True to my prediction, two hours later I arrived at the hospital in my rented car.
It had been a difficult two hours. There were only a handful of cars out at that time of night, with large trucks hauling their cross-country trailers appearing constantly as a series of obstacles for me to slalom through, pushing the speed limit as far as I thought wise. I tried to find something worth listening to on the radio, but quickly decided to turn it off. The unfamiliar lights from the car’s interior and my own dark thoughts were all that was there was to keep me company.
How much had I fucked up? That’s the question I remember coming back to. In trying to walk the line between professional and personal responsibilities I felt like I had failed in both domains. I shouldn’t have gone to Denver. But if I hadn’t, Mary would have fired me, and now Mary was likely to fire me anyway. I should have stayed home and taken care of my pregnant wife. But if I had, there’s no guarantee that she would have gone into labor. I still didn’t know what, if anything, had prompted that. Had Jenny fallen? Had Jacob struck her during a tantrum? Meredith hadn’t given me any clues in our short conversation, but it seemed obvious to me that some incident had prompted it. Women of Jenny’s age just didn’t go into labor five weeks early, did they? Like almost everything else that truly mattered, I realized, I didn’t know the answer. My attention, as always, had been elsewhere. On the urgent, never on the important.
At some point, the nurse Eliana had called me back, as she had promised to. In a few soothing words she had told me that my baby daughter was sleeping comfortably in one of the incubators in their NICU, and that the nurse administrator on duty that night considered her case “stable.” Not knowing entirely what that meant, I decided to assume that it was as good as things could be in the situation, and I thanked Eliana for her effort.
“It’s no trouble at all, Mister Larson. Are you on the road now?”
“Yes,” I said, juggling both the phone and the steering wheel as best I could. I looked at the digital clock on the dashboard and did some quick calculating. “I should be there a little before four in the morning.”
“I’ll be here,” she confirmed. “You call me back on this number when you arrive and I’ll come down and meet you in the lobby. Okay?”
“Okay,” I had said, and now, after abandoning the rental in one of the parking spots reserved for visitors, and pushing my sleepless and tottering frame towards the main hospital entrance, I was pulling out my cell phone and calling the last number it had received.
“Hello,” a now familiar voice said. “Labor and Delivery.”
“Eliana. It’s Alan Larson. I just arrived.”
“Okay. Wait for me in reception. I’ll be right down.”
The glass doors whooshed open and in I went. To my left there was a row of reception counters, to my right a large waiting area filled with modular chairs, coffee tables, and turned-over magazines. The place seemed deserted, not a single human form anywhere that I could see. I looked at my watch. 4:03 AM.
“Can I help you, sir?”
I looked up and was surprised to see a young woman standing behind the left-most reception counter, knowing that she had not been there when my eyes had wandered over them only a few seconds before. Had she been crouching behind the counter? What had she been doing down there? Picking M&Ms up off the floor? I had no idea why my tired brain decided to conjure up that image, but now that it had I chuckled at the idea of multi-colored candies strewn all over the floor, as if the nurses and night shift workers had had some kind of food fight.
“Sir?”
I rubbed my eyes. “No,” I said. “No, thank you. Someone is coming down to get me.”
And just as those words left my mouth a double set of doors on the far end of the lobby began to open on their pneumatic cylinders, allowing a short, middle-aged woman to walk through. She was in scrubs, her black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, her shining skin a light sandy brown. She carried a clipboard and wore a stethoscope loosely around her neck. Her white sneakers squeaked on the freshly waxed floor. She made eye contact with me and immediately adjusted her course to close the distance between us.
“Mister Larson?” she asked, and then didn’t really wait for me to respond. “I’m Eliana Alavarez. Your wife is in the NICU now, trying to breastfeed the baby. Come with me, I’ll take you there.”
It was a lot of information for me to take in at once. I looked somewhat stupidly around at my surroundings, forgetting, for the moment, where I even was. As I did, I noticed the young woman behind the counter scowling at me.
“It’s all right, Cheryl,” Eliana said to the woman, clasping me gently by the elbow. “I’ll sign him in later. He’s been traveling all night to get here.”
I looked back at Eliana, feeling like a child, and like I had forgotten how to move my legs.
“Come on, Mister Larson. It’s okay.”
Slowly, gently, Eliana got me moving, leading me first out of the lobby, through the doors that she had come through, and through a maze-like series of hallways. At that time of morning, there were only a handful of other people we encountered on our journey, most of them obviously members of the hospital’s janitorial crew, two of them health professionals, and one of them, I remember, an elderly patient, seemingly wandering the halls by himself, in his robe and hospital gown, pushing his wheeled IV tower before him like a wizard’s staff.
Eliana ignored them all, attempting from time to time to engage me with some critical piece of information about where we were going and what would happen when we got there. I would need to gown up before going into the NICU. They had eleven babies there now, and mine was the largest of them all, being only five weeks premature. It might be a week or more, but they would try every few hours or so to get the baby to suckle, as that was an instinct that usually developed around this time in the womb, and that the baby would not be released from the NICU until it successfully latched on and had started gaining weight from its mother’s milk.
