed at my fingers. I could still feel the silkiness of her foot against my fingertips. I looked from my hand to my arm, where the IV tethered me to a pole that rose above my bed. I needed to be set free. I needed to find my baby.
I fumbled around on the bed until I found a call button for the nurse. I was already sitting up, woozy-headed, my legs dangling over the side of the bed when she arrived. She nearly bounced into the room.
“Ready to use the bathroom?” she asked. She was younger than me. Petite. Blond. Too perky, though I saw that as a good sign. Would she be perky if Joanna was not okay?
“I just want to see my baby,” I said.
“One step at a time,” she said, checking a machine attached to my IV pole. “Let’s get you cleaned up and then you can visit her.”
“Is she all right?” I asked.
“They’ll be able to update you on her condition when you go over there,” she said.
An unsatisfactory answer, I thought, and I was ready to head out the door and find my own way to the nursery, but I felt so shaky when I stood up that I knew she was right. She unhooked me from the IV and I let her lead me into the bathroom, where I rushed through brushing my teeth and washing up as quickly as I could. My hair was a straggly mess and I didn’t bother to comb it. My whole body ached.
The nurse had a wheelchair ready for me when I came out of the bathroom, along with a robe made of the same thin fabric as the hospital gown. I slipped awkwardly into the robe, my hands and arms so tremulous that I had trouble finding the sleeves. Then I sat down in the chair, wincing from the pain, and the nurse pushed me into the hallway.
After a short distance, we entered a small foyer, the walls lined with lockers and a couple of sinks. Through the large glass windows, I could see into the nursery, which was filled with wall-to-wall isolettes and recliners and people dressed in yellow gowns. I knew immediately which isolette held my baby because it was surrounded by the yellow-gowned people, masks over their noses and mouths, yellow hats covering their hair. Doctors and nurses.
“Is that her?” I asked my nurse. “What are they doing to her?”
“Perfectly normal,” she reassured me. “There are always lots of tests when a new baby comes to the CICU.”
“Sick-U?” I asked.
“PCICU, technically,” she said. “This is the Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Unit.”
A dark-haired nurse who looked to be in her mid-thirties opened the door between the foyer and the CICU. She smiled at me. “Who’s this?” she asked the nurse pushing my chair.
“I’m Joanna’s mother,” I said, those wonderful words leaving my mouth for the first time. “Joanna Sears’s mother.”
“Welcome,” the nurse said. “I’m Celeste Purvis. I’ll be Joanna’s primary nurse for the next few days.”
I loved that she used Joanna’s name so easily. My baby had been real to me from the moment I knew I was pregnant. Now she was real to someone else.
“She’s being evaluated,” Celeste continued. “She had a little trouble breathing when she first arrived but we’ve stabilized her and she’s being hooked up to monitors right now. You won’t be able to get very close but you can come in and watch if you like.”
“Yes, absolutely,” I said.
“I’ll be back in a little while,” the nurse pushing my chair told me. She squeezed my shoulder and left.
“You need to wash your hands really well,” Celeste said. She instructed me to use some special antiseptic soap up to my elbows for two full minutes. She told me I had to remove my wedding rings and Hunter’s chronometer before I washed, although she said I could put them back on when I finished. I stayed in the wheelchair while I scrubbed. I couldn’t seem to stop trembling or move my gaze from where the crowd in yellow stood around my baby.
Once I’d dried my hands and put the rings and watch back on, Celeste helped me slip into one of the yellow gowns.
“Are you okay to walk or would you rather use a wheelchair?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. I just wanted to get to Joanna.
Celeste must have seen that I was not as fine as I said. She held my elbow as she opened the door to the nursery and we walked inside. I was immediately assaulted by the sound of alarms going off and the wail of babies crying. We walked toward Joanna’s cubicle, passing some unbelievably tiny infants, no bigger than my hand, in their isolettes.
Curtains were pulled around some of the cubicles, but not Joanna’s. Celeste guided me closer, but there was no way I could see my baby through the sea of people surrounding her.
“This is Joanna’s mom,” Celeste interrupted them. “Can she say hello to her daughter for a second?”
The people turned to look at me, only their eyes visible between their masks and hats, and I realized there were only four of them. Two men and two women. I looked past them to my daughter as Celeste nudged me closer to the isolette.
I knew she would be connected to some monitors and perhaps to oxygen, and yet the sight of my baby wearing only a diaper and a pink hat, hooked up in a dozen different ways, was more shocking than I’d expected. There was a sort of masklike device on her face holding things in place. A tube in her nose. Another in her mouth. A network of wires crossed her little chest and tummy, and another tube ran into her navel. I couldn’t even see her face behind the mask. She lay still and quiet, eyes closed. Sedated, I was sure. My throat tightened and I heard myself whimper. The muscles in my legs shook as I reached over the side of the isolette to touch her cheek with the back of my fingers. She was perfect beneath all the paraphernalia, I was certain. I felt tears roll silently down my own cheeks.
