The First Bad Man

CHAPTER TEN

Something huge was inserted into his tiny throat. A cord was implanted in his raw belly button. He was covered in white stickers. A net of cables and tubes was woven between him and many loud, beeping machines. There was hardly enough baby to accommodate all the things that had to go into him.

“Do you think they know?” Clee whispered from her wheelchair.

We were gripping each other’s hands between the folds of our white hospital gowns — a small hard brain formed by our interlocking white knuckles. I peeked around at the nurses. Everyone knew that this baby was up for adoption.

“It doesn’t matter. As long as he doesn’t know.”

“The baby?”

“The baby.”

But there was no thought more horrible than this baby fighting for his life not knowing that he was completely alone in the world. He had no people, not yet — legally we could walk out the door and never come back. We stood there like mesmerized criminals who had forgotten to flee the scene.

My own brain and its thoughts were just distant noise. What mattered was that every few seconds she or I would tighten the fist, which meant live, live, live. A bag of blood was rushed in; it was from San Diego. I’d been to the zoo there once. I imagined the blood being pulled out of a muscled zebra. This was good — humans were always withering away from heartbreak and pneumonia, animal blood would be much tougher, live, live, live. A beefy man in scrubs motioned us over.

“He’s critically stable. If he starts to desaturate you’ll need to leave him alone.”

He showed Clee how to put her hands through the holes in the clear plastic incubator. The baby’s palm miraculously curled around her finger. That’s just a reflex, the man said. Live, live, live.

Clee was mumbling a rolling chant that I could barely hear; at first it sounded like a prayer, but after a while I realized it was just “Ohhh, sweet boy, oh, sweet baby boy,” over and over again. She only stopped when the head doctor came over, a tall Indian man. His face was gravely serious. Some people’s faces always look this way, it’s just how they’re raised. But as he talked it became clear he wasn’t one of these people. Meconium was repeated several times; I remembered the word from birth class: excrement. Meconium has been aspirated leading to PPHN. Or PPHM. He was talking slowly but it wasn’t slow enough. Nitric oxide. Ventilator. We nodded again and again. We were actors nodding on TV, bad actors who couldn’t make anything look real. He finished with the words closely monitored. We forgot to ask if the baby would live.

A toothy young nurse with glasses suggested Clee lie down in a receiving room on the Labor and Delivery floor. Clee said she was fine and the nurse said, “Actually, you’re bleeding a lot.” The back of her gown was soaked through. She fell back into the wheelchair, suddenly not fine at all. Her eyes were strangely sunken. They would call us, the nurse said, if anything changed. We looked at each other darkly. If we didn’t leave, then we couldn’t get a terrible phone call.

“I’ll stay,” I said, and Clee was rolled out the door.

I was afraid to look at him. There were ten or fifteen other babies, each one hooked up to a beeping machine that regularly burst into alarm; the alarms overlapped, creating an undulating chaos. On the other side of the NICU another team of doctors and nurses surrounded something small and unmoving. Its parents stood apart from each other to let all of us know the other one was to blame and would never, ever, be forgiven, for all eternity. Their prayer was rage. The mother looked up at me; I looked away.

Without Clee’s hand to hold, my thoughts were terrifyingly unbound. I could think anything. I could think: Why am I here? And: This is going to end in tragedy. And: What if I can’t handle this, what if I lose my mind? I started crying giant wet tears.

Ha. I was crying.

It was easy now, stupidly easy. I wiped my nose on my hands, contaminating them. I went back out to the foyer and washed them again; the hot water on my skin made me homesick. This time I was asked to sign in. For Relationship to the baby I wrote grandmother because that’s who everyone thought I was.

I forced myself to look at the tiny gray body. His eyes were shut. He didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t deduce, from the beeps and the sound of feet on linoleum, that he was in a hospital. He didn’t know what a hospital was. Every single thing was new and made no sense. Like a horror movie, but he couldn’t even compare it to that because he knew nothing about the genre. Or about horror itself, fear. He couldn’t think, I’m scared—he didn’t even know I. I shut my eyes and started humming. It was easier to do back at home, when he was still inside her. That time now seemed like a silly TV show, the three of us floating in a daze, believing we would always be safe. This here was real life. I hummed for so long I started to get dizzy. When I opened my eyes, he was looking right at me. He blinked, slowly, tiredly.

Familiarly.

Kubelko Bondy.

I smoothed my hospital gown and tucked my hair behind my ears.

