Day seven. It’s before eight a.m. when I get to Mercy, and already there are two women ahead of me in line for the breast pumps, Nancy, who looks as zombied as I do, and a dark-haired woman I don’t recognize, someone obviously new to our select little sorority.
    "Hi Nance. How’s Jeremy?" I ask. It is always what you ask. How’s Jeremy/ Marissa / David / Keyshana / Tara / Julia / Austin / Elizabeth / William / Dakota / Mary Jane. Just fill in the blank.
    She shakes her head. I can see the exhaustion in her eyes. I don’t think she’s slept in a week. "He had two bradys last night," she says. Brady is short for bradycardia, which means, in a nutshell, that Jeremy stopped breathing. Of course, he is hooked up to so many machines, and there are so many nurses, one for every two babies in the green section, which is where Jeremy still is, that it’s not really a crisis. Or that’s what the perpetually cheery nurses tell you. The goal is to get Jeremy to yellow (one nurse for every four) and then to pink (one for every six) and then out these God damn doors once and for all. But who knows how long that will take. And, of course, not all of these babies leave by the same set of doors. There’s a back door right down the hall that no one talks much about.
    I want to say something to Nancy, but there is nothing to say that will make her feel any better and she knows that I know that, so I turn to the new woman instead. "Kassie Crayton," I say. "Mother of Sarah and Luke, born six days ago at thirty-one weeks, two pounds two ounces and three pounds three ounces respectively. Sarah’s in bassinette D over in yellow. Luke’s in green. He’s still on the ventilator, but the chest tube came out three days ago."
    At least I think it was three days ago. You lose track in this place. It is not like your typical hospital waiting room where there is always a discarded newspaper to confirm the day and date. People don’t read here. They pump milk. Corner doctors. Sneak peaks at cryptic charts. Cry silently, and not so silently, in the bathroom stalls. Spill out their story, again and again, to anyone who will listen. Measure out hope, gram by gram.
    "Stella," the new woman says. A name I haven’t heard in ages, don’t even recall from those countless baby name books Sam and I spent months pouring over. Wasn’t there a Stella on Perry Mason, I think? Or was that Della? Streetcar Named Desire. There was a Stella in Streetcar, for sure. You think a lot about names here, names and the way things didn’t turn out.
    "My son was born two days ago at thirty weeks. He’s over in green, down from your son I think," Stella says. She still looks stunned, like she doesn’t quite know how she got here or what’s happening to her. She’s wearing the regulation Mercy candy cane-colored robe, which means she’s still on her paid-for-hopefully-in-full four day post C-section stay on second floor south, the wing where they stick those of us who had "complications," the ones who won’t be taking home a baby when they repack their colorful overnight bags once Prudential or Travelers or Mass Mutual decides the party’s over.
    I am about to ask her more—we’re ambulance chasers all of us, wanting to know the gory details—but just then Lizzie, mother of the unit’s only current set of triplets, three tiny, identical little girls, comes out from behind the curtain, clutching a plastic container of thin milk. Her eyes are red, her face drawn.
    "I’m next," Stella says, standing. She manages a faint smile and disappears behind the white curtain. I can hear the click of the breast pump as the motor whirs into action, and imagine it sucking full force at Stella’s hard little breasts. Another thing no one warned us about is this breast-feeding business. How, I wonder, did the cavewomen and pioneer mammas manage without breast-feeding classes and electronic pumps? Why doesn’t anyone tell you it doesn’t come easy?
    "Hey Kassie," Lizzie says. "How are things?"
    "Status quo," I say, which I’ve learned is a very good thing. Two nights ago Lizzie’s Madeline, the second of the triplets, had a "neurological event," i.e. a brain bleed. No one knows why it happened, if it will happen again, or what it means long term. Lizzie is doing the best she can to cope, pumping like crazy, giving all the milk she can eek out of her swollen breasts to Maddy, hoping like mad those fabled extra antibodies will do the trick. She’s here eighteen hours a day and spends all of her time next to Maddy’s isolette, rocking back and forth, back and forth in a big white rocker donated to the unit in memory of one Leonardo Jones III. Bart, her husband, won’t go near Maddy. Maddy, of course, is still in green, just like Luke. Bart spends all his time across the room in the yellow section where the other girls, Michele and Monica, are, right next to Sarah. What a small little world ours is!
