by Nancy Rue
School. There was so much I didn’t know.
Although it could be hours before Kate called me, I couldn’t go back to the city and put that much space between us. I’d left nothing at the Wyndham, so there was no reason I shouldn’t relocate here. It would give me something to do to keep me from splitting out of my skin.
I was just about to sign the register at the Rittenhouse Inn when my cell phone rang.
“Serena?” Kate said.
“She said yes?” I said.
“She’s gone into labor. They’re taking her to University of Pennsylvania Hospital in an ambulance. I’ll come to you and you can follow me.” I could hear her smiling through her concern. “She wants you.”
A woman at the nurses’ station called to me before Kate and I were all the way out of the elevator.
“You Mrs. Soltani?”
“Yes! My daughter—”
“Follow me.”
It was as easy as that. After all the closed doors and the privacy policies and the people who claimed to know nothing, I simply stepped into a room and there she was.
I heard her before I saw her face. She was crying as if her soul were dying, sobbing, “Please! Please don’t!”
I shoved someone in green out of the way and stepped between two more at her bedside.
“Tristan,” I said, “honey, it’s Mom.”
In the first moment that she turned her face to me, the thought that it wasn’t her seized me. This girl’s skin was the color of a dove, and her long dark hair had been chopped off at the chin. The tendons in her neck hardened like wires just beneath the surface as she clenched her jaw.
Only her eyes were the same—two soulful, fathomless brown eyes that found their focus in me and pulled me deep inside her.
“Mama!” she said. “Please don’t let them!”
I took her head in my hands. “Don’t let them what, baby?”
“Don’t let them take her! They said they were going to take her!”
I looked helplessly at the green-clad woman at the end of the bed who was trying to pry Tristan’s knees apart.
“I said as soon as your baby’s born, we have to take her straight to ICU,” the woman said in a tone usually reserved for the hard-of-hearing. To me, she said, in a lower tone, “You her mom?”
“I am.”
“Then maybe you can convince her that we’re not going to give her baby to somebody else.”
“Don’t let them, Mom!” Tristan screamed.
I hitched one hip onto the bed and made my hands firm around her face. “Tristan, honey, listen to me.”
She bit down on her lip, face writhing.
“They’re just trying to help you have your baby,” I said. “Your baby. Nobody is going to take her away from you. Not the doctors. Not the nurses. Not me.” I pressed her cheeks with my palms. “Not even Daddy.”
Her hands came out from under the sheet and grabbed my wrists.
“Do you mean that?” she said. “I know I’ve been terrible. I know I don’t deserve her—”
Her face contorted again. I thought she would burst the blood vessels in my wrists.
“Breathe, Tristan!” someone called to her. “Breathe through it.”
“Mom, I don’t know how to have a baby!” Tristan cried. “It’s too soon. I didn’t get to go to classes yet!”
“We’re trying to help you—”
“Okay, Tristan, listen.” I hiked myself all the way onto the bed so I could put my face close to hers. “This is your baby, and you know how to bring her into the world. I’m just going to give you a little crash course, okay, so it won’t hurt so much. Stay with me, now. Stay close.”
Her eyes devoured my face. “You won’t leave me?”
“Not for a second. Now, before the next contraction comes, just try to relax. Let the baby rest.”
“She wants to come out, and she’s not ready.”
“She thinks she’s ready,” said the woman at the end of the bed. Her voice had softened.
“Will she die?” Tristan said.
The frail tremor in her voice shook through me.
“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure she doesn’t,” said the woman, who I assumed was the doctor. “Let’s get her born first.”
“Oh!” Tristan cried.
I slid my arm around her back and helped her sit up. “Nice big breaths, little mommy. Come on, breathe … breathe … breathe … This one’s almost over.”
When it was, she sank against me, her eyes wild.
I looked at the doctor, who was now examining Tristan. “Can’t you give her something?”
“Too late,” she said. “Tristan, it’s time to push.”
“I don’t know how!”
“Of course you do,” I said into her ear. “Just press down from your hips, and she’ll be right out to see you—”
“I see a head,” the doctor said. “What’s the little one’s name, Tristan?”
“Serena!” Tristan said. “Serena Grace. Oh—push now?”
“You’re the mom,” I said. “If you want to push now, push now.”
Serena Grace Soltani was born at 1:06 p.m., weighing in at one pound, seven ounces. At 1:11 her mommy hemorrhaged. Both girls were crying as bevies of people in green swept them away from me in opposite directions—Baby Grace in a thin, exquisite wail; Tristan calling, “Mama, please don’t let her be alone.”
“We’ll let you know as soon as Tristan’s out of surgery,” a nurse told me. Double doors sighed closed behind her.
I ran the other way behind the tiny gurney that held my granddaughter. But the closest I could get to her was a couch in the hallway outside the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Kate joined me with some sandwiches and a cup of tea.
“One lump or two?” she said.
“Give it to me straight,” I said. I cradled my hands around its warmth and sank against the sofa. It was white and clean, and the lighting above was soft. The gentleness was too much.
