“Hello? Hello? Is anyone awake in here?”
I woke up with a start, my legs dropping heavily to the floor and almost tumbling out of the chair I was perched on. After the scene in the NICU, I had gone back to Jenny’s hospital room where, both of us exhausted from our individual ordeals, we agreed to try and grab an hour or so of sleep before the hospital itself began to wake up; Jenny in the bed and me in the adjoining visitor chair.
“Daddy!” I heard Jacob shout, and then saw him run into my field of vision. I was unable to fend him off as he climbed heavily up into my lap and gave me a desperate hug. I clutched at him both to steady myself and to keep him from falling, and looked around, still not entirely sure where I was or what was going on.
“Oh, hello, Meredith,” I said, dimly perceiving Jenny’s mother standing in the open doorway, dressed in her latest ath-leisure ensemble, and a big bouquet of flowers in her left hand.
“Hello, hello!” she said again, moving into the room and setting the flowers down on the bedside table.
Jenny was just beginning to stir. “Jesus, Mom, is that you?” she croaked. “What time is it?”
“It’s eight-thirty, my dear. I brought you some flowers to help brighten up this dreary room they’ve put you in.”
“Daddy!” Jacob was shouting, practically in my ear. “Gramma made pancakes for breakfast! And they were shaped like DINOSAURS!”
“Oh, yeah?” I said distantly, more interested but unable to hear the words Jenny and her mother were exchanging.
“I liked the STEGOSAURUS best! He had bumps on his back just like a real STEGOSAURUS!”
“Oh, yeah?” I said again, deciding that I needed to get up on my feet. “Let me get up, Jacob,” I said gently, sliding him down my legs as best I could.
By this time, Meredith had her hand on Jenny’s forehead, evidently feeling for a fever the way she must have been doing since her daughter was four years old. “It’s okay,” she was saying, her tone indicating that she was referring to something other than Jenny’s temperature. “I can only stay for another day or two. But, Alan is home now. He’ll help until you’re back on your feet.”
Meredith suddenly turned towards me, her earrings clinking with the movement. “Have you seen her, Alan? Have you seen my granddaughter yet?”
I was conscious of standing there in my stocking feet and wrinkled slacks, one shirtail untucked and hanging down. Jacob was tugging on one pant leg, and I had to grab the waistband to keep him from pulling them off.
“Ummm, yes,” I said. “Late last night, or early this morning, I guess.”
“Isn’t she an angel?” Meredith asked, her face beaming with a light like that of eternal life. “When I held her last night, she looked right at me and told me everything was going to be all right.”
I exchanged a glance with Jenny. Meredith had always been a glass-half-full kind of person, but this seemed a little out of even her norm.
“What do you mean, ‘she told you’?”
“The look in her eye,” Meredith said easily, turning back to Jenny and now caressing her daughter’s cheek with the back of her fingers. “There’s a fire there. You can see it, honey. She’s a fierce one. She’s going to grow big and strong. You’ll see.”
An awkward silence settled in among us, broken by Jacob.
“Can I see?”
“Hmmm?” I asked, turning to look down on his upturned face. “See what, buddy?”
“The baby!” Jacob said. “I want to see her fire eyes! PLEEEEASE?”
He continued to clutch and grab and I decided it would be easier to pick him up. “Not right now,” I said as I eased him into that somewhat comfortable position on the arm and hip. “She’s probably sleeping right now.”
“Nope, she’s awake,” a suddenly-appearing nurse said, her white sneakers squeaking on the floor as she moved quickly into the room and pulled the window shade up. “And she’s hungry. How’s mom doing?” she asked, weaving between me and Meredith to stand next to Jenny. “Are you ready to give breast feeding another try?”
Jenny sighed. “I suppose so.”
The nurse was a middle-aged woman with dark hair and wide hips. Now that she was standing still, I could see the tag on her smock, the name AUDREY prominent above everything else. “We’ve got the lactation consultant in this morning,” AUDREY said. “If baby isn’t ready, we’ll get you set up for pumping. That way baby can get her mother’s milk by eyedropper until she learns how to suckle. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’ll get a wheelchair,” AUDREY said, and then she was in motion again, quickly disconnecting Jenny from the multiple monitors that were checking her blood pressure, her heart rate, her pulse oxidation. “If you need to use the restroom, maybe dad or grandma can help you?”
She fluttered her way out of the room, leaving me and Meredith staring blankly at each other, neither one of us sure what had just happened and what we were supposed to do next. Jenny, however, was struggling her way up and out of the bed.
“Mom! Help me!”
Ten minutes later, we were all gathered in the viewing room outside the NICU, the long row of windows giving us a full view of the dozen or so incubators and their tiny occupants. I was holding Jacob up, his sneakered feet more or less standing on the bottom frame of the windows as he leaned back against my chest. To our right, Meredith was busily gowning up while Jenny sat, vacant-eyed, in her wheelchair.
“Where is she?” Jacob asked me, whispering like he was in a library. “Where is the baby with the fire eyes?”
I peered into the NICU and tried to determine the answer to his clumsy question. It was a challenge since, from our distance, all the incubators looked the same and it was impossible to tell even the gender much less the features of the little humans that lived inside.
“I’m not sure, buddy,” I said. “Grandma will bring her over to us when Mommy is done feeding her.”
This is what had been discussed and agreed to in advance. Given the clean conditions that needed to be maintained in the NICU, only one mother and one additional person were allowed in at any single time, and that additional person, usually the husband or another relative, had to be masked and gowned. There was no way to bring someone as young and rambunctious as Jacob into such a quiet place, but the large windows offered an ability for close viewing when necessary.
“Now you be good, Jacob,” Meredith said as she prepared to enter the NICU. “Give us just a few minutes and I’ll bring the baby over to the window so you can see her. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jacob said, as he began kicking his rubber toes against the window.
