appeared a few minutes later, slipping from Emily so easily that Mother said she “caught” him more than delivered him. He was still, and the color of ash. Shawn thought he was dead. Then Mother felt a tiny heartbeat—actually she saw his heart beating through a thin film of skin. My father rushed to the van and began scraping at the snow and ice. Shawn carried Emily and laid her on the back seat, then Mother placed the baby against Emily’s chest and covered him, creating a makeshift incubator. Kangaroo care, she called it later.
My father drove; the storm raged. In Idaho we call it a whiteout: when the wind whips the snowfall so violently it bleaches the road, covers it as if with a veil, and you can’t see the asphalt, or the fields or rivers; you can’t see anything except billows of white. Somehow, skidding through snow and sleet, they made it to town, but the hospital there was rural, unequipped to care for such a faint whimper of life. The doctors said they had to get him to McKay-Dee in Ogden as soon as possible, there was no time. He could not go by chopper because of the blizzard, so the doctors sent him in an ambulance. In fact they sent two ambulances, a second in case the first succumbed to the storm.
Many months would pass, and countless surgeries on his heart and lungs would be performed, before Shawn and Emily would bring home the little twig of flesh that I was told was my nephew. By then he was out of danger, but the doctors said his lungs might never develop fully. He might always be frail.
Dad said God had orchestrated the birth just as He had orchestrated the explosion. Mother echoed him, adding that God had placed a veil over her eyes so she wouldn’t stop the contractions. “Peter was supposed to come into the world this way,” she said. “He is a gift from God, and God gives His gifts in whatever way He chooses.”
The first time I saw King’s College, Cambridge, I didn’t think I was dreaming, but only because my imagination had never produced anything so grand. My eyes settled on a clock tower with stone carvings. I was led to the tower, then we passed through it and into the college. There was a lake of perfectly clipped grass and, across the lake, an ivory-tinted building I vaguely recognized as Greco-Roman. But it was the Gothic chapel, three hundred feet long and a hundred feet high, a stone mountain, that dominated the scene.
I was taken past the chapel and into another courtyard, then up a spiral staircase. A door was opened, and I was told that this was my room. I was left to make myself comfortable. The kindly man who’d given me this instruction did not realize how impossible it was.
Breakfast the next morning was served in a great hall. It was like eating in a church, the ceiling was cavernous, and I felt under scrutiny, as if the hall knew I was there and I shouldn’t be. I’d chosen a long table full of other students from BYU. The women were talking about the clothes they had brought. Marianne had gone shopping when she learned she’d been accepted to the program. “You need different pieces for Europe,” she said.
Heather agreed. Her grandmother had paid for her plane ticket, so she’d spent that money updating her wardrobe. “The way people dress here,” she said, “it’s more refined. You can’t get away with jeans.”
I thought about rushing to my room to change out of the sweatshirt and Keds I was wearing, but I had nothing to change into. I didn’t own anything like what Marianne and Heather wore—bright cardigans accented with delicate scarves. I hadn’t bought new clothes for Cambridge, because I’d had to take out a student loan just to pay the fees. Besides, I understood that even if I had Marianne’s and Heather’s clothes, I wouldn’t know how to wear them.
Dr. Kerry appeared and announced that we’d been invited to take a tour of the chapel. We would even be allowed on the roof. There was a general scramble as we returned our trays and followed Dr. Kerry from the hall. I stayed near the back of the group as we made our way across the courtyard.
When I stepped inside the chapel, my breath caught in my chest. The room—if such a space can be called a room—was voluminous,