“God, please don’t let them die,” I said. I looked at Kate. “You don’t think He will, do you?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
I took a scalding sip of tea. It was the best thing I’d tasted in days.
“Thank you for not telling me that God is good all the time; all the time God is good.”
“I think I saw that on a bumper sticker once.” Kate unwrapped a sandwich and broke off a piece.
“Maybe it should be more like ‘God is in it all the time; all the time God is in it,’ ” I said.
“I like that,” Kate said. “Toughing it out right alongside us.”
“I never got that before.”
Kate chewed thoughtfully. “You probably never had to. I got the impression from Tristan that you’ve never had a real crisis in your family.”
“Not really. My parents are both gone, but it didn’t affect me the way this has. I feel like I’ve been groping around in a strange place.” I picked up a sandwich and then put it down. “I guess that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.”
“On a number of levels, I’m sure,” Kate said. “Your parents dying in your adult years—those are the normal sorrows of human life. They don’t usually plunge you into a dark night of the soul.”
“Is that where I’ve been?”
“You tell me.”
It was automatic to say I don’t know. But I did know. It was new, and it was tentative, but it was knowledge.
“I’ve felt like God was far away. But really, He just got so big I couldn’t see all of Him,” I said. “You know, like when you’re so focused on one thing that you can’t see the big picture.”
“I have a feeling you could say the same thing about yourself right now.”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure I can get my mind around all that.”
“Why try? Just embrace who God is—and who you are.”
I nodded with her. “And who Tristan is.”
“I like the way you think,” she said.
<
br /> She left me alone with the egg salad on rye and went to make phone calls. I sat sorting my fears between the two children suffering at different ends of the hall, one I’d come so far to know again, one I wanted desperately to know at all.
When rubber soles finally squeaked down the hall, it was Tristan’s obstetrician. She looked younger and less severe without her headgear. I liked the fresh-air-and-granola-bars look of her smile.
“She’s going to be fine,” she said. “We’ve stopped the bleeding, and I don’t think there’s any permanent damage to her uterus. I’m Dr. Kelly, by the way.”
“Serena Soltani.”
“Ah, so your granddaughter’s named after you.”
I smiled a little. I hadn’t even had time to absorb that.
Dr. Kelly nodded toward the NICU door. “How’s our little girl doing?”
We didn’t find out for another hour, when a tall man with less hair on his head than he had on his arms stepped out of the unit. He had to sit by degrees to fold his lanky body into place on the table beside me.
“Dr. Branaugh,” he said. “I’m a neonatologist. I understand you’re the grandma.”
“I am,” I said. “My daughter’s still in the recovery room.”
“She’s young, isn’t she?” His eyes were as blue and wholesome as blueberries.
“Sixteen,” I said.
“It might be the best thing if I tell you what were dealing with, and then you can break the news to her. I’ll be there in case you need me to clarify anything.”
Something gave way inside me. “It isn’t good, is it?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Using most of his fingers, Dr. Branaugh counted off the problems Baby Grace was struggling with.
Respiratory distress syndrome.
Possible IVH, bleeding in her brain that could cause pressure and possibly brain damage.
Immature digestive system.
Anemia.
The first signs of jaundice.
The danger of heart failure.
She had already had two episodes of apnea, where she stopped breathing completely.
“She’s medically fragile,” he said. His fingers were still fanned out in a display of her vulnerability. “We’re doing absolutely everything possible to keep her alive, but at twenty-eight weeks gestation, 510 grams birth weight, she is at extremely high risk.”
“How high?” I said.
Two sad dimples appeared as he pressed his lips together. “She has a 40 to 50 percent chance of surviving, given all that we’re doing for her. If she does make it, it’ll probably be two to three months before she can leave the hospital, and after that she’s very likely to experience developmental problems—speech, behavior …”
I folded my arms, which were almost too heavy to hold against me, and my head dropped forward.
“We’re giving her a transfusion right now,” the doctor said. “As soon as your daughter comes to, they’ll get her to pump her breasts, and we’ll get that good nutrition going through the feeding tube. After that, you can see her if you want to.”
“Just through the window?”
“No. You can come in and sit by her Isolette and talk to her. You won’t be able to touch her yet, but we’ve found preemies do a lot better when their families spend time with them.” He unfolded to a stand and smiled down at me. “It’ll be at least another hour. You can get some rest, make phone calls—whatever.”
Phone calls. Nick
I’d turned my cell off as the signs had directed when I’d entered the hospital. I powered it up as I went downstairs.
Dusk had set the city’s dark silhouette on fire, and lights winked on along the front walkway as I stepped outside and found a place on a bench out of the wind.
The phone screen informed me with alarm that I had nine new messages. I ignored them and called my home number.
When Nick answered, I scarcely recognized his voice. The word “Serena?” broke like hot glass, as if it had been waiting for the final fracturing touch.
“It’s okay; I’m okay,” I said.
“Where are you? Serena, what is going on?”
“Nicky, just listen, okay? I’ll explain everything, but just listen. Please.”
Stay close, I wanted to say to him. I leaned my head against the brick wall behind the bench.
