Tell Me a Secret (17 page)

Shelley wiped her forehead as if pressing that mountain out of me was the hardest work she’d ever done. The nurse stayed.

“What’s happening to my baby? Can I see her?”

“Soon. But you should rest now. They’ll take care of her.” She chattered on about how they had taken the baby to the NICU. Her lungs would be immature. She wouldn’t yet have the sucking reflex. Her skin would be too sensitive to touch.

Shelley closed her eyes, “just for a few minutes,” and before long her head had dropped down to her shoulder and she was snoring softly.

The nurse began to peel away the tapes and tubes and monitors sticking out of me like Dad gathering gift wrap to take out with the trash. It was like nothing had ever happened,
except for feeling like I’d been hit by a truck. “Can I get you something? A Popsicle?”

“Just take this IV off of me,” I said irritably, noticing where the skin had puffed pink at the edges of the tape. I picked at it with my left hand. When she rushed over to help, I softened. “Maybe you could get a pillow for my friend, too.”

The room was quiet except for the low rumbling of Shelley’s breathing. Even after the nurse left to tend to other patients, I couldn’t rest. I felt empty. Anxious. I reached for my satchel. Ten missed calls. Kamran? My parents? I didn’t bother to check.

I could put on my clothes and go home, and it would be like Lexi had never existed. Someone here—maybe Nichelle, who wanted a baby,
needed
a baby—would take her. My parents would have their daughter back. I could take back the part of Brenda, repent, and nothing at all would change.

Except everything had changed.

When I fell asleep, my phone continued to buzz in my dreams. The ground beneath me rumbled like a saw. I passed a white cross, a chain mail of safety pins. Xanda was nowhere to be found, even though I was sure she was with the baby—I could hear her voice speaking my name in a piercing whir.

Mandy.

The whirring sounded again—a phone ringing, somewhere in the room.

I sat up groggily. Shelley was gone, and in her place was a note scrawled in Sharpie—“Be back soon.” A few streaks of
golden light penetrated the sky from behind the mountains. What time was it? My phone buzzed in my satchel, tucked into the sheets beside me.

Seven thirty-five, Christmas morning.

Another ring assaulted my ears, dragging me fully into the present. Lexi. Where was she? I started to swing my legs over to the side of the bed then had to stop when a rush of blackness wrapped around my head like a turban. Slowly. I had to move slowly, or the parts still inside me were certain to fall out.

The phone rang again, nagging and insistent. “Shut up!” I shouted, and swung my pillow in its general direction, knocking the handset from the wall so it dangled helplessly in midair. A voice squawked on the other end like Charlie Brown’s teacher. While I tried to regain my balance, it went dead.

Still swathed in a hospital gown, I pulled on the hospital drawstring pants and tried standing up. Dizziness went from the top of my head to my knees, threatening to buckle.

Slowly, slowly, slowly
. But then another, more urgent voice, said,
quickly, quickly, quickly.
I made my way to the door, where a few medical papers with my name on them were tucked into a Plexiglas pocket. Past the door, down the long hall I limped to the center of a whirlwind of activity—doctors, nurses, wheelchairs, papers, patients, people bearing balloons and flowers, a desk in the midst of it all.

“Where’s my baby?” I panted to the nurse at the desk, who dropped the papers she was thumbing through.

“Are you Mandy? I just sent a call back to your room. I think it was your mom.”

“Where’s my baby?” I repeated, with an undercurrent of
If you don’t tell me, I’m going to peel your eyelids off
. “Is there somebody who can take me to see my baby?”

A tall, thin nurse with enormous eyes appeared and put her hand on my shoulder. I vaguely remembered her as part of the birth-room crowd. “I’ll take care of this,” she said to the desk nurse. “You shouldn’t be up yet,” she said to me. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.” In a flash, she came back with a wheel-chair.

“She’s in the NICU,” the nurse said as she wheeled me toward a hidden elevator, pronouncing it “nik-you.” The sound made me think of Nik. Shelley.

“Did my friend leave?”

“I don’t think so. I think she went down to find something to eat while you were resting. I heard you had quite a night. And that you were very brave.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You made it through birth. You should be proud of yourself. It’s a unique, powerful experience.” I couldn’t see her face, but it sounded like she was smiling. “Of course, now you have the infinitely more challenging experience of parenting ahead of you.” She pushed a button on the elevator before the doors swished shut.