I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t know it was you until now, I said. He gave me the same warm look of recognition that he’d been giving me since I was nine — but exhausted, like a warrior who has risked everything to get home, half-dead on the doorstep. Now it was unbearable that he should be lying untouched except by needles and tubes. I opened the circular doors and carefully held his hand and foot. If he died he would die forever; I would never see another Kubelko Bondy.

See, this is what we do, I began, we exist in time. That’s what living is; you’re doing it right now as much as anyone. I could tell he was deciding. He was feeling it out and had come to no conclusions yet. The warm, dark place he had come from versus this bright, beepy, dry world.

Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn’t representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works. And in case he wasn’t into nature, I added: And it’s a really wild time in terms of technology. You’ll probably have a robot and that will be normal.

It was like talking someone off a ledge.

Of course, there’s no “right” choice. If you choose death I won’t be mad. I’ve wanted to choose it myself a few times.

His giant black eyes strained upward, toward the beckoning fluorescent lights.

You know what? Forget what I just said. You’re already a part of this. You will eat, you will laugh at stupid things, you will stay up all night just to see what it feels like, you will fall painfully in love, you will have babies of your own, you will doubt and regret and yearn and keep a secret. You will get old and decrepit, and you will die, exhausted from all that living. That is when you get to die. Not now.

He shut his eyes; I was wearing him out. It was hard to lower the pitch of my mind. The Asian nurse with the glasses went on her lunch break and was replaced by a pig-faced nurse with short hair. She looked me over and suggested I take a break.

“Get something to eat, walk around the block. He’ll be here when you get back.”

“He will?”

She nodded. I didn’t want to push it by asking if he was going to live in general, or just until I got back. And if I didn’t go would he still live?

I’m going away, but just for a short time. It was impossible to leave him.

I left him.

My guilt was cooled by relief: it was good to be out of that terrifying, earsplitting room. I followed the signs to Labor and Delivery, dazed by the calm hallways filled with business as usual.

There was some confusion at the nurses’ station.

“What did you say her name was again?”

“Clee Stengl.”

“Hmmm. Hm, hm, hm, hm, hmmmm.” The chubby nurse clicked around on a computer. “Are you sure you have the right hospital?”

“They told her to come down here, in the NICU, she was—” I gestured to the back of my pants to indicate bleeding. I remembered her sunken eyes and suddenly felt that Clee was in great danger, fighting for her life at this very moment. An older nurse was reading a magazine and watching from a distance. I leaned my body over the counter.

“Are you searching… widely?” What I meant was maybe she was in an emergency operating room, or the ICU, but I didn’t want to say that. “Stengl. You might be adding a vowel between the g and the l? There’s no vowel there, she’s part Swedish. Very blond.” And just in case it would help, I added, “I’m her mother.”

The older woman put her magazine down. “Receiving,” she said quietly to the other nurse, standing behind her. “Two oh nine, I think. Home birth.”

The door to 209 was half-open. She was in a mechanical hospital bed, wearing a smock. A tube ran from her arm to a hanging bag of liquid. She was asleep, or not asleep — her eyes were fluttering.

“Oh good,” she said when she saw me. “It’s you.”

I sat next to her, feeling strangely meek and nervous. Her hair was in two braids — I’d never seen it like that. I thought of Willie Nelson or a Native American person.

“I guess he’s okay for right now. A nurse said I should go.”

“They told me.”

“Oh.”

It seemed like she had been in this room forever and knew everything about the hospital whereas I had been staggering around like a beggar.

“What’s that bag?”

“It’s just saline, I was dehydrated. Dr. Binwali checked me. He said I’ll be fine.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah.”

I looked at the ceiling for a minute. Now that crying was easy, it was too easy.

“I thought maybe”—I laughed a little—“you were dying.”

“Why would I be dying?”

“I don’t know. You wouldn’t be.”

It wasn’t an exchange we would have had before, but now we’d ridden in an ambulance together, listening to the siren from the inside. That’s when she’d first grabbed my hand.

A nurse came in.

“You pressed the call button?”

“Can I have some more water?” Clee asked.

The nurse went off with the pitcher, leaving a weird metallic smell.

I felt we couldn’t say anything, knowing she’d be back. She banged in again with the pitcher, her coppery smell redoubled. I waited, first for the nurse to leave and then for her scent to follow her.

“Can you get me something?” Clee asked. “That Tupperware?”

Kate’s spaghetti. It was on a plastic chair.