“I’ve found Tristan, here in Philadelphia. She’s all right … she will be … and, Nicky …” My voice thickened. “She just gave birth to our granddaughter.”
I let him absorb that in silence before I said, “But the baby is very sick. None of her organs are ready to function outside her mommy’s womb yet. She may die, Nicky.”
“Dear Lord,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I keep saying.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Nick said he was leaving immediately for Philadelphia. He still sounded numb when we got off the phone, and I prayed he’d have enough presence of mind for the drive. Ironic, I thought. My doubting Nick’s competence.
When I got back upstairs, they had moved Tristan to a private room with tender pink walls and a rose chair and bedspread. It somehow softened the intrusion of the needle in her arm and the beeping of the machine that flashed her blood pressure. I slid the chair closer to the bed so I could brush my fingers against her cheek. She didn’t stir.
There had been so little time to really look at her in the emergency delivery suite. A woman probably never looked much like herself when she was giving birth, anyway.
A woman.
The face I stroked was warm and smooth with sleep, just as it had been when she was three years old. Her lashes feathered the fine skin below her eyes, and her eyelids moved with dreams. When I’d watched her sleeping as a toddler, I’d always liked to imagine that she was dreaming of angels dancing on clouds.
But two delicate lines deepened between her brows, and she moaned, softly and yet from a deep place. She wasn’t dreaming of anything so diaphanous as angels or clouds. She had the hard, solid worries of a woman now—a tiny baby fighting for life, a troubled journey to recover from, a future changed from anything she had ever imagined. Or been prepared for.
I kissed her forehead and kept my lips close to her as I whispered, “God will bridge the gap, little mother. That’s what we can pray for.”
Her eyes fluttered open and searched my face as if she were emerging from a mist.
“Mama,” she said.
“I’m here, Tristan.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Her lids fell again, and her breathing returned to its sleepy richness.
“I am too, baby girl,” I said. “I am too.”
Tristan was still asleep when a round, maple-skinned nurse with a wonderfully ample bosom peeked in and told me I could see the baby.
“My name’s Debbie,” she said as she walked me toward NICU. “You need anything at all, you just let us know. This is a tough time for the whole family, and we’re here for all of you.”
I touched her arm, felt the supple flesh give under my hand. Philadelphia was quickly redeeming itself.
Dressed in a full regalia of paper gown, cap, face mask, and shoe covers, I pulled on pale pink latex gloves and turned to take my first look at my granddaughter.
Baby Grace lay in her little Isolette world, bathed in warm light and swaddled in white blankets. Only her tiny balled-up fists and parts of her face were visible amid the bunting and the tape that secured her tangle of wires and tubes. Still, I gazed at her in awe.
Her head—though it was no bigger than an apple even with its snuggie cap—seemed too big for her spindly body. I could have cupped all of her eight and a half inches in the palm of my hand.
Yet the places I could see were perfectly formed—fingers, a foot that freed itself from the blanket, even an indignant little chin that made me think of Max. Her skin, tinged a pale yellow, was so thin I could see her veins running like silk threads beneath it. I watched in wonder as her chest, the size
of a deck of cards, lifted and fell with life.
“It’s always a little disconcerting when you first see them,” a voice murmured behind me. “But there’s a real live baby in there.”
Baby Grace poked her minuscule arm from her cover. Fingers small as matchsticks groped the air and found a wire draped across her blanket. For an instant, she tried to curl them around it.
“Just like any child,” the nurse whispered. “Into everything.”
I smiled. But the baby before me wasn’t just like any child. Maybe none of them were. Maybe our job as parents was to let each of our unique offspring tell us who they were and how they needed to be raised.
“What about you, Baby Grace?” I whispered. “Who are you?”
She kicked her foot, half the size of my thumb, farther out of her bunting. The nurse, who until now had stayed out of sight, put her hands through two openings in the Isolette and checked the device attached to the miniature heel.
“You don’t want to lose that, sweet baby girlfriend,” she said. “We need to make sure you’re oxygenating your blood.”
Oxygenating her blood. Raising the surfactant level in her lungs so she could breathe on her own. Lowering her bilirubin to prevent brain damage. Those were things no brand-new life should have to fight to do. If she lost that battle, I would never know who she was. There would be no time for her to know any of us, her mommy or her grandparents or her Aunt Max. And there was so much I wanted her to know.
I pressed my hand on the end of the Isolette near her head. “I’m just going to tell you this one thing, Serena Grace,” I whispered to her. “Whoever you are, whatever you feel or think or do, God loves you. What you need might be a long way from what any of us can give you, but God will bridge the gap.”
Grace poked her foot out of the blanket again, as if her teeny toes yearned to be free. I decided she’d heard me.
Hours later Debbie and I rolled Tristan to NICU in a wheelchair so she could see Baby Grace for the first time. I watched through the window as she stroked the Isolette with hands I knew were aching to hold her baby daughter. Her lips moved in a soundless monologue I didn’t have to hear to understand. She was every woman who’s given birth. She was a mother.