They were speaking to me, those people in yellow, but their voices were a white noise in my head.
“… and we’re keeping an eye on it,” one of them said.
“I’m your daughter’s cardiologist,” a woman said. She was not the pediatric cardiologist I’d been seeing during my pregnancy. “Give me a few more minutes with her and then we can talk.”
“Talk about…?” I asked.
“The condition of her heart,” she said. I couldn’t read her expression from her eyes alone. “She looks quite good,” she reassured me, “but we need more information.”
“All ri
ght,” I whispered.
From somewhere, Celeste produced a wheelchair and I sank into it. She pushed me to a lounge at the side of the CICU. The room held six green recliners, small tables between them. Celeste sat on the edge of one of the chairs, while I remained in the wheelchair.
“She weighs six pounds, two ounces,” Celeste said, as if to make conversation. I thought they’d told me that in the delivery room, but I couldn’t remember. “And her APGAR scores were pretty good, given what she’s been through.”
“Is she going to be all right?” I asked, cutting to the chase.
“She’s off to a good start,” Celeste hedged. “Let’s see what Dr. Wynn has to say.”
“Can I go back to her?” I looked toward the door. We’d only been in the lounge a few minutes, but I already wanted to go back. Why was I in here when my heart was out there?
“Yes, as soon as they’re finished evaluating her, you can spend as much time with her as you like and I’ll explain what all those things she’s connected to are doing for her. It’ll be less intimidating once you know. Before we do that, though, you’ll need to return to your room to have your breakfast and get ready to be discharged.”
“I don’t care about breakfast.” I waved a hand through the air dismissively. I didn’t want to go back to my room. I wanted to stay as close to Joanna as they’d let me.
“I understand your husband passed away,” Celeste said, bringing my attention back to the lounge.
I nodded. They’ve been talking about me, I thought. About how I’m alone.
“But you have a sister…?” She didn’t finish the sentence.
“We’re estranged,” I said. “And she’s in North Carolina.”
“Maybe this would be a good time to mend fences,” she said.
“It would be harder on me to try to do that right now than to be alone,” I said. If only I had a sister nearby with whom I could mend a fence! I didn’t like lying, digging myself in deeper with every embellishment of who I was.
“Hey.” One of the doctors came into the room. Without her mask on, I could see she was Asian. Petite, fair-skinned. Almond-shaped eyes. She pulled off her yellow cap to reveal shimmery black hair swept back in a ponytail. With her hand outstretched, she walked straight across the room to me, smiling.
“Amy Wynn,” she said, shaking my hand. “Let’s talk about Joanna’s heart.” She looked like she might only be a year or two older than me. How could she possibly know what she was doing?
“Dr. Wynn is terrific,” Celeste said as if she read the worry on my face.
Amy Wynn brushed aside the compliment with a wave of her hand. Like Celeste, she took a seat on the edge of one of the recliners and leaned toward me. I expected her to have a Chinese or Japanese accent when she spoke, but her voice was pure New York.
“You made a very good decision to have fetal surgery on your baby,” she said. “Frankly, I think you saved her life. The repair looks excellent.”
I choked up again as I had when I stood next to Joanna’s isolette. Thank you, Hunter, I thought. Suddenly I knew that everything I’d been through during these past few months had been worth it.
“Is she … is she going to be all right, then?” I asked.
“Her problem now is relatively minor,” Dr. Wynn said, “and it’s fixable. The aortic valve is still narrower than we’d like to see. We’ll make sure she’s stable over the next few days and then we’ll do a dilation.”
“Is that surgery?” I asked, thinking, No, please, no. I didn’t want Joanna to endure anything more than she already had.
“She’ll be asleep,” Dr. Wynn said, not really answering my question. “But we can do it through a catheter placed in the umbilical artery. I expect it to be successful and it’ll make a big difference as far as her leading a normal life with a normal heart goes.” She stood up. “There’s always a chance of valve insufficiency—leakage—after a dilation,” she said, “and we’ll watch for that, but I believe the chance of that is small in Joanna’s case.”
I thought I should ask more questions, but I felt too overwhelmed to know what those questions might be. Dr. Wynn left us, and the nurse who’d brought me to the CICU from the maternity unit returned.
“Ready for discharge?” she asked brightly.
I shook my head. “Can I just stay here in the nursery?”
My nurse smiled. “You can come right back,” she assured me.
Reluctantly I got to my feet, aware for the first time of how sore I felt. How tender. How tired. My nurse had left the first wheelchair outside the nursery, and as we walked through the CICU, I looked over at Joanna’s isolette. For the first time in nine months, I was separated from her. I could barely stand the feeling.