Clee peeled the lid off and lowered her head, sticking her mouth down into the container. She made her hand shovel-like and started pushing the food into her mouth. It wasn’t the spaghetti. Of course it wasn’t — Kate’s visit was months and months ago. I stood up and faced the window so I wouldn’t have to look at it. I could still see her in the reflection but not the bloody thing she was eating. What happens when you eat that much of yourself? She was leaning back now, just chewing, chewing, chewing. She had gotten too much in her mouth and now she had to catch up with it. The glass had an amber tint or film that made her look old-fashioned. It was mesmerizing, how different this woman was from Clee. Now she carefully shut the container, click, wiped her hands on a napkin, drank a glass of water, and leaned her head back on the angled bed. Her braids lay on her chest and she looked leaden with sorrow, like a picture from the Dust Bowl. You just knew her whole life was going to be hard, every second of it.

“If he lives,” she said, “will he be messed up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Amy and Gary won’t want him,” she said slowly. “What happens to babies like that, if they’re not adopted?”

She was looking at me now, in the glass. I was the same sad sepia color.

I sat with Kubelko Bondy through the evening, staring at his miniature fingers wrapped around my thumb. I knew it was a reflex — their hands would curl around a carrot — but I had never been held so steadfastly for so long. He grabbed at the air when I gently pulled away. I’ll be back in the morning. For now this was true.

I slept on a metal cot between Clee’s bed and the window. A baby cried in the night, on and on without stopping, and then was abruptly silent. A cart rattled down the hall and someone said, “Who?” and someone replied, “Eileen.” An alarm rang and was shut off and rang again before it was finally shut off for good. I slept for a minute or two and woke up as the old me, untroubled and dumb, until it came back like a floating carcass. Leaving him would be like killing someone and getting away with it. I’d be haunted forever. What was this life even for? It was over.

He was up there, alone. Maybe not even alive. I wanted to wail. Where was the real grandmother, the pastor, the chieftain, God, Ruth-Anne? There was nobody. Just us.

The cot was impossible. I sat up and put my feet on the floor; the mattress made a V shape around me.

“Are you leaving?” she whispered. “Please don’t go.”

“I’m not leaving.”

She raised her bed up. The motor sound was too loud.

“I’ve been having some bad thoughts,” she said.

“I know. Me too.” It was not a scenario where something comforting could be said, like Everything will be okay. Nothing would be okay, that was the problem. I stood up and reached for her hand; maybe we could make the fist again. She grabbed my whole arm.

“Really, don’t leave me here.”

Her eyes were huge, her teeth were chattering. She was in a mad panic. I pulled the blanket off my bed and draped it around her shoulders, turned the thermostat up though I wasn’t sure it was connected to anything. I filled the pitcher with hot water from the bathroom and made steamy compresses with the white hospital washcloth.

Clee wondered if she should call her parents.

“I think that’s a good idea.”

“You do?”

“Their daughter had a baby. They’ll want to know.”

“They’re not like that.”

“It’s biological, they won’t be able to help it.”

“Really?”

I nodded knowingly.

She dialed. I began to tiptoe out but she shook her head violently and pointed at the chair with a sharp finger.

“Mom, it’s me.”

The cadence of Suzanne’s voice was abrupt; I couldn’t make out actual words.

“In the hospital. I had the baby.

“I don’t know, we don’t know yet. He’s in the NICU.

“I didn’t have a chance to, everything was crazy.

“I said I didn’t have a chance to. I haven’t called anyone.

“No, Cheryl’s here.

“I don’t know, it just worked out that way. She came in the ambulance.”

Suzanne became loud; I moved to the window so I couldn’t hear her.

“Mom—

“Mom—

“Mom—”

Clee gave up and held the phone straight out in front of her; the shrieking distorted violently, crackling in the air. Was she holding the phone like that to be funny and rude? No. She was hyperventilating. Her hand was gripping her stomach; something was seizing up in there. I leaned toward the phone — the sarcastic voice taunted, “… apparently I’m not your mother anymore; I’ve been replaced…” I wanted to punch Suzanne, to strangle her and drag her to the floor and bang her head against the linoleum again and again. Your (bang) daughter (bang) is in hell (bang). Be gentle with her.

I motioned for Clee to hang up and she looked at me with feral, uncomprehending eyes.

“Hang up,” I whispered. “Just hang up.”

Her hand obeyed me; the phone went silent.

I apologized for encouraging the call. She said she’d never hung up on her mom before.

“Really?”

“No.”

We sat in silence. After a moment she poured herself some water and drank the whole glass.

“Do you want more?” I rose to take the glass. “Should I call the nurse?”

“Will it be the same one from before?”

“She had a funny smell, didn’t she?”

