light, and some of the pods were bathed in ultraviolet. Those babies were being treated for jaundice, Pete explained later. But it was the noise that hit me the hardest. There was no crying—little lungs couldn’t, only mew, and in any case, most of the babies had tubes that went up their noses and down their throats, preventing them from making any sound. Instead, the NICU was a cacophony of electronic bleeps and chimes and bongs. Later I’d come to realize that many weren’t even alarms, just machines making their everything-normal-here noises, and that each was different for a reason. Like ewes recognizing the bleat of their particular lamb across a noisy field, the nurses could recognize their patients’ sounds and respond to any change.
I had no idea which incubator contained my baby. But then I saw Pete, over in one corner. Most of the pods had see-through covers with holes in the sides, like machines for handling hazardous material, but he was standing next to one that had the top removed. He was attaching a syringe of what looked like breast milk to one end of a tube.
“Over there,” I said to the porter who was wheeling me.
Pete looked up and gave me a tender smile, but didn’t stop what he was doing. “Mummy’s here,” he said to the incubator. I got there, peered in, and saw Theo.
It should have been a big moment. The way everyone talks about the maternal bond, that bottomless pit of gushy love people go on about, if for some reason you don’t feel an immediate, overwhelming connection to your baby there must be something wrong with you. But I didn’t. I simply recoiled. I’d somehow expected from Pete’s positive updates that Theo would look like a real baby now. But this stranger’s wizened face seemed a hundred years old rather than newborn. Dark, downy hair covered his shoulders, like a little monkey. He was wearing the tiniest nappy I’d ever seen, and he was tucked into a kind of ramshackle nest of comforters and bedding. Electrical pads were stuck to his chest, and a cuff around his left foot glowed red—that was the oxygen sensor, I learned later. His arms and legs were stick-thin, the limbs of a famine victim.
A clear plastic tube went up one tiny nostril—the same tube Pete was gently squeezing breast milk into the other end of. “Shouldn’t a nurse be doing that?” I said anxiously.
“They’re busy. Besides, I like doing it for him. It makes me feel useful.”
“Did you check the pH, Pete?” an Irish voice called. I looked up. A nurse, dark and pretty, was speaking to him from across a nearby incubator.
“Two point five.”
“Good man,” she said approvingly. Then, to me, “Are you Mum?”
I’ve always found the way medical staff call every mother Mum and every infant Baby, instead of the mum and the baby, slightly grating, but I know that’s pedantic of me. “Yes. Maddie.”
“Welcome to the NICU, Maddie. I know it must seem overwhelming at first, but little Theo’s doing really well.” With her Irish accent, his name came out as Teo. “And Pete’s been a total star. If only all husbands were that handy with the NG tube.”
“We’re not actually married,” I said automatically.
“Sorry, my bad—all partners. Don’t let him get away, though. He’s a catch, that one.”
It was just the friendly banter of someone trying to put me at my ease, I knew. But something about it irritated me, perhaps because I still felt a failure for not being able to carry Theo to term. Plus, there was the realization that, while I’d been lying in a cushy private room, Pete had been quietly coping—no, more than coping, excelling—here in the brutal environment of the NICU. Generally, I’d have said Pete isn’t brilliant in an emergency. But put him in a situation like that, a situation that requires steadfastness and determination, and he comes into his own. It should have made me feel proud and grateful. But actually, it just made me feel even more guilty.
Pete saw me looking at the monitors. “They start to make sense eventually,” he said.
It hadn’t even occurred to me to try to make sense of them. “What do you mean?”
He indicated the nearest one. “The wavy line is his heartbeat, and the big number is beats per minute. Anything less than a hundred is a braddie—if that happens, try to get his heart going again with a stroke or pat. The one that goes