Detours (30 page)

“How much more do you need to tell us?” Ellis leaned wearily against the chair back, still holding Mary’s hand.

“Not much. Only one or two other possibilities.”

“I’d just as soon hear it all and be done with it.” Ellis looked at Mary. “What about you, babe?”

“Might as well. How much worse can it get?”

The doctor offered a thin smile. “He’ll probably be anemic for at least the first two months because he can’t produce new blood yet, and we’ll have a hard time keeping his blood sugar levels under control. We’re fairly certain his kidney and liver functions are compromised. You probably noticed his skin is already looking yellowish because of the excess bilirubin in his bloodstream. We’ll need to be on the lookout for kernicterus if his bilirubin levels get too high.”

“What’s kerni—whatever you said?” Gloria asked.

“A form of brain damage, but let’s not borrow trouble.” Doctor Jenkins closed the folder she’d been holding.

“Like what you’ve just described isn’t trouble enough,” Ellis said.

“I know this is disheartening. I’m sure Doctor Hill will suggest that you speak with one of the hospital’s counselors as soon as you can. You’ll be dealing with a lot of stressful experiences in the days to come, and the more support you get, the better you’ll be able to handle them.” Doctor Jenkins looked from face to face. “Can I answer any immediate questions for you?”

“Is he going to live?” Mary’s even tone belied the gravity of the question.

The doctor put her hand on Mary’s forearm. “We’ll do everything we can for him medically. Beyond that—”

Tears rimmed Mary’s eyes. “I want to be with him now.”

“Sure, sis,” Gloria said. “We’ll all go.”

“No, just me.” Mary rose and left the room.

“I’ve dealt with a number of premature births,” Doctor Jenkins said. “In almost every instance, the mother believes she’s somehow to blame.”

“Is she?” Ellis asked.

“No, certainly not. Spontaneous early birth is still, in large measure, a mystery.” She stood and offered her hand to Ellis. “I wish you and Mary all the best, Ellis. Later today I’m going to examine her carefully, and if everything checks out, I’ll sign discharge papers for her to go home in the morning. No need for her to spend more than tonight here. If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to call me.”

After Doctor Jenkins left the room, Gloria and Ellis stared blankly at one another. At length, Gloria spoke. “What should we do?”

“Damned if I know. I guess we should at least check on Mary.”

They made their way back to the NICU. Through the glass panels on the entrance door, they saw Mary standing beside the baby’s incubator, watching her half-day-old infant son.

“Do you think we should go in?” Gloria asked.

“Uh-uh. Whatever is going on right now is strictly between her and the baby.” Ellis gazed at her devastated partner. “Maybe we should grab something for us to eat and bring a sandwich back for Mary. I don’t think any of us has had a bite all day. Some of the nurses offered her some snacks after the baby came, but she wouldn’t touch a bite.”

“We’ve all been too upset to eat, but I think I could eat something now,” Gloria said.

“I’m not sure I can gag anything down, but we ought to try. And it would feel good to step out of this hospital, even if only for a little while.”

Ellis tapped on the window to get Mary’s attention. She pantomimed walking away with fingers of one hand on the palm of the other and then feigned eating. Mary indicated she understood.

On their way out, Ellis and Gloria passed through the waiting room. Clusters of Hispanics talked rapidly in their native tongue.

“I think I know how they feel,” Gloria said, gesturing toward a group that seemed especially distraught.

“What do you mean?”

“Ninety-five percent of what’s been said to them today has been in a language they barely understand. For all I got out of what Doctor Jenkins told us, she might just as well have been speaking Swahili.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. And from what I did grasp, we’re all going to have to learn a lot of foreign languages to get through what’s ahead of us.”

Ellis returned to the NICU and stood quietly beside Mary, who was still only inches from the incubator. “Hi, sweetie. You doing all right?”

“How can I be doing all right? It’s three months too early. Everything’s all wrong.”