“She smelled like metal,” Clee said gravely.

I laughed.

“She did,” she said. “The smell made my teeth hurt!”

This seemed funny too. I gripped the bed rail, giggling; I felt slightly hysterical. Clee’s laugh was an unflattering guffaw; her mouth became huge. There was that smile I’d seen once before. She was looking at my lips; I brushed them off as I finished chuckling. We were done laughing. She was still looking at my mouth; I kept my hand over it. She quietly moved my fingers away and kissed me softly. She pulled back, swallowed, and then began again. We were kissing. For a while I kissed thinking that this was not that kind of kissing. I kissed her unfamiliarly soft, full lips again and again and reasoned that there were plenty of families who kissed easily and on the lips, French people, young people, farm people, Romans… After a while the hypothesis fell away; her palms were rubbing my back, my hair, she held my face. I stroked her braids again and again, as if I had wanted to touch them for a million years and would never tire of it. After a long time, ten or fifteen minutes, the kissing slowed. There were a series of closing kisses, goodbye kisses, kisses placed like lids on boxes — then the lid would pop off and need to be replaced. There, this is the final kiss — no, this is the final kiss. This one is, it really is. And now I’m just kissing that kiss good night.

She turned out the light by her bed. I stepped backward and crouched onto my cot. She lowered her mechanical bed; the noise of the motor filled the room. Then silence.

I had never been so awake in my life. What did it mean? What did it mean? I hadn’t kissed anyone in years. I’d never kissed a person with silky lips. Did I even like it? It was a little sickening. I wanted to do it more. It probably wouldn’t happen again. We were in a crisis. It was the kind of thing that happens for no reason in a crisis in the middle of the night. What did it mean? I blushed thinking of the starved way I had acted. As if I had been dying to do that. When really it was the furthest thing from my mind. I raised my pointed finger in the air — Furthest thing from my mind! — but the jury was inscrutable. How would we be in the morning? Kubelko Bondy. Somehow it was hard to believe he would die now, since he was a part of this. Soft was the wrong word. Satiny? Supple? A new word, I would come up with it right now — which letters would I use? S, for sure. Maybe an O. Was this how words were made? How would I announce the word? Who would I contact about that?

IN THE MORNING HER BED was empty. I hurried into my shoes and took the elevator up to the NICU. The linoleum hallways were endless and fluorescent and the kissing episode was remote, just one of yesterday’s many dramatic events. Today was day two of his life, hopefully. I washed my hands and put on the gown. Clee was hunched over the glass case, chanting her “sweet baby boy” hymn. Her braids were gone. Without looking at me she stepped back, so I could have a turn.

The tube down his throat looked huger today, as if he’d shrunken in the night. His tired black eyes had just opened when the tall Indian doctor appeared behind us.

“Good morning.” He shook our hands. “Please come with me.”

His face was grim and it occurred to me that we would now be told the baby wasn’t going to make it. Maybe he had already technically died and it was just the machines giving the illusion of life. Clee gave me a stricken look.

“Can she stay with the baby?” I asked. “He just woke up.”

I followed the doctor across the room. I yearned for a lawyer and the right to make a phone call. But those rights were for arrested people. We got nothing. Whatever he told me would be the new reality and we’d just have to accept it. The doctor parked me in front of a skinny woman with a folder.

“This is Baby Boy Stengl’s grandmother,” he said, introducing me.

“I’m Carrie Spivack,” said the woman, sashaying forward.

“Carrie is from Philomena Family Services.”

And the doctor turned to leave, just like that. I grabbed him.

“Shouldn’t we wait to see if—”

He looked down at his pocket; my hand was in it. I took it out.

“If what?”

“If he lives?”

“Oh, he’ll live. That’s a tough kid. He just needs to show us he can use his lungs.”

Carrie from Philomena Family Services brought out her hand again. I hugged her, brittle reed that she was. He’ll live.

She stepped backward out of my arms; she wasn’t that kind of Christian.

“I’m here to talk with your daughter — is that her over there?”

“No.”

“It’s not?”

“Now wouldn’t be a good time.”

“Of course it wouldn’t.”

“It wouldn’t?”

“She’s saying goodbye,” Carrie said.

“Which might take a little while.”

“You’re right. There’s an arc to adoption.”

“An ark?”

“A beginning, a middle, and an end. The end is always the same.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“That’s because she’s in the beginning. Nobody knows in the beginning. She’s right on track.”

“How long does it take?”

“Not too long. I like to give a lot of space and let the hormones do the work.”

“But approximately.”