If Lexi survives,
I thought.

We emerged from the elevator onto the NICU floor. A
large picture window looked out over the rows of little incubators and ventilators, where babies hung on to the thread of life. A fat, hairless one wore a silver metallic jacket with light streaming out of the edges. A long and thin baby with a mop of black hair and purpley skin grew a network of cords out of its body, shaking.

I thought I would be able to recognize Lexi anywhere, a mirror of my own self. But I had only seen her for a split second, covered with white fuzz, before they’d whisked her away from me. Now, faced with twenty possibilities, I wasn’t so sure.

But there she was, in the ventilator and cushioned by folds and folds of white blanket, a plastic tube taped to her nose and a diaper looking like it might swallow her whole. Skin so gold-eny pink, like mine after a summer visiting my dad’s parents in Arizona, brownish hair sprouting in a damp mass from the top of her head and feathering into wisps on her forehead. A lot of hair, like Kamran—the color a cross between mine and his. Sweet, tiny lips. Eyes closed. A circle of cord taped where her heart would be.

I was in awe.

“I’ll check if you can see her.”

“Is it okay? Or is she too…” I didn’t know what. I only knew I was afraid to go anywhere near her, afraid she might shatter.

The nurse went to talk with the NICU staff while I watched through the glass.

A warm presence came up beside me, and I turned to see Shelley there, smelling like pancakes.

“Sorry I left while you were sleeping. I had to call my family and grab a bite.”

“DaShawn!” I had forgotten all about him. “Oh my gosh, it’s Christmas. You have to go home.”

“I’ll go soon. But I wanted to check in on you first. She’s a beautiful baby. She has the look of you, I think. What’s her name?”

“Lexi,” I answered, like a magic spell threatening to break.

“It’s a beautiful name. Does it mean something special?”

“It was my sister’s name. Alexandra. Xanda.”

“Xanda’s Angel.” A look of knowing passed over Shelley’s face. “You must have been close.”

I couldn’t get past the lump in my throat to answer.

“I talked with your mom when I came in yesterday. Before I realized…” Her voice trailed off. “I hate to leave you here by yourself on Christmas. Do you want me to call someone for you?”

The nurse signaled through the glass. Lexi was waiting. “No thanks, I’ll spend Christmas with Lexi…but will you come back?”

“Of course. Can I bring DaShawn?”

I nodded as the nurse came to wheel me into the NICU.

Shelley came back with DaShawn—the day after Christmas, and the day after that, and nearly every day until New Year’s. I wasn’t quite sure what to say to DaShawn, so I bought his eternal loyalty with Popsicles from the hospital fridge. When I asked about my job, Shelley said, “Don’t worry about it, we’ll get a temp to fill in for you. The job will be yours whenever you can come back.” DaShawn brought his stuffed giraffe for Lexi, because, he said, “I don’t really need Raffe anymore.”

Lexi made it through the first, critical forty-eight hours—with me sitting by her ventilator for most of them. Wrapped in wires and tubes, she looked like one of Kamran’s cyborg sci-fi heroes. I used up another bar of cell-phone battery taking pictures of her and ran across the picture of stained-glass
Jesus. I forgot it was there, all this time.

“If she can make it through the first few days, she has an excellent chance,” the NICU nurse told me. “And the more time you spend with her, the better she will do. When she’s stabilized, you can hold her skin to skin.”

Until then, I could stay by her side. They moved me out of Labor and Delivery and into Recovery, then to a tiny room with a cot down the hall from the NICU. “You can stay here until we need the room.” A nurse gave me a tour of the area—a shower in the restroom, a coffee maker, a vending machine. After six months of chowing my weight in peanut butter, I couldn’t bring myself to eat a bite.

I watched my daughter in the ventilator, where nothing could touch her but the wires and needles, taped to skin as thin as paper. She was even smaller than the giraffe I was holding—pink and mottled with hands like a doll’s.

Xanda was a preemie, too. Had my parents been in my place, wondering if their baby would live or die? I couldn’t picture it.

“You can talk to her,” said my ob-gyn when she dropped by. “She knows your voice—she’s been hearing you for months.”

“What do I say?”

“Anything. Sing her a song. Tell her you love her. Tell her about your life. If you can’t touch her skin, you can touch her with your voice.”