Ellis saw a mixture of fatigue, disbelief, and confusion on Mary’s face. She tried again. “I know things aren’t right. I wondered if you might want to sit down for a while and have a chicken salad sandwich.” She lifted the brown paper bag a little higher so that Mary could see it. “Gloria and I found a nice deli a couple of blocks from here.”

“Where is she?”

“I sent her home. She was worried about how Barry would handle the three girls on his own. Besides, she was exhausted.”

“I should call Nat.”

“I talked to Naomi a little while ago. Natalie will spend the night at her house. You could call her right before bedtime, maybe.” Ellis willed herself to look into the incubator. “He sure is little, huh?”

“Almost not there at all,” Mary said. “I really messed up this time.”

Ellis wrapped her arm around Mary’s shoulder. “This isn’t your fault, love. Doctor Jenkins even said so. These things just happen.”

Mary slumped against Ellis. “But it was my body he was supposed to grow inside of. I must have done something wrong to make him need to come out so early.”

“Let’s not drag ourselves through that briar patch tonight, okay?” Ellis drew Mary a few steps from the incubator. “Take a break and come sit with me for a while.”

Ellis took Mary from the NICU back to the small room where they’d met with Doctor Jenkins.

“I got you some coleslaw and a cookie, too,” Ellis said as she pulled the contents from the bag. “And some tea.”

“Thanks, babe. I guess I should try to eat a little.”

Mary ate three bites of her sandwich and picked at the cup of slaw. She broke off a piece of cookie and handed the rest to Ellis. “Not much of an appetite. You can finish this.”

Ellis put everything back in the bag and set it aside. “We said we wanted to see the baby before we decided on a name. We promised we’d wait until Halloween to even start discussing possibilities—”

“Why name him? He probably won’t make it through the night.” Mary’s chin dropped to her chest.

Ellis left her chair and knelt in front of Mary. She grasped Mary’s shoulders, then lifted Mary’s head with the palm of her hand. “Don’t talk like that about our son. I know you’re tired, and for sure this is
not
what we expected, but we’re not giving up on him. Not tonight, not ever.”

“Ellis, he’s half the size of any of the babies in the NICU. You heard what Doctor Jenkins said about all the problems he has.”

“Problems he
might
have. All we know right now is that he’s premature, he’s had trouble breathing, and he has some jaundice.”

Mary let her head fall back. She stared at the ceiling a long time. She finally looked at Ellis, still kneeling in front of her. “If Gloria took the car, how are you getting home?”

“I’m not going home. I’m staying here with you and our little boy tonight.” Ellis took Mary’s face between her hands. “We’re a family, remember?”

“You never really wanted kids, Ellis. I know that. You just did this because you felt sorry for Nat… and for me.”

Ellis looked Mary in the eye. “You’re right, I didn’t think I wanted kids, but then I got to know you and your daughter. It took me a while, but I finally figured out that what makes me happiest is doing what makes you happy. Maybe I didn’t know what I was signing on for, but one thing I’m sure of—my life isn’t worth a damn without you, and you not only want kids, you need them. So, since I need you, that pretty much looks like a complete circle to me.”

“But this nightmare isn’t the way I wanted you to learn about being a parent. How can I ask you to be a parent to that tiny lump of a person in there? I don’t even know how to be a parent to him.”

“Then I guess we’ll learn together.” Ellis dragged her plastic chair close to Mary’s. “He needs a name, though. I want to call him by name.”

“We were so careful not to let the sonogram techs tell us the baby’s gender. Even though I didn’t say so, I’ve thought all along the baby would be another girl, so I didn’t think much about boys’ names. And we promised Natalie she could be in the delivery room. You
know
she’d have had a dozen suggestions.” A half-smile played on Mary’s drawn and pale face. “She’s gonna be pissed that she got a brother instead of a sister.”

“She’ll adjust.” Ellis patted Mary’s upper leg. “Besides, Nat and I already discussed this situation, so I’ve got the perfect suggestion for what to call him.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Uh-huh. Let’s call him Joseph.”

Mary’s lower lip trembled. “That was my dad’s name.”