“Three days. In three days she’ll be herself again.”

Carrie said she would be back tomorrow and not to worry about a thing. Amy and Gary were on their way.

“They’re coming here?”

“She won’t have to meet them. Here’s my card, just let her know she’s not alone.”

“She’s not alone.”

“Great.”

CLEE’S FOREHEAD WAS AGAINST THE ISOLETTE. His eyes were shut again.

“Who was that?”

“The doctor said he’ll live. He said he’s a tough kid.”

She straightened up. “A tough kid?” Her chin was trembling. She unclicked one of the circular doors and put her mouth into the arm hole. “Did you hear that, sweet boy?” she whispered. His skinny, mottled arms lay limply against his tiny torso. “You’re tough.”

I glanced across the room — did three days include today? Or was yesterday the first day and today was already day two? Was she factoring in that we had kissed and kissed and kissed last night? I winced with embarrassment.

A nurse hurried past. “Excuse,” she said, too busy for the me. I looked across the room at the parents who would blame each other for all eternity. They belonged here, both of them equally, as did the nurses and the doctors and Clee. None of them recognized the interloper among them, but they would soon. I’d gotten swept up in the drama of the situation and mistakenly involved myself.

It was time to go home.

He was going to live, Carrie Spivack was here, in three days from either yesterday or today Clee would be discharged without the baby. I would clean up, get the house ready. I pictured myself taking off my shoes and putting them in the rack on the porch. Funny how up until a few minutes ago I thought this incoherent fear, this limbo, was going to last forever. I tried smiling to see if it really was funny, ha ha. My hand went to my throat as it seized violently. Globus hystericus. I had thought it was gone for good but of course it wasn’t. Nothing ever really changes.

I bent over the opposite side of the case. His fingers wiggled like underwater plants. How would I recognize him if we crossed paths later in life? These seaweed hands would be buried inside normal man hands. I wouldn’t even be able to know him by name, because he didn’t have one.

Almost! I said. There was no good way to be, so I was being cavalier, lancing my own heart. We came pretty close. See you next time!

Kubelko Bondy looked at me with disbelief, speechless.

I turned and walked out of the NICU before Clee looked up. I went down the elevator and into the lobby. I walked out of the lobby into the street. The sun was blinding. People were striding past thinking about sandwiches and feeling wronged. Where was I parked? Parking garage. I searched for my car, floor by floor, row by row. Ambulance. I’d come by ambulance. I’d have to call a cab. I didn’t have my cell phone. It was in the room. Fine. Go back and get it. In and out again. I took the elevator back up to the seventh floor. Everything looked the same, the pig-faced nurse still had that face. How good this world was, with its large and real concerns. There was the couple who blamed each other — they were holding hands and smiling tenderly. I was a ghost, spying on my old life without me. Room 209. Clee would be making her way back from the NICU any second now. My cell phone, grab it and go.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, crying. Something terrible had happened in the short time I was gone. She glared at me and made a shapeless angry sound.

“I couldn’t find you. I looked all over.”

Nothing terrible had happened.

“I was just trying to make a call.” I patted my phone in my pocket to show her. My phone was actually in my pocket; it had been there all along. I’d come back for something else.

The last of her crying came out in a clotted sigh after the first kiss. We began a series of impatiently off-center ones, as if we were too hurried to land them properly; then our mouths became fingertips, moving blindly over the bumps and hollows of each feature. She stopped, pulled her head back a little and looked at me. Her mouth hung open and her eyes were slow with thought. She was studying my face like she was trying to break it down, find some appeal in it — or maybe figure out how she got here, how this could be happening.

“Come in here,” she said, lifting the starched white sheet.

“There isn’t enough room.” I sat carefully on the edge of her bed.

“Just come in.”

I took off my shoes and she slowly, painfully scooched to one side of the twin bed. The combined width of our bottoms just barely fit inside the guardrails.

We began again, slowly this time. And deep. Her bosom, loose beneath the hospital smock, pressed against mine; she pushed her tongue into me with strong, mature movements and I held her face, that soft, honeyed skin. It was nothing like the things I had once done with her in my head. Phillip and the plumber and all the other men had missed the point completely. The point was kissing. Suddenly she froze, wincing.

“Are you in pain?”

“I am, actually,” she said, a little curtly. It was startling how quickly she changed.

“Maybe you need more fluids?” I looked at her saline bag. “Should I call the nurse?”

She laughed hoarsely. “Let me just think about something else for a minute.” She exhaled a long, controlled breath. “I guess I’m not ready to have these kinds of feelings.”