My phone rang when I was packing my few belongings in the hospital room. I thought it would be Myra—who else would call me?—but it was Becky from the hotel registration desk.
“Raoul told me to call and check on you,” she said. “He thinks you must have had your baby. He said he called you a cab to go to the hospital and you didn’t come back.”
“I did have her,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “She’s in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit and has to have a … a procedure, but hopefully then she’ll be all right.”
“Good news,” Becky said in her unemotional voice. “I’ll pass it along.”
“Thank Raoul for me,” I said.
“Will do.” She hung up without saying good-bye. Becky always acted as if she were very busy, even when she was not.
When I hung up with Becky, I dialed Myra’s number. She answered right away and I told her I’d had Joanna and how she was doing.
“Well, congratulations,” she said. “That’s excellent news. So what do you think? Will you be able to make that first portal?”
I had the impression she was anxious to get me back to 1970 where I would no longer be her responsibility.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She won’t have that dilation for a few days and then she’ll need to recover from it.” Today was July 12. The first portal was nearly two weeks away, but it sounded like Joanna had a long way to go before then. I tried to imagine tucking my fragile-looking little baby into the sling and stepping off the wall of the Gapstow Bridge. Impossible.
“Well,” Myra said. “Keep me posted.”
For the rest of the day, no longer a patient in the hospital myself, I sat next to Joanna’s isolette. Celeste explained the function of every lead, every wire, every tube. She told me to expect Joanna to be an irritable little thing for a while, tethered to so much equipment and struggling to breathe. “After the dilation, her heart rate and breathing will settle down and you’ll see a calmer baby,” she said. “You should be able to hold her then. For now, just talk to her. Let her get to know your voice.”
Joanna couldn’t have been calmer than she was at that moment. Her eyes were closed, and she appeared to be sleeping like an angel behind the mask and tape and tubes. I reached into the isolette and moved the edge of her little knit hat aside enough to see the fair hair on her head. Pale peach fuzz. That was exactly how my mother had described my own hair when I was a newborn. She had perfect ears. Her little hands and feet, fingers and toes—all perfect. Behind all the paraphernalia that was layered and taped over her body, she was beautiful. I touched her hand. Held her small fingers. She didn’t try to pull away from my touch.
When Celeste left us alone, I began talking to her. I chattered in a nearly constant stream of words. I told her about her father. How I taught him to use sand fleas as bait the first time I met him. How we fell in love. How much he would have adored her and spoiled her. What a brave soldier he had been. I whispered that part to her. To the outside world, Joe hadn’t been a soldier at all. I told her about her cousin John Paul and described the bond I was sure would soon exist between the two of them. I talked about her aunt and uncle, Patti and Hunter. I told her she’d soon be living next to the sea and I described the animal life of the beach and th
e maritime forest. I couldn’t stop talking to her. I had so much to say. When Celeste pulled the curtains closed around Joanna’s cubicle, I thought it was to give me privacy, but then I wondered if the nurses and other parents in the CICU were simply tired of listening to my chatter. I didn’t care. I was with my baby. My very nearly healthy baby. Frankly, I think you saved her life.
I had the disposable camera with me, taken from my purse before I secured it in one of the small lockers provided for parents in the foyer, but I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of Joanna tied up the way she was. Most of the time, she didn’t appear to be struggling in any way, but every once in a while she screwed up her tiny face as though she wanted to wriggle out of her wiry prison. As I was trying to comfort her with my voice, Celeste pulled open the curtain and came to my side, a chart in her hand.
“Sometimes she needs quiet time,” she said. “Time to help her heal.”
I smiled. “Have I been talking too much?” I asked.
“Let’s give her some rest.” She returned my smile without really answering the question.
“It’s just that I’ve been saving up so much I want to tell her,” I whispered.
Celeste touched my shoulder. “You’ll have the rest of your life to talk to her,” she said. She hung the chart on the side of the isolette and I saw the name “Amy Nguyen, MD” below my daughter’s name. I frowned. “Is that the cardiologist?” I asked. “I thought her name was Amy Wynn?”
“N-G-U-Y-E-N,” Celeste said. “It just sounds like Wynn to our ears. It’s a very common Vietnamese name. I think about half the Vietnamese population has that name.” She checked the tape holding one of Joanna’s wires in place. “No Nguyens in North Carolina?” she asked me.
I couldn’t find my voice. Dr. Nguyen was Vietnamese? North or South or…? Was it ironic that she might be the person to save the life of Joe’s child? It didn’t matter, of course. I just wanted someone to make my little girl well.
“No,” I said. “No Nguyens in North Carolina.”
The Dream Daughter: A Novel Page 15