The Peculiar Miracles of Antoinette Martin: A Novel (5 page)

Mom sinks into a chair next to me and drops her head to my bed rail. “You’re okay,” she says. The words come out in a rush.

I’m not okay. I’m empty. I drop my hand to my stomach.

It’s flat.

Baby?
I mouth around the tube.

Mom doesn’t notice.

Where is she?
The familiar taste of copper pennies fills my mouth. I wrench myself upright, and yank at the tube.
Where is my baby!

“Stop,” Mom says. She stands over me, cradling my hands in hers. “Wade, help me.”

Dad grabs my arms and pulls them down. “Be still, Rose, calm down.” His green eyes are rimmed with red.

Baby,
I mouth again.
Baby!

Mom, at last, understands. “Your baby’s fine,” she says, but I don’t believe her. Her eyes are so wide the white swallows the blue, and her lips are thin with the effort of smiling. She doesn’t let go of my hands.

I can’t breathe. Something is crushing my chest.

“She’s fine,” Mom repeats. “Lily’s with her. She hasn’t left her side.”

“She’s little,” Dad says. “No bigger than my hand. But she’s fine.” He holds out his hand, palm up, and smiles.

What?
I mouth. My mind is white fog. I remember sitting at the kitchen table, drawing. Pain ripping through my abdomen. Then . . . nothing.

What?
I mouth again. This time, Mom understands I mean:
What happened?

She looks at the ceiling. “When we got to the ER, your blood pressure spiked. They had to deliver the baby. You had a heart attack on the table.” Her voice wavers.

I shake my head. She’s wrong. I’m twenty-two. Heart attacks happen to old people.

Dad takes over. “It’s called peripartum cardiomyopathy. The pregnancy caused your heart to enlarge, and the muscle was badly damaged.”

If Mom weren’t holding my hands, I’d clap them over my ears. I am a child again.
La, la, la. I’m not listening.

Her last words are small, and I almost miss them. “You’re still here,” she says as if to convince herself. “I didn’t lose you.” Then she drops her head to my chest and closes her eyes.

THE NEXT DAY,
a doctor I’ve never met removes the vent tube. His long fingers curve around it, then he yanks like he’s starting a push mower, and just like that, I’m breathing on my own again.

When he leaves, I press my hand against my heart. It beats like it always has, but now I know I’m broken.

When a nurse brings my breakfast tray, I turn away. I keep my eyes closed when she checks my vitals. I keep them closed when a nurse’s assistant comes in to sponge me off. The girl lifts my arms and runs a damp cloth over them, chattering the entire time.

“You’re a lucky one,” she says. “Still young enough to get better. Most of the people in here are old. They don’t have much time left.”

I realize I’ve never thought about time before. My life used to stretch before me to a vanishing point on the horizon, the end always out of sight. Now it contracts until it’s a small dot. How much time do I have left?

A week? A month?

The aid moves to my legs, running the cloth against my skin in soft circles. I count my heart beats. Nothing seems different, but I can’t trust my body anymore.

When she’s finished, Mom and Lily come in. Mom sways on her feet, and Lily’s skin is pale.

I turn away from them.

“Get up,” Mom says. She’s pushing a wheelchair. “We’re taking you to see your daughter.”

I don’t move. What kind of mother can I be if my heart might give out at any moment?

Lily sits on the side of my bed, and I roll toward her. “She’s two pounds fourteen ounces,” she says. “All even numbers, so it’s good. She looks like you.”

My heart flutters. My daughter is three days old, and I haven’t seen her yet. “Really?”

Tiny strands of brown hair have escaped Lily’s ponytail. Dirt fills the creases of her fingers and smudges her left cheek. She works in the garden when she’s upset.

“Really.” She squeezes my hand.

Mom guides the wheelchair toward the bed and helps me into it. When she bends down to ease my feet onto the footrest, I notice streaks of gray running through her hair. I smooth them down. Suddenly I don’t want to see time passing.

