NEED to BREATHE

Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

Early spring, 1975.

FOR HOURS EVERY DAY, Mick and Manda roost on opposite sides of the incubator. They check out of school. They check out of life. They live off fast-food hamburgers and French fries, take two showers per week. They have oil slicks in their hair and mirages in their minds. The winter is more crisp than cold, so they forget their coats. Stoplights and slow-pokes have no idea they’re always hurrying to the hospital. They ask nurses and doctors when they can hold Claire or when they can at least touch her. The answer is, “Maybe in a few days,” or “I don‘t know,” or “Perhaps when she reaches 1000 grams.” So every day at weigh-in, Manda crosses her fingers and prays, watches the needle bounce around and flirt with the magic mark. Claire is three weeks old and she’s still less than two pounds. And this makes Manda cry more.

Mick, he never cries. He just sits there, staring, looking into Claire’s sterile little world, looking at the bandages around Claire’s joints and thinking, “I can’t fix this.” Not with the twist of a screwdriver, the bang of a hammer, the configuring of a few equations. There’s a hold on his heart and a straw inserted inside his soul that sucks and sucks, to the point he pictures himself as an orange. A deflated orange, juice dribbling on the floor while Manda asks, “Why don’t you ever cry? Doesn’t this bother you?”

He says, “You’re crying for the both of us.”

“And why did they put those bandages and splints on her?”

Mick says he doesn’t know. So Manda flags down a nurse, who says it’s because Claire’s skin is soooooo thin. “It holds the IVs in. And we’re trying to help those burn places to heal.” Nurse cuts her glance over at Manda when she adds, “There’s some…some thing…that happened to her. That you’re still not telling us about.”

Manda ignores the nurse’s prompting and cries harder and says the situation is horrible, it’s pathetic, she can’t believe what’s happened, and, “Can you please tell me if she’s going to make it?” The doctors say they don’t know. “We’ve never had one this small. We honestly don’t know.”

As for me, I stand at attention, like the alarms and monitors, leaping in and telling Claire to breathe when she forgets how. If Mick and Manda listen long enough and hard enough, they sometimes hear me. “There’s this voice,” Manda says, and she holds out a careful hand, “telling Claire to breathe, telling her you can do it.” She wonders if hospitals are haunted, after all, there are so many people who die here. “What if their spirits remain in these hallways? What if they are helping our baby?”

That may be so, I tell her. That may be so.

“Did you hear that? Mick?”

Claire is about four weeks old when the doctor announces: “You can hold her today. Fifteen minutes. But remember--any stimulation is over-stimulation. Her nerves are so sensitive, her lungs, even her skin. She’s fragile as chipped china or the thin layer of ice across a windshield. Or…think about the pages in a Bible or dictionary. Imagine them wet and draped across your hands.”

“So here,” says a nurse, “we’ll do it like this.” She ushers Manda to a special bed and adjusts the temperature in the room. The nurse shows Manda exactly how to hold the tiny Claire, who they swaddle tight in a blanket and lay across Manda’s chest. She wraps the young mother’s arms tight--“but not too tight”--around the baby.

And then the nurse turns Claire’s head to one side. “She can hear your heartbeat. There needs to be bonding.” Bonding, they say, and here’s another blanket. Blanket after blanket to keep Claire warm. They drape the mother-baby bundle with something soft, pink, and covered with flutterbies.