    When Lizzie told me about the episode yesterday, I hugged her hard and let her sob into my shoulder. "I love her so much," she cried. "How could I have done this to her?" Way back when, at twelve or thirteen weeks, the doctors had gently suggested to Lizzie to consider "reducing." Had offered to magically make one of the growing embryos "disappear," so Lizzie might have a safer pregnancy, perhaps go to term, deliver healthy babies without neurological problems. Of course, Lizzie hadn’t. (Could I have in her shoes?) And now she feels responsible. Guilty in the first degree for putting poor little Maddy through this with no guarantees. We all want crystal balls. Peripheral vision to see around the corner a day, a week, a year. To know how it all ends.
    I feel for Lizzie, but must confess that what I also feel is a palpable sense of relief that it is her baby and not mine. Everything is a crapshoot. Odds are better than even that all these babies won’t make it, or if they do, they will have massive problems, and I want like hell for Sarah and Luke to be on the right side of fate’s fickle coin flip.
    "How’s Maddy?" I ask, sincerely hopeful that the news is good, that she’s spent a peaceful night, maybe gained an ounce.
    "The same," Lizzie says. "Bart won’t touch her. He’s written her off. Says we should concentrate on the healthy two." And with this she bursts into tears, her whole body heaving and shaking beneath her husband’s oversize work shirt. Some milk has leaked through and left a large wet circle under her left breast, right beneath her heart.
    "She may be okay," I say. I pat her gently on the back, this woman I hardly know. "She’s in the best place. They’ve got the best doctors here, you know that." It all sounds so hollow. As for Bart, what can you say?
    My own husband Sam has already shown a distinct preference for Sarah, our perfect little child. When he comes to visit, he goes directly to her isolette, lifts her out tenderly and rocks her for a good half hour before he ventures down to green to see how Luke is doing. If I point this out to him, he’ll deny it. Say it’s my post-partum hormones raging, making me imagine things. But I know it is true. I’ve been observing, making mental notes, and already over compensating in return, always heading first to Luke.
    Poor little Luke. He had a tough time of it. I was at the office, wrestling with yet another spreadsheet, still pregnant, a good two months to go, when his placenta ruptured. I remember the wetness, the immediate knowledge that something was very, very wrong. There were phone calls. To the doctor, whose service picked up twice and never bothered to call back. To Sam at work. To 911. There was the ambulance ride, an endless eternity crawling through gridlocked midtown traffic. The oxygen mask and IV. The urgency in the medic’s voice as he phoned ahead and said we were coming in. Then papers, jammed in my face. Sign here. No time. Emergency C. The room. Five, maybe six people in dull green gowns hovering around my body, strapped on a stainless steel table. The cool, iced air. Me thinking "Where’s Sam?" then nothing, nothing at all.
    Waking later, thirsty. More thirsty than I can ever remember being. Dry, parched mouth. Worse than the worst hangover. Me begging a nurse for an ice chip, just one little ice chip, please, please. Just one. The same nurse (or another?) showing me two little sets of footprints. "Your babies are fine," she said, which is what she says to everyone, I am sure, regardless of whether it is true. No need to tell the truth to someone on morphine. No need to break the bad news on her shift.
    Later, downstairs on two south, two different nurses told me what a beautiful daughter I had. "But what about my son?" I cried. "What about my son?"
    Sam came in shortly after the nurses. His face was drawn and pale. I had never seen him look so scared, not even when his father was dying. He took my hand, squeezed it hard, bent down to kiss my parched lips. "They’re fine," he said. "Small, but fine. And Sarah, Sarah’s a real beauty."
    It was all it took to break my heart. I needed to see Luke, to see my son with my own eyes, to know that he was okay, but it would be a full twenty-four hours until they let me up to the neonatal unit, and another three days until I could hold him, tubes and all. The enormity of what we had gotten ourselves into hit me. It was too much to bear. Too much to shoulder, the responsibility for these two little creatures’ happiness and well-being.
    Suddenly, I wanted to rewind. To go back, way back, to that stormy Tuesday night in June five years ago at the LaGuardia airport bar where Sam, his flight to Atlanta postponed due to weather, and me, early—always early—for a flight to Pittsburgh that, ultimately, too, was delayed, sat on adjacent stools and ordered the first of several over-priced beers. I wanted to be single again. To have no husband, no children, none of this! Because if something is wrong with Luke—
    And this is just the beginning! There is everything that lies ahead, all the danger lurking between the Kodak moments. The broken bones. The schoolyard taunts. All those things you never see until it is too late—fast cars, cancerous cells, thin ice. I can’t do this! I want to scream. I simply cannot do this.
