arm or leg, or arching their back, or even just sneezing. You got ridiculously attuned to those signs in your baby, because any of them might herald the onset of an “episode”—the nurses’ euphemism for a near-death experience, when the alarms went off and Theo’s heart or breathing would have to be restarted.
Watching my baby so obsessively changed how I felt about him. I felt—not love, exactly, definitely not that, but an overwhelming, painful feeling of responsibility. I’d already let him down once. I mustn’t let him down again.
The skin-to-skin, or “kangaroo care” as the nurses sometimes called it, helped, too. The first time Bronagh—the Irish nurse, who turned out to not be as bad as I’d thought once I got used to her breezy manner—suggested it, I was dubious. It seemed madness to move this tiny, vulnerable being out of his lifesaving incubator and onto the same stomach that had failed him once already. But Bronagh wasn’t going to take no for an answer, so while Pete drew the screens, I pulled off my top and Bronagh carefully lowered Theo, complete with all his tangles of lines and wires, onto my chest, like a collapsed puppet.
“You can see if he might latch on to your breast now, if you like,” she added when he was settled.
Breastfeed? Really? I was terrified just holding him. He was so tiny—three pounds when he was born, and still under five pounds three weeks later. I knew how babies should feel—plump and squeezy and pinchable. By comparison Theo felt as light as a blown egg. But I obediently pushed up my bra and steered his tiny head toward my nipple. Tiny toothless gums, soft as a little fish’s, mouthed at me. Then, abruptly, they fastened on. A pop, a bubble, and suddenly euphoria was flowing out of me into him. He spluttered once, gasped, then went back to sucking.
“He’s doing it,” Pete breathed. Then: “Mads, look at the stats.”
I looked over at the monitor. Theo’s heart rate was falling. “Is he all right?” I said anxiously.
“All right? He’s just settling down for a nice drink and a sleep,” Bronagh said. “Welcome to your new favorite place, Theo.”
That was when it first sank in that the doctor at the other hospital might have been wrong. This baby might be destined to live.
* * *
—
I FIRST NOTICED LUCY because she seemed so out of place. She was very well groomed, for one thing, with long blond hair that was either natural or so expertly dyed it must have been done professionally. The cut also looked like it had been done at an expensive salon, a lovely feather-edged fringe that reminded me of a show horse’s mane. Her clothes were impeccable—in all the time we were in the NICU, I never saw her turn up in a fleece or tracksuit bottoms, as other mothers did. She wore white linen blouses, little jackets or cashmere cardigans, jeans that showed off her slender legs. She was probably around the same age as me, but somehow seemed older.
One day, we were both in the sink area. She was rinsing breast milk syringes, while I was washing bottles and teats. She glanced across and said, “That looks like a really distant dream.” Her voice had that slight drawl posh English people have, so really came out like rarely. But her smile was friendly, and I could tell she was just breaking the ice, not actually complaining.
“You’ll get there,” I replied, trying to be encouraging.
Her smile slipped. “I’m not sure we will, actually. The doctors want to talk to us about discontinuing care.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said immediately. Everyone on the ward knew what discontinuing care meant. There’d been an instance just a few days before, a lovely Indian couple who brought in homemade Keralan food for the nurses and whose baby girl had been a micro-preemie—less than eight hundred grams. She’d fought off infection after infection, but each one had left her progressively weaker. She’d already been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, was partially blind, and had never come off a full ventilator. When the doctors did their rounds, they’d confer over her crib in low, quiet voices. Afterward, the mother would be in tears, and sometimes the father, too. And then a day came when the parents simply looked exhausted and defeated, and the whole apparatus—incubator, ventilator, vital signs monitor, and all the connecting tubes—was unplugged and wheeled out of the NICU. They were being taken to a private