The hospital shrank in my rearview mirror until it was just a pale shape against the winter sky, and beside me, buckled into a car seat that suddenly seemed enormous around her, Nora slept. Thirteen days in the neonatal intensive care unit, thirteen days of leaning over a plastic incubator listening to monitors beep out the rhythm of my daughter’s small stubborn heart, and now she was coming home, and I kept glancing over at her at every red light as if she might vanish if I stopped looking. I had told myself, all those days in the hospital, that the hard part was almost over. That if I could just get her home, get her past the wires and the alarms and the careful hovering of nurses, then the two of us would be fine. I believed that, driving away. I want to remember that I believed it, because it was the last hour I would spend believing my life was a simple thing.
Those thirteen days had emptied me out in every way a person can be emptied. I had slept in a vinyl recliner that squeaked when I shifted, eaten vending machine crackers at three in the morning, learned the first names of every night nurse and the exact meaning of every alarm tone. I had signed forms I barely read and initialed charges I couldn’t think about, watched the invoices for the specialists and the incubator time pile up in a folder I shoved into my bag without opening, because there would be time to be frightened about all of that later, and right now there was only her. She had come three weeks early, small and furious, and she had fought her way up to a weight they would let me take home, and I was so tired that the tiredness had passed through exhaustion into something almost clear, a scoured, transparent kind of alertness. That is the state I was in when I drove her home. Hollowed out and wide open, which is maybe why what came next hit me the way it did.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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