“Which feelings?” I said.

“Sexual.”

“Oh.”

At eleven I brought us lunch from the cafeteria in the basement; she ate the minestrone soup and the crackers and the yellow cake and the orange juice and then she needed to take a nap. But only after kissing my neck while running one hand through my short hair. It was like a dream, where the most unlikely person can’t get enough of you — a movie star or someone’s husband. How can this be? But the attraction is mutual and undeniable; it is the reason for itself. And like a surprise on the moon or a surprise on the battlefield, astonishment was native to these parts. The climate in 209 was fetid, breeding an exotic flower instead of the natural thing that Carrie Spivack had described. Or maybe she would say that things often became very sensual right before the release of the baby on the third day; maybe this was part of the arc. Tomorrow was day three.

I waited for her to wake up and when she didn’t I went up to the NICU by myself. A couple was taking off their gowns as I was putting on mine. They were talking about used cars.

“You would never buy a car without kicking the tires first,” he said, balling up his gown and throwing it in the recycling by mistake.

“You would if you were taking a leap of faith and trusting that God knew what you could handle.”

“I’m pretty sure God would not want you to buy a falling-apart old junker.”

“Well, it’s too late now,” she said, making a fist around her purse strap. She looked older than her picture on ParentProfiles.com, both of them did. They reeked of their house back in Utah, its old carpets suffused with cigarette smoke. This would be the smell of his life, of him.

“Is it?” Gary said. “Is it too late — legally?” He was scared. He really did not want the car they had bought. “Yes, it is,” she said. Then she gave him a look like Let’s not talk about this in front of that woman. They were terrible people, even slightly worse than most. I stalled, fumbling with the sleeves of my gown. Should I introduce myself or try to kill them? Not violently, just enough that they wouldn’t exist. Amy gave me a polite nod as they exited. I nodded back, watching the door swing shut. It occurred to me that the doctor had said only that the baby would live. Not that he would run, or eat food, or talk. Living just meant not dying, it didn’t necessarily include any bells and whistles.

Kubelko Bondy’s eyes were wide open and waiting.

Every single thing about you is perfect, I told him.

You came back, he said. I bowed my head and tried to come up with a promise that would allow for nothing being in my control.

I love your dear little shoulders, I said. And I always will.

Clee slept until noon and then we went back up together. She put her arm around me in the elevator and kept it there as we walked down the hall. Our hips bumped together in a difficult syncopated rhythm. We passed the couple who used to blame each other and they nodded without flinching. I thought to myself that these would always be the first people I came “out of the closet” to. They seemed very accepting. A few of the nurses looked silently startled by our new intimacy. Maybe because they had thought I was Clee’s mother. Or maybe because they were now dealing with two sets of parents and we weren’t the real ones. Clee gave me a peck on the lips in front of the Isolette. In this quiet way we came out to the baby.

Carrie Spivack had been here too; her Philomena Family Services card was sticking out of the plastic name tag that said Baby Boy Stengl. I palmed it like a magician and moved it into my pocket.

“We can’t keep calling him ‘the baby,’ ” I whispered.

“Okay. Do you have a name?”

This moved me, that she thought I had any right to name him. I pictured trying to explain the name Kubelko Bondy.

“It should come from you, you’re his mom.”

She laughed, or I thought it was a laugh — it ended in a gasping kind of swallow. We noticed a strange red mark on his tiny arm. I waved over a nurse with bleached-blond hair.

“Hi, little dude,” she croaked, checking his monitor. “It’s a big day for you.” She reeked of perfume, perhaps to cover the smell of cigarettes. The mark: a cigarette burn. I felt alive with anger. But I was a manager and knew how to handle this; I could already picture her crying after what I was about to say.

“He comes off the ventilator later today,” she continued. “So we hope he’s a good little breather.”

Clee and I glanced at each other with alarm. Breathing. That was on the top of our list of things we hoped he would be able to do.

“Will you be involved in taking it out?” I said nervously. Please no.

“Yep. We’ll put him on CPAP — continuous air — and see how he adapts.” She winked. It wasn’t a kindly wink, it was a wink that said all the other nurses and all the employees at Open Palm have told me about you, and now — wink — we get our revenge. I looked at her name tag. CARLA. It was too late to buy Carla a gift certificate or a Ninja five-cup smoothie maker. Maybe some candy or a coffee.

She looked at the mark on his arm and made a clicking noise.

“Sometimes when they take the IV out it leaves a mark. But if I’d done it”—she winked again—“there wouldn’t be a mark.”

