“What about the tube?” I asked. “Did you attach it to her?”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “We inserted the central line, in case she needs blood or meds. It’s the easiest way in.”
I dipped my nose to the baby’s head; she still smelled like herself. At least I was getting back the same girl I’d given them.
I was afraid to look at her stomach. I pictured something Frankensteinish, a rusted bolt or a spare bike part holding the central line in place. But it was just as the doctor had described, a soft rubber tube, extending from her stomach.
“OK,” my mom said. “We can live with that.”
“So,” I said, “the iron isn’t getting into her brain?”
“Iron is not crossing the blood/brain barrier at this time,” the doctor said.
I should have felt relief, the doctor looked relieved, but I was confused and bizarrely disappointed. They’d said she needed her blood cleaned only a short time ago, so wouldn’t cleaning it still be a good idea?
“If you aren’t going to clean her blood, why does she have a rubber hose in her torso?”
“Sweetie,” my mom said. She laid a hand on my arm and gave me a look. Be grateful. Don’t go looking for trouble.
*
When I’d finally accepted that I was pregnant and was not going to magically become less pregnant, I called Brian. The phone was an inadequate tool, but it was the only immediate way to bridge a continent. As I dialed, my teeth chattered in intermittent bursts. This is new, I thought, psychosomatic teeth. Calm down, I told myself. Don’t be melodramatic. People get pregnant. But I couldn’t calm down. I couldn’t even think of how to break the news. “I’m pregnant” sounded so unoriginal, so teenager-in-the-heartland and—here was the real rub—too much like something happening exclusively to me. When I finally managed to say it, he melted. “My darling,” Brian said. “My sweetheart.” And then he went silent. He was silent for a long time, and when he spoke again his voice sounded clotted with pain, half-aspirated, as though he literally could not swallow this knowledge.
Having kids—what kids do to an adult life already in motion, what they do to romance, to your couch, your car, your time, your money, most of all your art—had been the constant bass line thrumming through our conversations in the months before I got pregnant. It was the issue that sent us, oddly early, into therapy together. It was the gun in the room. If he wanted to have kids with anyone, Brian kept saying, it would be with me. If.
But if is a wisp of a word. You could hardly hang your hat on that. Or build a life. Plus Brian already had a life, as a writer, a semi-happy bachelor of the Upper West Side, as a diffident, sexy Jewish intellectual. As the editor of a left-leaning magazine, a jazz detester, TV lover, kind friend, and surprising gossip. But first of all, last of all, most of all—as a writer. His entire adult existence had been organized around writing. If he had a creed, it would have been Nietzsche: “The essential thing in heaven and in earth … is a long obedience in the same direction.”
His obedience was to life at the desk, life as it shimmered onto the page. The unruly emissaries of real life—food and flowers, snow, slush, the Vermont night sky, sex, the Grand Canyon, the East Village, twisted ankles, soured wine, the Hudson River at close range—all these were fine, but were interlopers on his essential mission: animating a humane vision of the world.
Fine, OK, be a writer. Life of the mind, live for your art and all that. I could respect his calling, his need. But, then, what the hell had he been doing swinging around town with me? I’d never kept my wish to have kids secret, quite the opposite. I’d said emphatically, many times over, that I could not, would not, contemplate a life without children. Impossible. And he’d made his wish to avoid kids just as obvious. So, then, what the hell was I doing swinging around town with him?
After that initial declaration, My darling, my sweetheart, Brian remained shattered and unhappy on the phone, but I kept believing we’d work this out. If we could just see each other face to face, all the pieces would find a place: life, art, baby, love, writing—wasn’t there room for everyone on the couch? Pluralism, isn’t that what he believed in?
I’d remind him that we were the same two people who’d been made delirious by walking hip to hip; that he had been an eager partner in the (knowingly unprotected) act that produced this very dilemma.
Knowingly unprotected: Brian, by the age of forty-five, had never gotten a girlfriend pregnant; I, by the age of thirty-two, had never been pregnant. Luck or best practices, hard to say, but with each other we were bizarrely laissez-faire. Like naive dolts worldwide, we thought that since it had never happened before it couldn’t happen now. We’d been enacting a fantasy that turned into a vertigo-inducing reality.
Over the years, two different doctors told Brian he might encounter trouble conceiving; he’d chosen to believe them. He had room, he thought, to flirt with a possibility that a very submerged part of him wanted. When we’d made love without protection, I was discounting the things Brian said to me in therapy every week about not wanting kids. I was believing in some version of him that didn’t exist except in bed. But I was acting in alignment with my own deepest wishes.
I’d hoped he was too—that his willingness to be so cavalier about birth control was an unconscious wish to have the issue decided for him. For us. This interpretation now looked to be somewhere between wildly self-delusional and outright self-destructive.
*
The baby’s bird-sized rib cage rose and fell in a steady rhythm under the sunlight lamps. I sat beside her, in a rocking chair, watching her sleep. She had, I noticed, a preferred sleep pose, with her head tossed back, one ear angled upward as though waiting for the answer to a question. Occasionally, she emitted a high-pitched squeak, like a small wind instrument.
Once we were officially admitted and assigned a spot in the NICU, the nurses encouraged me to treat the baby like any newborn. “She’s not a china cup; she won’t shatter on ya,” a young Irish nurse said. She was my immediate favorite; she had a face of wide-spaced, pale freckles and red hair cut in a thick, exuberant bob. “Listen,” she told me, “the thing the babies like best is to be tucked into your clothes, naked. Skin-to-skin contact.”
“Won’t she get cold?” I asked.
“Not so long as you’re not dead,” the Irish nurse said, and winked.
In the wee hours of our first night there, with the baby tucked inside my shirt against my skin, I relaxed enough to notice the NICU rhythms. Someone had tried to soften the blow of this place with kitten posters and rocking chairs, to pretend it wasn’t a giant room of plastic boxes with very sick babies inside.