I decided to drop him slowly to the floor, knowing he was going to get quickly bored with waiting and not wanting him to cause a disturbance. The visiting space had a small play area for toddlers like him, and I gently nudged him there, towards the activity tables and coloring books. At first I was worried that he would resist, but he quickly saw the logic of the suggestion, sitting down on one of the kindergarten chairs and beginning to dig through an enormous tub of loose crayons. I lingered at the window a little longer, watching as Jenny, Meredith, and a nurse moved into the space, and then disappeared behind an encircling curtain.
“Look, Daddy,” Jacob said. “This book has babies in it.”
I went over and stood beside Jacob. The coloring book he had found indeed had a multitude of babies on its many pages, most of whom were already streaked with the angry color smudges of many previous artists. Eventually, he found a page not yet marked, a cartoon baby crawling across a toy-strewn rug, wearing nothing but a diaper, and smiling so wide that its eyes were nothing but slits.
Jacob picked up a purple crayon and began carefully coloring in one of the circles in the braided rug. “Where did you go, Daddy?”
“What?”
He did not look up or pause in his work. “Where did you go?”
It was such an odd question it took me a moment to understand what he was asking. I eased myself down onto one of the miniature chairs opposite him. “I was working,” I said. “In Denver. Remember? I showed you on the map before I left.”
Jacob nodded as if he remembered, but then repeated my words as if trying to reassure himself. “Daddy was working in Denver. But he’s back now. Now he’s back.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m back. And I’m going to be staying home for a while now.”
“Is Mommy sick?”
“What?”
“Is Mommy sick?” he asked again, his little voice now sounding a bit frightened.
“No,” I said. “No, she’s not sick, buddy. She’s just tired. Having a baby makes Mommies really tired. She’ll probably need a few weeks to feel better. We’ll need to help her. Okay?”
“Okay.” He dropped the purple crayon in favor of an orange one and began working on another circle in the rug.
He was quiet for a few moments, and it gave me the first chance in a while to reflect on everything that was going on. It was hard to explain the details to Jacob, but the next several weeks were going to be a real challenge. Jenny and I had discussed much of it before falling asleep in her room earlier that morning, and neither one of us knew exactly how things were going to proceed. She was going to have to stay in the hospital for a while -- initially to recover from her c-section, but quickly (and maybe already) for the sake of the premature infant they had taken out of her. She would need her mother nearby until she learned how to suckle and began gaining weight. When that started to happen she could be released from the NICU, but would need to stay in a mom/baby room at the hospital until she was large and healthy enough to be released. The baby had been born six weeks premature, and it was likely that it would take at least four weeks before such a day would finally arrive.
And all of that meant that I would need to be home and taking care of Jacob. Meredith had done a tremendous amount already, getting Jenny to the hospital and making dinosaur pancakes for Jacob, but she couldn’t stay for weeks on end. Neither Jenny nor I would ask her to. She had her own life and her own obligations, and managing our household had never been one of them.
And that meant that I would have to call Mary some time soon and see what kind of flexible accommodation could be made. That is, assuming I even still had a job there. The company, I knew, had no parental leave policy. It barely had any benefits at all. In fact, I wasn’t 100% sure that our extended hospital stay was even going to be covered by the company’s health insurance. That was something else I would need to look into.
I looked down at my little son, carefully coloring within the lines, and was suddenly overwhelmed by grief and terror. What the hell was I going to do? Until the call came in from Boston -- assuming a call was even forthcoming -- I needed the horrible job with Mary Walton. I needed it because my family needed it. I couldn’t see any way forward in my current circumstance without it -- but I also didn’t see how Mary was going to allow me to go forward after what I had done, and after I made the request I would be required to make. Yes, hi, Mary, how are you? Hope everything wrapped up well in Denver, but hey, don’t you know, I’m going to need a few weeks paid leave so I can take care of my wife, my 4-year-old son, and my premature infant daughter. Would that be all right? Hello, Mary? Are you still there?
In my despair, I became aware of a light tapping on glass and I looked up to see my masked mother-in-law standing on the other side of the viewing window with a small, partially swaddled bundle in her arms.
Jacob heard it, too, and in a flash, he was up out of his chair and dashing across the open floor to the window, calling for me to come, to follow him, to lift him up so he could see, so he could see. Swallowing back my fears, I rose and did as beckoned. Jacob seemed heavier than ever, but I lifted him up onto my hip and stood with him inches from the glass as Meredith carefully positioned my daughter in such a way that I and Jacob could more easily see her.
She was such a little thing, more like a kitten than a baby, loosely wrapped in a small blanket, with her fragile head supported by Meredith’s certain hand, her little arms extended, and tiny, gossamer fingers clenching and unclenching in the arm.
“There’s the baby!” Jacob said excitedly. “There’s the baby, Daddy!”
I softly reaffirmed that yes, indeed, there was the baby, but trailed off as she seemed to turn her little head towards what must have been the muffled sound of Jacob’s voice. Her eyes were open, and they seemed to widen and then squint in some unpracticed attempt at focus. Unlike the fire that he was undoubtedly expecting, her irises were the deepest midnight.
“She’s looking at me!” Jacob cried, placing his hand on the glass. “She’s looking at me, Daddy! Hi, baby! Hi!”
And then her eyes seemed to lose their focus, but the still-unnamed baby smiled, a toothless and joyful thing that momentarily lit up her little face.
“I think she can hear you, Jacob,” I said. “She knows you’re her big brother.”
“I love you!” Jacob said suddenly, clapping his hands together in his simple joy. “I love you, baby!”
I was glad he did. Somewhere deep within my calcified heart, I knew that my family was going to need a lot of love if we were going to make it through the next few weeks.
+ + +
“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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