A plucked note sounded, and the elevator doors opened. The three of them followed the nurse around a corner and stopped in front of a small window. Knox realized that she had been imagining a wall of glass, an endless movie nursery, now that she stood jostling for space and peering into a room gnarled with equipment.
“I’ll just let them know who you are,” the nurse said. “You’re not allowed in here right now. The NICU’s very restricted, even if you’re family.” She pronounced it “knee-cue.”
“That’s all right,” her mother said. “Thank you.”
The nurse entered the room and spoke quickly to a woman in vivid, multicolored scrubs—the baby scrubs, Knox thought, the whimsical nursery scrubs, Ned would find that funny—before letting herself out again. Inside the room, the woman walked toward one incubator, its sides transparent, and pointed to it. She waited beside the machine, though it was too far from the window for them to see much of anything, then moved closer to the window and pointed to another.
“They’re called Isolettes, those beds they sleep in,” the nurse said. She positioned herself against a nearby wall, there not being enough room for her at the window. Knox wondered how long the nurse would remain with them, if she was charged to watch them the way a retail assistant was assigned to shadow potential shoplifters. Inside the room, the scrubbed woman’s eyes were crinkled above her mask. Knox looked in through the plastic sides of the Isolette she pointed to now; whichever twin was inside lay lavender on white cloth, mewling silently, like a newborn cat. He lay on his stomach, his face turned toward them, eyes shut. He was naked except for a tiny striped cap on his head. Tubes snaked out from under him, and from taped places on both of his feet. As they watched, the woman reached in through a flap in the Isolette, gently turned him faceup with both of her hands, taking several long seconds. She arranged the tubes, two of which Knox could now see were taped to his chest, one of which disappeared into the chapped skin above his bandaged navel. The woman then reached for another tube and wiggled the tip of it into his mouth. The baby closed his lips, which looked like nothing but dabs of pink wet, around it. She reached behind the Isolette, produced a pair of dark blue eyeshades, and placed them over his eyes, then went to the other side of the room, flipped a switch. The light above the baby brightened.
“Oh,” her mother said.
“Oh my God,” Knox said.
“So … incredible, look,” her mother said.
They looked. They looked. A full minute went by.
“He’s a potato,” her father said finally. “Look at him.”
“How can he … do you think he’s Ethan?” her mother said.
“Those sunglasses,” Knox said.
“The light is for jaundice,” the nurse said.
“He’s like a snowbird in Boca,” her father said.
Her mother started to giggle. She wiped at her eyes.
“They should be next to each other, though,” Knox said. “I think they should be closer together.”
“Sweet,” the nurse said, glancing in. “Do you have any more questions.”
Her mother stopped laughing. “How are they possibly going to be okay?” she said. “Ben?”
“They will,” her father said. He kept his eyes on the glass. From Knox’s angle, it looked as if he was gazing into his own reflection. “They don’t say they are going to be all right unless it’s true. Bruce said tube feedings and time to grow were all they needed.”
“Oh,” Knox said. She felt sure she spoke, though she had the sensation that she might just be experiencing a loud, pressing thought. She didn’t recognize anything about the baby, except that it was unquestionably human, albeit a kind of human that she had never seen before. The antipathy she had felt for the sonogram images Charlotte sent her evaporated in the warm breath that fogged the inch of window just in front of her mouth; what was left wasn’t quite love, not yet. More like—curiosity. Mystery. Hilarity. Shock.
The baby body seemed to pant. The little patch of its skin that passed for a chest moving up and down, up and down.
THE GATES crashed open; the bell sounded. Bruce had never known such happiness, or such fear. He thought he had, but he hadn’t. He laughed at the pattern he’d held in life, the pattern of being warned about what was upcoming and thinking the warning was all