The wink was a tic. It wasn’t cruel or conspiring, it was just a thing she did. Obviously smoking wasn’t allowed in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I watched her arrange the cords around his body so they wouldn’t poke at him. Her fingers were quick, like she’d done this nine hundred times before.

Clee asked what time the ventilator would come out.

“It’s scheduled for four o’clock. You can visit him afterward — he’ll be sedated, but he should be much more comfortable.”

“Thank you, Carla,” I said. “We appreciate everything you’re doing.” It wasn’t enough, it sounded fake and silly.

“You’re welcome.” The nurse smiled with her whole face; she didn’t think it was silly.

“We do,” I repeated vehemently, “we really appreciate everything you’re doing.”

AT FOUR THIRTY WE CALLED the NICU from the floor below.

“It’s taking them a little bit longer than expected,” said the receptionist. “The doctor’s still with him. We’ll call you when it’s done.”

“Is it the tall Indian doctor?”

“Yes, Dr. Kulkarni.”

“He’s good, right?”

“He’s the best.”

I hung up.

“He’s with the tall Indian doctor and they said he’s the best.”

“Dr. Kulkarni?”

I asked Clee to recite all the names of the nurses and doctors while I wrote them down. The short, beefy male nurse was Francisco, the toothy Asian one with glasses was Cathy, Tammy was the pig-faced one.

“How do you know all of this?”

“They have name tags.”

The room grew dark and we didn’t turn on the light. We would turn on the light when good news came and if it never came we would live in the dark like this forever.

FIFTEEN MORE MINUTES PASSED. AND then another five. I got up from my cot and turned on the fluorescents.

“Let’s name him,” I said.

Clee blinked in the light.

“Did you think about a name?”

She put a finger in the air and took a sip of water. She forgot to think of a name. She’s making one up on the spot. My old disgust for her was just right there.

“I have two names,” she said, and cleared her throat. “The first might seem kind of like it doesn’t fit him right now, but I think it will later.” I felt shame for my disgust. The shame felt like love.

“Okay.”

“I’ll just say it,” she said, hesitating.

“Just say it.”

“Little Fatty.”

I waited with no expression, to see if this was really the name.

“Because”—her eyes suddenly filled with tears, her voice cracked—“he will be fat one day.”

I put my arm around her. “It’s a really nice name. Little Fatty.”

“Little Fatty,” she whispered tearfully.

“I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone named that.” I rubbed her back. “What’s the other name?” I asked nonchalantly, knowing this other name would be his name, no matter what it was.

She took a deep breath and on the exhale said, “Jack.”

AT FIVE THIRTY THEY CALLED to tell us that the ventilator was out and he was breathing well on CPAP. We hurried upstairs.

He looked completely different without a big tube in his mouth. He was a baby, a cute little baby with a plastic prong in his nostrils.

“Hi, Jack,” whispered Clee.

Jack is your name now, I explained. But Kubelko Bondy will always be the name of your soul. I took a breath and forced myself to add: You will also have a third name, the one Amy and Gary give you. It might be Travis, it might be Braden. We don’t know yet.

We stood on either side of the incubator and each put a hand in. He squeezed Clee’s finger in his right hand and my finger in his left. He thought they were fingers from one person, a person with one old hand and one young hand. We stood like this for twenty-five or thirty minutes. My back ached and my hand was numb. Every once in a while Clee and I would look over the plastic case at each other and my stomach would go tumbling backward. A chaplain came in and began blessing babies. I looked around to see if this was legal. What about the separation of church and state? No one cared. Eventually he paused in front of Jack and before I could shake my head no, Clee nodded. His prayer swept across the three of us; my face tingled and my head spun dizzily. I felt holy, almost married.

As we walked arm in arm back to 209 I became aware that the woman clicking down the hall in front of us was Carrie Spivack. I subtly slowed our gait and waited for her to peel off to the left or right. But of course she did not, because she was headed for our room. It was day three. Up ahead was a fire extinguisher and a window. I chose the window. Speaking was risky so I just gestured, making an expansive motion toward the view. Clee peered down at the parking lot. The couple who’d once blamed each other ambled toward us, stopping with bemused smiles to see what we were looking at. The four of us peered out the window. A middle-aged man was helping an elderly woman out of a wheelchair and into the front seat of a station wagon.

“That’ll be us one day,” said the wife of the couple who’d once blamed each other. “Me and Jay Jay.” Her husband squeezed her shoulder. I guessed Jay Jay was the name of their baby.

