76 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
had been put on ventilators, feeding
tubes, the works. “One kid across the
hall didn’t make it,” he said calmly.
“But this guy’s tough. He’s a liver.” The
boy had already had surgery twice,
“to get a valve clipped,” whatever that
meant, and for a blood-vessel malfor-
mation in his back, and the woman
said he had an infinitesimal chance of
brain damage.
While my kid drank her bottle, her
little sea-monkey hands fluttered be-
neath her bib. When I let my finger
roam away from under her chin, she
slacked off and lost interest. I kept it
tight against her.
Whenever I saw another baby strug-
gle, I felt relieved, and I’d stare up at
the big monitor with my kid’s oxygen
level. My kid was in better shape than
that one, although she was on some of
the same drugs, so there was a feeling
of camaraderie, but also of competition.
By the end of that first day, or the next
day, or the day after that, I could tell
by the amount of equipment around an
incubator what kind of shape a kid was
in. When a new kid arrived, with, like,
two hundred feeding tubes, I couldn’t
look, but I’d assess anyway, hourly, mak-
ing trips past the new people to count
their baby’s toes or explain how to read
the monitors.
The woman put the girl back in her
case, and, as she changed her diaper, she
squeaked down at her, “Who’s got nasty
pants?,” touching the girl’s nose. “Do
you want your Pooh Bear? Do you want
your kitty?” she asked, and sang “Kook-
aburra.” The girl’s name was drawn on
colored paper, stuck on the wall above
the monitors, decorated with silver stars.
The dad weighed the boy and put
him back in his case, then he picked up
a backpack, looking scared.
“Did you just do that?” the woman
asked.
“What are we talking about?”
“Where do you think you’re going?”
He waved his fingers at the twins.
“Bye-bye. I’m late.”
“I love this crud,” the woman said,
alone now, washing the skin beneath
her daughter’s chin. “This is my favor-
ite part.”
When the woman left, I sat there
for a while with my kid sleeping on me.
The hat on her head was bending her
ear. A flake of skin sat on her eyelid. I
rested her on my shoulder and guarded
her head from falling back. Her whole
body fit in my hand and pulled down
my shirt like a soaking-wet corsage. She
didn’t seem small to me, except when I
compared her with something. Her
forearm, for instance, was the size of
my thumb. Then she sneezed. It was
identical to a real sneeze, but on a smaller
scale. And now she had hiccups. She
wouldn’t stop making noises. Her head
smelled like an apple. “I have dirty
pants!” I said to her. Then she grabbed
her hat and shoved it to one side. God-
dam hat!
The nurse came and took the baby
from me—time to put her back in the
case—and stepped aside for a doctor,
who stood behind my chair, a distin-
guished-looking man I hadn’t met be-
fore. He had a lengthy title embroi-
dered on his coat and about sixteen
pens in his breast pocket, and was
tanned and bald with platinum wisps.
He put his hand on my shoulder and
walked me away from the incubators
to some place between the nurses’ sta-
tion and the security doors.
“Your daughter had an EKG this
morning,” he said. “She also had a so-
nogram on her heart.”
He held a small pad with a simple
drawing of a heart on it. “This is a gap
between the right and left atria. It’s an
abnormality.” He drew the abnormal-
ity with his pen. He told me the med-
ical name for it. And then I noticed that
the next piece of paper in the pad also
had a sketch of a heart—it was an en-
tire pad of preprinted hearts. “And here
is the pulmonary artery. And here is a
partial blockage of the artery.”
I held my chin very tightly with one
hand, as though I were here only for his
benefit. We were standing outside the
nicu now, by the sink. People in street
clothes rinsed their hands without looking.
The opening went between the two
upper chambers. “It’s supposed to close
in the womb.”
“So it’s not closed?”
“ N o. ”
“Why is that?” Orderlies came past,
their I.D. badges swinging, their voices
full of life.
“We don’t know why that is.” He
drew the blockage now, explaining the
development of babies with normal
hearts. He was exquisitely sincere andinformative. What would I do when I
went in there again, and saw her sleep-
ing in her box, smirking in her dreams
beneath her jaunty cap?
“So you go in there and fix it?”
“No. Not that.”
“I see.”
“We don’t operate on either of these
things.”
“Why don’t you operate on it?”
“We don’t even track it.”
“You don’t track it?”
“No.”
I didn’t know what I’d just asked him,
and I didn’t know what he was saying
back to me. “What?”
“It closes up eventually. It fixes itself.”
He wanted to leave now, so he put a
medical form in front of me and I signed
it. He gave me some more exact and
elucidating percentages, and said she’d
outgrow it in six months. “One in a mil-
lion doesn’t close right. The rest of them
are fine.”
“Great!”
“Fine.” He wanted his pen back.
“How about one in a billion?!” I was
so relieved now that I patted him on
the shoulder, as if to congratulate him,
which he visibly hated.
Back inside the nicu, I stood beside
her, holding the little sketch of her heart,
shaking with gratitude, maybe, as the
nurse redid the splint, shunts, and tubes
with bright white tape.
“CUTE, HUH?” I noticed I was
screaming. “Who’s the little gumdrop?”
We stood there. I waited to see her
fall into a peaceful slumber, although
she was kind of wriggling, thrashing,
trying to sleep, half crying between hic-
cups. There were blips on the monitor,
and I knew exactly what each one meant.
I studied her chart, the list of antibiot-
ics, and somehow the word “caffeine.”
“You’re giving her caffeine? Like in
coffee?”
“It’s a very safe, very small amount.”
She was the day-shift nurse in charge, a
young, dark-haired woman with geo-
graphically interesting lips, chapped and
full, and a terrific nose, with wide nos-
trils. “There are very few side effects.”
Her nose was challenging me to look in-
side it. I turned back to my writhing kid.
“What’s it for?”
“It reminds them to breathe.”
“Or else they stop breathing?”
She said that there was information