The Dreamers

33.

At the center of that hospital, in the wing where the first patients are now tended by nurses in Level 4 Tyvek suits, beneath the sheets of one particular bed, beneath the thin cloth of the hospital gown, and beneath the smooth skin of the belly of one young woman: a tiny heart begins to beat. It is a secret, fluttering, hummingbird beat, four weeks in the making.

Rebecca experiences none of the emotions she otherwise would, pregnant by accident at eighteen—the panic, the disbelief, the excruciating need to make a decision.

Ten feet away, dreaming in another hospital bed, Caleb feels none of that, either.

The whole thing, too young yet to call a fetus, has grown to the size of a pea.

A face is beginning to surface from the tissue of the head, the earliest components of eyes. Those eyes: they will show her everything she will ever see. Passages are forming that will one day become the inner ear. Those ears will deliver every voice, every note of music, every drop of rain, she will ever hear in her life. Already, there is an opening that will later become the mouth, the same mouth that, if mother and child survive, might ask, someday, what God is and why we need the wind, or where she was, anyway, before she was inside her mother’s belly.

In the room, the monitors hum and whir. The suits swish as nurses and doctors come and go, performing the same diagnostic tests they have been doing from the start: the massaging of the sternum, the tickling of toes. No change.

Nutrients travel through a plastic tube up through one nostril, then down her throat and into her stomach.

Meanwhile, Rebecca sleeps and sleeps, the conscious brain, it turns out, as superfluous to the process unfolding inside her as the sunflowers that are right now wilting on the windowsill beside her.