NEED to BREATHE

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Forsyth Memorial Hospital. Groundhog Day, 1975.

THE FIRST TIME I SEE Miss Claire Marie, she’s thirteen inches long and weighs seven-hundred grams. Her eyes have barely gelled and opened, and her spindly arms look like the bones in a bat’s wings. She doesn’t look big enough to have a name, in fact, she’d fit inside my hands if they were cupped together. Her skin is gauzy, translucent as a veil, filled with a network of purple and blue veins that look like frayed wires. She has youth so bad it hurts, full of loosely-stitched tissues and organs. There’s something about the way Claire lies fighting in that bubble-shaped incubator that could make a heart do handsprings.

Doctors move her to an isolated room and slip on gowns and gloves. They turn and look for Daddy Mick Harper, to tell him that, “Well, they rarely make it at twenty-six weeks, we just want you to be aware. You want us to try saving her?”

But Mick stares down the hall saying something like, “What will be. Will be.”

“Mr. Harper, do you want us to try saving her?”

Mick’s words echo: What will be, will be. What will be-- He mashes his head hard against a nearby wall and mumbles about “going to the restroom for a Johnny Prayer.”

The doctors take that to mean “yes.” So Claire sprouts tubes like they’re day lilies, and nurses try to start an IV in her scalp with little butterfly-shaped clips. They couldn’t find or fold a diaper small enough, so a jimmy-rigged surgeon’s mask swallows half of Claire’s body.

I look away because seeing unfinished life like this nicks me like a needle. It is incomplete art, like the paint’s not dry or the pot is still wet on the wheel. Any little touch will leave a permanent fingerprint--that’s all it takes to mess up a work-in-progress like this. And I think, sure, science can put men on the moon, but all the wires and machines, tubes and electronic “gee-whizzes” can’t replicate a womb. It’s Groundhog Day, 1975, and it’s the day I receive my newest heavenly mission. I’m an Incorporeal Agent, Spirit Impalpable of a woman who died in 1922, and my afterlife is filled with missions that last anywhere from ten minutes to ten years--

“She’s bradying down. Heart rate at sixty-four.”  

All I can do at first is stand here and stutter while staring into the blinding lights of the nursery, at people as they shout, arms waving like wings, at the nurses moving so fast they look like a blur. This-this-this-is-like. I think this is like going from simple addition straight to calculus. I’ve never had a mission quite like--

“Heart rate at sixty-one.”

This. They’ve attached something to the remnants of her umbilical cord to measure blood pressure, and that number drops like a barometric reading. In weather, they call this a hurricane. Same kind of emergency here, where alarms sound off and doctors invoke their expletive license. Medical people leap into action with their monitors, collecting blood samples and rushing the lab-- “Process levels of bilirubin and CO(2). We need results yesterday.” Bleeps slow down, and they shove the incubator lights out of the way, they turn them off completely. Then I hear: 

“Heart rate fifty-three!”

They can’t resuscitate her, and I feel frozen. A doctor beats on a machine, swears and mumbles about oxygen levels while people swipe the sweat off their brows. I close my eyes, muster all that is within me, lean close to the tiny baby and say it’s your first life-lesson, Claire.

You need to breathe.

In, out, repeat.

And at my prompting, she does.