THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 73
I
n the morning, the blinds let in
light. I lay on a recliner against the
wall, with my coat wrapped around
my head, and heard the nurse pump the
blood-pressure thing. I’d set up a bar-
rier, a towel hanging over the back of a
chair, for privacy. I’d been reclining here,
listening to ice blow against the win-
dow, since about four. Kathy sat up in
bed, looking pale, with blue lips and a
puffy face. She was still on morphine
and seemed serene and angelic.
Another nurse walked in, pushing
a cart, and wanted to know if she’d felt
milk coming out. Kathy stiffly undid
her robe and both her hands trembled
and I saw the funny webbed bandage
across her belly. It was sort of threat-
ening and serious and a little sicken-
ing, but I was so happy I didn’t care. I
got up then. My pants were open. I
shut them.
The second nurse wheeled the cart
to the edge of the bed. She wore red
lipstick and hoop earrings, and had her
hair in a tight bun that stood straight
up on her head like a bowling pin. She
stepped back to let the first nurse, who
was older, explain the breast-pumping
machine. The older nurse was tall but
stooped, and wore a short-sleeved blouse
with kittens on it.
Kathy’s breasts looked full. She put
the cups up to her boobs and the machine
started sucking. There was nothing. Then
the first drop of milk, bright yellow, drib-
bled down into the bottle. “Oh, my God,”
Kathy said. “I’m a fountain.” Then an-
other drop. The dairy had come in. What
we needed now was a baby.
T
he baby had come—two months
before her due date—after a late-
night run to the emergency room, where
it became clear that, for some reason,
Kathy was in labor. We’d planned on
spring, the beautiful explosion of April,
the full, ready, ripened flowering, but it
was February, and she’d been having
contractions, undiagnosed, for two days,
and then it was two o’clock in the morn-
ing and snowing like crazy, and she’s
lying there in our bed at home, moan-
ing. I suggested the possible psychoso-
matic reasons for her pain, urging her
to reflect on any anxiety that could be
causing it. But when she called the E.R.
the doctor was alarmed.
We put on our boots and got in the
car and plowed across Western Ave. in
silence, the only ones on the road,
shocked at the sight of it—street signs
half buried and fences swamped in drifts,
each spindly vein of every branch ar-
ticulated in gloppy white, and more
coming down. The airport was closed,
power lines bowed in swooping arcs, al-
most to the ground, and we held our-
selves steady, a little dumbstruck, pass-
ing stuck city buses and evergreen
boughs lying broken in the street, and
finally spun up the hill toward a glow-
ing “Emergency” sign, under a great
overhanging deck, and a tall security
guard in a rabbit-fur helmet took Kathy
inside while I parked.
The E.R. nurse seemed alarmed, too,
and called an emergency-labor special-
ist, and they tried over the next few
hours to get it to stop but couldn’t. And
the baby was facing forward, which was
wrong, and was breech, also wrong, ap-
pearing onscreen with her hands and
feet pushed against the front of her bub-
ble as if she were driving a truck. A new
doctor appeared, an older man, an ex-
pert in premature birth, who looked out
the window and clapped his hands and
said, “There goes my golf game.” He
was worried that the cord might suffo-
cate her, and that once he got her out
her lungs might not work, or, after those
first breaths, other things, even at this
venerable gestational age of thirty-three
weeks. He said the name of something,
then told you what it meant; nothing
was too dark or devastating to divulge—
brain hemorrhaging and colon perfo-
rations and invading bacteria, rips in
the insulation around her nerves. And,
as she grew, it might be months, or years,
before we knew the whole story—a
higher incidence of cerebral palsy, men-
tal retardation. It had begun wrong and
now the wrongness would never end.
After some hours of labor, they tested
the oxygen level in the baby’s blood to
see how she was doing. During the worst
parts, Kathy attacked the wall with her
claws. In between contractions, it got
quieter, because there was nothing left
to say. I’d jog to the nurses’ station, to
complain for her, stopping on the ele-
vated pedestrian bridge where the an-
cient, red-sweatered volunteer ladies
looked out over the hospital grounds,
cataloguing the snowfall with immense
concentration. They were trapped, too.We agonized over how much weight
the roof could take.
Then the doctor did another test and
suddenly new faces rushed into the room
and put Kathy on a gurney while she
signed papers.
I saw it all, the seven layers of skin
and tissue, the yellowish fat, the muscle
wall, the wall of the uterus, the blood.
I hadn’t known what to expect, so when
the baby emerged, blue, screaming like
a maniac, it was whatever I’d been feeling
plus relief, ratcheted all the way up. Her
lungs worked, she appeared to have all
her parts, and they took her away. Kathy
gave me a crimped smile, just a head
behind a sheet, flying high on morphine.O
ut in the hall, I didn’t think about
the night before, as the quiet of a
cool, gleaming hospital at dawn helped
me push those feelings far away. In-
stead, I thought of the T-shirt I’d thrown
on back home in the dark, which said
“Donald Trump,” with “Fuck” in smaller
script above it. A new mother walked
toward me from the nursery, the lady
from the room next to ours, haggard in
her big pink nightgown, pushing her
baby in front of her. The baby, a day
old, lay flat in an open tray, and looked
gigantic, ten or twenty pounds, at least.
It was as long as a tuba and its face was
pinkish white and its cheeks rested on
its shoulders. No veins on its head, its
skin wasn’t mottled, it didn’t have a wrin-
kled, wizened, thoughtful grimace. It
looked sturdy enough to be drinking a
glass of gin. I’d seen the grandparents
the night before, trim and tanned in
matching V-neck sweaters, celebrating.
The new father, as luck would have it,
had been moping around with a full-
length cast on one leg, the moron, but
now the mother was alone. Her belly
was still large, and she walked by, head
down, with an exhausted, shell-shocked,
stumbling gait.
On the seventh floor, I scrubbed to
my elbows and entered the sanctity of
the nicu. The baby was sleeping in a
plastic case, on her side, wrapped in a
blanket, machines bleeping and whoop-
ing around her—breathing on her own,
with the monitors above her. The ap-
paratus around my kid, the oxygen tube
in her nose, the crooked little hat on her
head, her wormy pallor scared me. Be-
hind me, two big men in soccer jerseys