“She’s a fighter, Rose. Like you.” Mom looks at me as if I’ve accomplished something great, instead of merely surviving.

They wheel me out of ICU and to the neonatal intensive care unit. Mom pushes me to a double sink next to the doors. Several plastic scrub brushes are stacked in a cabinet over the sink.

Lily grabs three of the brushes and hands them out. “Make sure you get under your fingernails,” she says as she shows me how to squirt soap onto the sponge and lather every inch of my hands.

She’s fast, scrubbing her hands with the brush, then scraping under her nails with a tiny plastic file. She counts as she works, and I mouth the numbers with her. We stop at thirty-two.

Lily blots her hands with a paper towel, and then dries mine for me. When we finish, Mom wheels me down an aisle lined with cube pods, each of which houses a baby in a plastic bubble. It looks like something from a science-fiction movie. Quilts in bright colors—orange, pink, and purple—cover the bubbles.

“There are so many.” I whisper, afraid of disturbing the babies. I had expected crying, but other than the beeping monitors, the room is silent. Nurses bend over babies. Some of them sing. Some stroke tiny feet or hands. Others adjust IVs and oxygen sensors.

Lily turns down an almost-empty row and stops next to a bubble draped in an orange quilt. A round nurse dressed in SpongeBob scrubs pushes buttons on a monitor. She looks up when we enter. “Is this Mom?” she asks.

Mom. Hearing that startles me. I need to grow into the word.

“We’ve been waiting for you.” The nurse adjusts something on the monitor and writes the displayed numbers on her palm. Then she folds the orange quilt down, opens a curved plastic door on the bubble, and I see my daughter for the first time.

She is tiny, so small she looks more like a doll than a baby. She is asleep, lying on her stomach. Her hands are balled into fists. A purple plaid hat covers her head, but a fine mist of hair pokes out from under it. Blonde, like mine. I touch the tips of my hair and smile.

Other than the hat, a diaper, and booties on her feet she is naked. “Can I touch her?” I ask the nurse.

“Just slide your hand into the isolet. She’s having a little trouble regulating her body temperature today. It’s been low, so she needs to stay in there, but she’ll know you’re here.”

I run my fingers along her back. At my touch, she sighs and moves her head to nuzzle my hand. I melt.

“We took her off oxygen this morning. She’s been fine.”

I nod as if the words mean something, but I’m only half listening. I’m too busy studying the eggshell pearl of my daughter’s fingernails, and her toes, which look like tiny peas.

“She knows you,” Lily says.

“How can you tell?”

“She hasn’t reacted this way to anyone else. She normally doesn’t move much, even when someone touches her. I’ve never seen her lean into anyone. Have you, Mom?”

“Never,” Mom says softly. I hear pride in her voice.

My baby’s eyelids flicker. I lean forward, hoping for a glimpse. “Has she opened her eyes yet?”

The three women glance at each other. “Once,” Mom says.

I take in their glances. “What is it? What’s wrong?” A list of problems flash through my mind. Blind. Missing eyes. Cataracts.

“Nothing. Her eyes are unusual. That’s all.”

“Can she see?” I ask the nurse.

She nods. “We think so. Some preemies have vision problems because of the oxygen, but we don’t think that’s the case with her.”

Lily says exactly the right thing. “Her eyes are just an unusual color. They’re not dark blue. They’re pale blue, like cornflowers.”

“Like yours, Rose, when you were a baby,” Mom says.

I run my fingers over my daughter’s back. Her spine is a string of pearls. “Does that mean anything?”

The nurse shakes her head. “No, it’s just unusual.”

Mom leans over me. “What are you going to name her?”

“Antoinette,” I say. I picked the name two weeks ago after flipping through a baby name book Lily gave me. “It means praiseworthy.”

At my voice, Antoinette opens her cornflower blue eyes and turns toward me. My heart stops again, but this time it’s from love.

Chapter Three

Lily sat on the edge of her bed, a well-worn book in her lap. Its white cover had grayed over the years, and the rose on the front was more peach than pink.

