her food intake, her heart rate, her blood pressure, her blood gases, and her antibiotics. There was no other universe except this plastic box, and Thomas and I marveled at the other parents in the intensive care unit who returned from forays into the outside world with McDonald’s cartons and boxes from Pizza Hut.
“How can they eat?” said Thomas.
That night, Thomas was told that he had a phone call, and he left the room. I stood beside the plastic box and rhythmically recited the Lord’s Prayer over and over, even though I am not a religious woman. I found the words soothing. I convinced myself that the words themselves would hold Billie to me, that as long as I kept reciting the prayer, Billie would not die. That the words themselves were a talisman, a charm.
When Thomas came back into the room, I turned automatically to him to ask him who called. His face was haggard — thin and papery around his eyes. He blinked, as though he were emerging from a movie theater into the bright sun.
He named a prize any poet in America might covet. It was for The Magdalene Poems, a series of fifty-six poems it had taken my husband eight years to write. We both sat down in orange plastic chairs next to the plastic box. I put my hand on his. I thought immediately of terrible contracts. How could we have been given this wonderful piece of news and have Billie survive as well?
“I can’t digest this,” Thomas said.
“No.”
“We’ll celebrate some other time.”
“Thomas, if I could be, I’d be thrilled. I will be thrilled.”
“I’ve always worried that you thought I was with you because of the poems. That I was using you. As a kind of muse.”
“Not now, Thomas.”
“In the beginning.”
“Maybe, for a while, in the beginning.”
“It’s not true.”
I shook my head in confusion. “How can this possibly matter?” I asked with the irritation that comes of not wanting to think about anything except the thing that is frightening you.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
But of course it did matter. It did matter.
I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective. But that night Thomas and I believed that our daughter was going to die. As we listened to the beeps and buzzes and hums and clicks of the machines surrounding her, we held hands, unable to touch her. We scrutinized her eyelids and eyelashes, her elbows and her fat calves. We shared a stunning cache of memories, culled in only six weeks. In some ways, we knew our daughter better that night than we ever would again.
Billie recovered in a week and was sent home. She grew and flourished. Eventually we reached the day when she was able to irritate us, when we were able to speak sharply to her. Eventually we reached the day when I was able to leave her and go out to take photographs. Thomas wrote poems and threw them away. He taught classes and gave numerous readings and talked to reporters and began to wonder if the words were running out on him. He drank more heavily. In the mornings, I would sometimes find him in the kitchen in a chair, his elbow resting on the counter. Next to him would be an empty bottle of wine. “This has nothing to do with you,” he would say to me, putting a hand on the skirt of my robe. “I love you. This is not your fault.”
I have sometimes thought that there are moments when you can see it all — and if not the future, then all that has gone before. They say this is true of the dying — that one can see a life — that the brain can perceive in an instant, or at most a few seconds, all that has gone before. Beginning at birth and ending with the moment of total knowledge so that the moment itself becomes a kind of infinite mirror, reflecting the life again and again and again.
I imagine that moment would be felt as a small billowy shock through the body, the whoomph of touching a frayed cord. Not fatal in itself, perhaps, but a surprise, a jolt.
And that is how it comes to me on the dock. I can see the years that Thomas and I have had together, the fragility of