I’m sure I only understood a fraction of what Eliana was telling me, and I felt myself growing more and more anxious as we kept rounding corners and trudging down hallways.
“What’s her name?”
“What?” Eliana said. “What was that?”
“The baby’s name?” I said. “Has Jenny named her?”
“Not that I’ve heard. But I’ve been down in Labor and Delivery all night. They might have more information up at the NICU.”
“Were you there?”
We had finally stopped in front of an elevator bank and Eliana had just reached out to press the call button.
“What?”
“Were you there?”
“Where?”
The words stuck in my throat. I wanted to know if Eliana Alvarez had been there, had been present, had maybe even assisted, with Jenny’s c-section and the birth of our still unnamed daughter, but I was having a hard time forming the right set of words and getting them out of my mouth.
Eliana could tell I was struggling. Her face grew concerned, and she reached out to clasp my elbow again.
“At the birth,” I eventually said with some difficulty. “Were you… in the room when… the baby was born.”
The elevator car arrived, a loud bell ringing and the door opening with a clatter.
“No,” she said. “No, Mister Larson, I wasn’t. But everything went fine. There is really nothing for you to worry about.”
I looked at her, hoping that what she said was true, but feeling, knowing, somewhere deep inside, that everything hadn’t gone fine and that there was, in fact, a great deal for me to worry about.
“Come on,” she said, easing me into the elevator. “Let’s get you reunited with your wife. She can tell you herself.”
We got in, went up five floors, and were disgorged into one of the oldest parts of the hospital, a sign clearly reading “Neonatal Intensive Care Unit” hanging from the ceiling just outside the elevator car. Now there seemed to be a quiet flurry of activity, several nurses and other hospital staff on duty and ready to put me through several hasty processes and procedures. Under Eliana’s watchful eye, I showed my identification, I filled out a form, I was given a plastic bracelet to wear, taken to a room where I was helped on with a gown, a tight-fitting cap, a surgical mask, and a pair of fabric overshoes. I was then led towards a door at the end of a long hall, one wall of which was mostly glass, allowing a view into a large room filled with medical equipment, some of them obviously incubators, and some of those obviously housing small human beings, who had been taken or who had fled their mothers’s wombs before they had been expected.
On the very edge of the door, Eliana, who had introduced me to the other nurses and who had spoken gently to me throughout the process, stopped.
“I’m going to leave you here, Mister Larson,” she said. “‘I’m not cleared for the NICU itself, but you’re in good hands with Valencia here.”
I looked at the nurse Eliana had mentioned, a large woman with black skin and voluminous braids under her cap, and then back at Eliana.
“Okay,” I said absently. And then, “Thank you. Thank you for all you’ve done.”
She smiled. “It was my pleasure. Be well.”
In a moment she was gone, and I turned back to Valencia who pushed a button that opened a sealed door and led me into the heart of the NICU itself. We walked along the very edge of the room until we arrived at a small curtained area, the curtain hanging from a series of small chains, each set into the metal track, giving the people inside, whoever they were, some small measure of privacy in the otherwise open floor plan. Valencia said a few words I didn’t quite catch and then slowly pulled back one section of the curtain to reveal a small room-like space with an incubator, a woman sitting in a wheelchair with her back to me, and another nurse, standing over the woman, crouching a little, as if helping her with something she was holding.
“Alan? Is that you?”
It was Jenny’s voice, and it took me a full three seconds to realize that it had come from the woman in the wheelchair, and then to realize that the woman in the wheelchair, her head bowed forward and the back of her neck visible because of the hospital cap she was wearing, was Jenny.
“Yes, Jenny. It’s me.”
“Well,” Jenny said, her voice more tired than I had ever heard it before. “Come and see our daughter.”
I slowly approached and, as I did so, Jenny’s head came up and swiveled towards me. She was masked like everyone else in the NICU, her eyes completely devoid of the sparkle that had first attracted me to her. She was wearing a robe over a hospital gown, both draped open to reveal her left breast, and she held in her arms the tiniest and skinniest baby I had ever seen, clothed only in a diaper that, in another context, could have been described as comically large, its spindly arms and legs moving lethargically in the air as if blindly seeking some essential purchase. The baby’s mouth was open, and it was mewling like a newborn kitten.
“She won’t latch on,” Jenny said, somewhat desperately, a different kind of sparkle returning with the tears to her eyes.
“It’s okay,” the nurse in the small space said, reaching down to gently take the baby from Jenny. “She’ll learn. It may take a few days. We’ll just keep trying until she does.”
I crouched down next to Jenny and took her hand as she worked to cover herself up with the other.
“Jenny,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Behind her, the nurse was placing our baby back in the incubator. Jenny gave me a long and sad look. “It’s okay,” she said. “When they told me you were coming up, I couldn’t believe you could’ve gotten here so fast.”
“Fast?” I said. “It felt like forever. I should’ve never left.”
Jenny put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, Alan,” she said, the tears beginning to streak down her face. “It feels to me like forever is just getting started.”
I choked up, falling forward to clasp her in an awkward embrace.
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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