The elderly woman’s legs didn’t work at all, so her son was lifting her from the wheelchair to the passenger seat in one prolonged and unwieldy motion. His mother’s hands were clasped around his neck, holding on for dear life. Amy of Amy and Gary would hang on to Jack’s neck like this one day. Right now it was much too tiny but one day he would be a sturdy middle-aged man, maybe even brawny or burly. He would move his mother with a much swifter motion than this man was able to, saying There you go, Ma, lemme buckle you and we’ll be set to go. My jealousy overwhelmed me; I had to look away.

Carrie Spivack straightened up as we approached, sharpening the corners of her smile and swinging our door open like a hostess. Clee walked right in, thinking she was just another nurse wanting to check her blood pressure.

“I’m sure you don’t mind giving us a moment alone,” Carrie Spivack said to me. She’d figured out I wasn’t the grandma. Or anyone. Behind her Clee gave me a confused shrug and a little half smile. The same half smile the passengers on the Titanic gave to their loved ones on the pier as the boat pushed away. Bon voyage, Kitty! Bon voyage, Estelle!

I floated back down the hall to the elevator.

“Going down?” It was a young Latino couple holding a newborn baby. Blue balloons bobbed from the wheelchair handle.

“Okay, I’ll go down.”

The couple was vibrating; this was the most incredible moment of their lives. They were about to take their baby into the world, the real world. The baby had lots of wet-looking black hair and was fatter than Jack. When the doors opened, the young father glanced back at me and I gave him a nod to say, Yep, your life, here it is, go into it. And they went.

I walked around the lobby. I scrolled through the numbers in my phone; there was no one to call. I mechanically deleted all my saved messages, except the one I’d left myself last year. The ten maximum-loud NOs sounded like wails, an inconsolable woman howling in the street, NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.

No one was in the cafeteria except a cashier. I ordered some hot water; it came with a slice of lemon and a napkin. I sipped it very slowly, burning my mouth each time. Three of the walls were white, and the fourth was painted in pinks and oranges. It took a little work to see it was a mural of a sunset in a place like Tuscany or Rhodesia. The door I had come through was in the beach part; to the left of the sun an empty paper towel dispenser hung open like a slack jaw, dumbfounded. Not a single thought could be had about what was happening upstairs. It was unthinkable. A railing had been painted along the bottom of the wall, placing the viewer on the terrace of a villa or maybe a palazzo. The salt air filled my nose; giant waves crashed on the rocks below, one after another after another. I cried and cried. Seagulls keened near the ceiling. Far in the distance a figure walked up the beach. He or she was clothed in a flowing white gown. Golden hair and warm Mediterranean smile. She waved. I wiped my face with the backs of my hands. She dropped into the chair next to me.

“I looked in the lobby first,” she said.

“I was there for a while.” I blew my nose on the paper napkin.

She glanced around. “Not very crowded, is it?”

“No.”

She pressed on my lemon slice and licked her finger.

“I didn’t realize that place was so Jesusy.”

“What place?”

“Philomena Whatever. If Amy and Gary hadn’t wanted him he would have gone to some other gross Christian family.”

A weird thing began to happen with the mural. The sun started rising, very, very slowly.

“The lady was okay, though — she didn’t try to hard-sell me or anything. I just said my situation had changed.” She picked up my hand.

Or maybe it had always been rising; maybe it was a mural of a sunrise, not a sunset. Oh, my boy. My sweet Kubelko Bondy.

“I’m not wrong about that, am I?” Clee said, sitting up. “This thing between us?”

“No, you’re right,” I whispered.

“I thought I was.” She settled back in her chair, extending her legs in a wide V. “But communication… you know. I believe in communication.”

I said I did too and she said she thought Jack was a pretty cool baby and while she hadn’t planned on being a mom, it didn’t seem that hard unless your kid was a jerk, which she was 100 percent sure Jack wasn’t. “Plus,” she added, “I thought you’d be psyched.”

I said I was psyched. Eight or nine immediate questions came to mind vis-à-vis her relationship to me and my relationship to the boy but I didn’t want to undo anything by overwhelming her. She rubbed her thumb deep into my palm and said, “I need a nickname for you.”

“Maybe Cher?” I suggested.

“Cher? That sounds like an old man’s name. No, let me think for minute.”

She thought with her knuckles against her head and then she said, “Okay, I’ve got it. Boo.”

“Boo?”

“Boo.”

“Like a ghost?”

“No, like Boo, like you’re my Boo.”

“Okay. That’s interesting. Boo.”

“Boo.”

“Boo.”