“I know, and it was Nathan’s middle name. Technically, he’s the baby’s father, so Joseph seems like the perfect name.”

Without leaving her chair, Mary fell clumsily into Ellis’s arms. “Joseph Moss. I think my dad would be proud. Well, maybe not exactly proud, since I’m now a divorced woman with a baby by way of artificial insemination, but at least his name will live on.”

“We need to pick a middle name,” Ellis said. “Any ideas?”

Mary righted herself in her chair. “Yep, I do have a suggestion. Let’s name him Joseph Ellis Moss.”

Ellis blinked back tears. “That’s sweet, but won’t it upset your mother and the rest of your family?”

“Maybe, but I don’t care. You said it best just a little while ago. He’s our baby boy. It’ll be up to you and me to take care of him.”

Ellis stole a quick kiss. She offered Mary her hand as she stood. “Let’s go see Joey.”

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

“But he was doing so well.” Mary’s lament pierced the usually quiet NICU. “It’s like every tiny bit of ground he gained over the past week has been lost again.”

“Preemies rarely progress on a straight line,” Doctor Hill said. “His heart rate fell to a dangerously low level, so we had to put him back on the ventilator. His jaundice worsened, so we gave him another transfusion.” He offered a sympathetic pat to the back of Mary’s hand, resting on an oxygen tank. “I know this is very frustrating for you.”

Mary jerked her hand away. “Frustrating? Dammit, Doctor Hill, frustrating is when you can’t find your car keys or you get caught in traffic. This is well past frustrating.”

Mary had been at the hospital nearly around the clock for the first week of Joey’s life. Two of the babies in the NICU when he was born had been released to go home. None of the other babies in the unit looked a fraction as feeble as her son. Doctor Hill might have great credentials as a neonatologist, but as best Mary could tell, he didn’t have a clue about how it felt to be a parent with a baby in an incubator.

“Well, his condition is stable at the moment. The nurses know to alert me if anything changes.”

Mary scowled at the doctor’s back as he left the unit. She felt the front of her T-shirt moisten. “Wonderful. Time to pump again.” She slipped behind a draw curtain, yanked the breast pump from her tote bag, and affixed it. Every three hours or so, she used the pump, then carefully saved the milk to be fed to Joey through his gastric tube. His tummy was so tiny, though, he couldn’t accommodate all that she was producing, so the milk from every third pumping was thrown away. Pump and dump was one of the hardest things she’d faced. All that wonderful nutrition going to waste while her son had gained only two ounces since birth.

She checked the clock on the wall. She needed to pull herself together. Ellis was bringing Natalie to the NICU for her first visit that afternoon. Thanks to a teacher’s in-service day, Nat had the day off from school. Mary and Ellis had done what they could to describe for Nat the challenges facing her baby brother, but Mary knew all the explaining in the world couldn’t fully prepare an almost-eleven-year-old for the shrunken, tube-laden, translucent-skinned being lying all but motionless in his two-by-two glass prison.

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

“That ugly thing is not my baby brother.” Natalie flopped onto a chair in the waiting room. Ellis and Mary each claimed a chair on either side of her.

Mary reached to stroke her daughter’s head, but Natalie jerked away. Mary said, “We told you he didn’t look much like the other babies you’ve seen. He’s only a week old, and because he was born too early, it’s going to take him awhile to catch up.”

“I don’t care. I just want to go home.” Natalie squinted her eyes at Ellis. “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t shown up and wrecked everything.”

“Nat, that’s not true, and you know it.” Mary looked at Ellis as she spoke.

“It’s okay to be mad at me,” Ellis said, leaning nearer to Natalie. “I’m mad, too, but I don’t know who to be mad at.”

“What’ve you got to be mad about? You don’t have a freaky monster for a brother.”

“You’re right. I don’t.” Behind Natalie’s back, Ellis motioned for Mary to leave. “Tell me why that makes you mad.”

“Hey, I need to go take care of some things,” Mary said. “How about I meet you two in half an hour?”