Tomorrow she would drive to Redbud and see Rose for the first time in years. She had already called her boss to request a leave of absence. She knew she should be packing now. Her barely used black suitcase sat open on her bed, a pile of T-shirts and jeans beside it, but she was spellbound by the old book. She flipped through the pages until she found what she wanted. As she looked down at the artist’s rendering of honeysuckle, her mind drifted to the last time she had been home.

Two years ago, on the first Friday in June, Lily had called in sick to work. She shoved T-shirts and jeans into a suitcase. Then she sat in her car and counted to fifty before heading south to Redbud.

It was Rose’s thirtieth birthday.

When they were children, thirty had seemed mythical, like a land they’d never visit. Like China, real but out of reach. They used to sit in the rafters of the drying barn, legs dangling over the beams, eating lavender shortbread cookies while conjuring their futures.

“Paris,” Rose said once. Her daydreams played out anywhere but Kentucky. “I’ll paint the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. By thirty, I’ll be exactly where I want to be.”

I want to be here
, Lily thought, though she didn’t say it out loud. Her dreams seemed small next to her sister’s.

“Promise me, you’ll be there when I turn thirty,” Rose said as she stretched out across the wide wooden beam. “Wherever we are in the world, we’ll spend our thirtieth birthdays together. First mine, then yours.”

They hooked their pinkie fingers and swore to be together. Rose might have meant they’d be together on their birthdays, but Lily had meant forever.

Yet here it was. Rose’s thirtieth birthday. They were apart and neither of them had the life they imagined.

Lily had arrived in Redbud early that Friday morning. She checked into her hotel room, but instead of leaving the room and driving to Eden Farms she stood at the door, twisting the knob first left, then right, counting each turn. She was stuck. It was late afternoon before she could stop.

When she finally left the hotel, she drove north, to Richmond. She ate at a diner that looked like a 1950s museum. Her legs sweated against the red vinyl booth. She drank her sweet tea and picked at her country fried steak. Then she walked around town, ducking into antiques shops and candy stores until it was too dark to do anything except drive back to the hotel.

The following day, she drove even farther north, stopping in Lexington at the Kentucky Horse Park. She bought a ticket and watched the Parade of Breeds. She looked at the statue of Secretariat and measured her steps’ length against Man o’ War’s impressive twenty-eight-foot stride.

Finally, on the morning she was heading home to Covington, she gathered her courage and drove to Eden Farms. She pulled off on the side of the road and stared at the blue clapboard farmhouse where she grew up. The house stood well back from the road, the drying barn several yards to its left. Oak and birch trees arched over the drive that split in front of the house. One path led to the house and the other to the drying barn.

Their land was wedge shaped, with the widest portion of their fifty acres in the back. Most of it was cleared, but a thick stand of woods made up their back border. The commercial fields were behind the house, and on the right side were two ornamental gardens—the house garden and the night garden.

The Hastings family property bordered theirs on the left, but Lily forced herself to ignore it. After Seth completed his sophomore year in college, he decided to enter seminary. When he did so, he made it clear that there wasn’t room in his life for both Lily and God. Besides, the last she had heard, he didn’t live there anymore. He was probably off somewhere, saving the world.

Lily turned her attention back to her home. She wanted to climb the back porch and knock on the door, but her knees locked. She stayed where she was, on the side of the road.

As a child, she had been captivated by the Victorian language of flowers. Her interest had started on a trip to the library, where she found a heavy book with a thick white cover. Each page had an artist’s rendering of a flower with the meaning the Victorians assigned to it written in script below.

She flipped through the book until she found lily. There were seven entries. White lilies meant purity. Lilies of the valley meant return of happiness. Water lilies meant eloquence. Her name could mean something different every day of the week.

She spent hours memorizing the meanings for each flower. When it was time to return the book, she hid it under her bed and told her mother she lost it. Twenty years later, she still knew that white daisies meant innocence and ivy meant friendship.