I waited until we were alone in the ward, except for the occasional nurse scurrying past to check one of the monitors
on the babies. The one in the jacket had jaundice, the light helping his body to process the excess bilirubin. Lexi’s skin was still too delicate for the light jacket, too raw for even the lightest touch. Another had a huge hematoma on the back of her head, but at least she was fat and healthy.

The shaking baby was gone. I didn’t know what happened to him.

Sing a song, the ob-gyn had said. She didn’t know what she was asking for. I can’t sing. Not in church, not onstage, not in an empty hospital wing with only an audience of infants. But the babies didn’t care. They just needed a song.

I tried out the lines of Xanda’s favorite Splashdown song. “‘If they try to clip your wings…’” My voice cracked. The baby in the light jacket’s chest raised and lowered, alone under the UV lamp. “‘Fly away, far away,’” I sang again, “‘I know why the caged bird sings.’”

Lexi lay there, maybe listening, maybe not.
Please God,
I thought as I breathed out another line of the song,
let her hear me. Maybe you can show me she’s listening
. I watched for some sign from her, wrapped in all of those tubes and wires. An IV in her leg seemed thicker than her fingers. My leg ached, too, where the needle stuck out of her, getting in the way of my song.

“‘I’ll await my next escape to meet…’” The words stuck in my throat. “This is stupid. You can’t hear me.”

“‘To meet with you again.’” I broke off, pressing my hands against the glass and willing her to feel them. “‘You can’t go,
baby.’” The words escaped at little above a whisper.

This wasn’t about Xanda anymore, whether or not the baby was her gift, or if she was the beginning or the end. Lexi hooked into my heart with tendrils like talons, tearing it out with every breath she couldn’t take on her own.

I didn’t know it would be like this.

In that moment, she stretched her neck, wrinkled like an elephant’s trunk, and rolled her head toward me. The eyes, closed in tiny, lashless slits, opened—slightly at first, then all the way. Pupils, bright blue—the color of hope.

“Can you hear me?” I whispered. She blinked. Once, twice. Still looking, waiting for me to speak.

This labyrinth I had been traveling wasn’t Xanda’s—it was mine. My own daughter, who I thought was the bird to transport me away, wasn’t the bird at all. She couldn’t transport anyone, not even herself.

That was the beginning of my conversations with Lexi. As the jaundiced baby and the hematoma baby’s parents came and went and new babies came through, I stayed with Lexi, quietly pouring out my heart. I drank coffee to keep myself awake, to keep myself talking. Singing. Telling her everything. By now the nurses knew better than to tell me to eat or rest. I couldn’t tear myself away.

I took as many pictures as I could, until the battery on my cell phone went dead with the rhythmic vibration of seventeen messages waiting.

They brought a stack of board books. I couldn’t read
Goodnight Moon
, or any of the good-night stories, for that matter. I focused on the love stories.
Guess How Much I Love You. The Runaway Bunny
. She was my bunny, trying to run away. But I wouldn’t let her. Morning and night, I stood by her ventilator and touched the glass for days, for weeks, hoping she could feel my presence cradling her.

“Is it helping?” I demanded when the ob-gyn came to see me.

“Yes, it’s helping. It’s important just for her to know you are here.” Her lips tightened. “You’ll have to keep coming even now that you’re discharged. You can stay as long as you like, except for during the nurse rounds and nights.”

“Wait a second. You’re kicking me out?”

She nodded grimly. “This is a busy hospital. You’ve been here for three weeks now, a lot longer than—”

I knew I couldn’t camp out indefinitely. But now? “What about Lexi?”

“You can still use the parent facilities when you’re here, and there’s the waiting room.” She picked up the copy of
The Runaway Bunny
and thumbed through the pages. “The nurses said your mom came by again.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’m sure you could go home, if you wanted to.” She opened to the page with the bunny on the tightrope wire. “Your mom cares about you, even if she doesn’t know how to show it. Just like you care for that baby.”

“She’s nothing like me,” I spat. “She would be happier if this baby died.”
Wasn’t she happier that Xanda died?

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

But she didn’t know what I knew. Andre didn’t kill Xanda—she jumped. She pulled the door open, she jumped from a moving car. Maybe escaping to Hollywood wouldn’t have been enough. Maybe she had to escape forever.

I watched Lexi in the ventilator, struggling in the tangle of threads keeping her tiny heart pumping. Every moment she lived meant another gram of hope.

She was going to live. We were both going to. And we were going to go where Xanda couldn’t.