    If you could dissect this place, you would find more love, more fear, more faith, more despair, more sorrow, more joy, more anger, more courage crammed into one space than is humanly imaginable. None of us intended to be here, and each of us has a story with one common denominator. We were all early, pre-empting our own baby showers and nursery set-ups, leap-frogging at least one astrological sign, and sometimes two or even three, expecting Geminis or Cancers and getting tiny, fragile Pisces and Aries instead.
    Every baby’s isolette is heated like a sauna and has a pink or blue sign over it with three pieces of information: the baby’s first and last name, the baby’s birth weight in grams, and the baby’s original due date. Walking past, you can’t help but do the arithmetic. There’s a nameless little black boy down from Luke who wasn’t due for ten more weeks, and the nurses tell me he’s already been here twenty-two days. Since we’ve been here, I’ve seen someone visiting the boy only once. She stayed less than twenty minutes. A woman my age, possibly younger, who the nurses tell me is his grandmother. The nurses here are amazing. You must need a very big, very resilient heart to work in this place. Though no one says it, we all assume he’s a crack baby. When no one is looking, I sometimes poke my finger through one of the side portals of his isolette and gently massage his tiny black leg.
    At last, there is a breast pump available, but my breasts aren’t cooperating. I have taken the breast-feeding class twice, but still I can’t get more than an inch or two of milk to come, even after half an hour on these damn machines. I’m ready to give up, but the nurses, the other mothers, all make you feel guilty for not trying just a little bit harder, for the babies’ sake.
    So I take my inch of milk, put it in a plastic container, label it with my name and the date, and give it to one of the nurses at the main desk. Then I go to see Luke. Sure enough, Stella’s son is next to mine. She is standing beside his isolette, looking down at him.
    "He’s beautiful," I say.
    She looks up and feigns a smile. These are not Gerber babies, and we all know it.
    I glance up at the sign to get his name, but all it says is "Baby Boy" Rosen.
    As if reading my mind, she says, "We don’t know what to name him. We’re waiting. To see— "
    I nod. Again, there is nothing to say.
    "How’s Luke?" she asks.
    "Fine," I say, which is only partially true. Until yesterday, we weren’t sure he would make it at all. But today, today things are looking up. All the blood he swallowed in utero has been drained, and the doctors say he may come off the respirator tomorrow or the day after. He’s still listless and doesn’t respond when you touch him, but he’s hanging in there, making progress. So although he’s asleep, the green lines on the machine monitoring his vital signals zigzag along nicely, his little chest rises and falls, rises and falls at a steady reassuring rate. I flip open the top of the isolette and reach down through the maze of brightly colored wires patched to his tiny body and touch his wrinkled fist.
    They say that once you have a child nothing will ever be the same again, and they are right. But it is not about the sleepless nights or the cost of diapers or how in hell you’ll pay for college. It is about what happens to your heart, how it will never be the same.

Day eight. Sam and I have fallen into a routine. The alarm sounds at six. Sam showers first, then me. My stomach is still puffy, the scar from the C-section still red and raw, but there is no time to dwell on this, no space for vanity these days. We have a quick breakfast. Juice, coffee, stale bagels. Sam leaves for work, and I head for the hospital.
    As usual, Nancy is already there when I arrive. So are Stella and Lauren, mother of Alexander, and Jocelyn, mother of Cleo. I don’t see Lizzie, which worries me. Lizzie is close to the edge. Maddy is not responding to the drugs and she has lost fifteen grams, and Bart is of no help.
    The husbands have receded. They come after work, occasionally before, and sit five and six hour vigils on the weekends. But they have jobs. There is money to be made, money that will be needed to pay the mounting hospital bills, bills that none of us allow ourselves to think much about. Sam and I joke that, at $2,000 a day per baby just for the isolette, this is the most expensive hotel these kids are ever gonna stay in.
    "Guess what," Jocelyn says. "The doctors say Cleo may go home today. She’s up to 1610 grams." Jocelyn is beaming. She is a tall, pretty woman with softly streaked blonde hair. Her husband is an investment banker; someone whose name, were you looking for it, you would see quoted in the Wall Street Journal. They live in a big sprawling apartment on Park Avenue. Under other circumstances, it would be easy to be jealous of Jocelyn, but not here, not knowing what we know. Cleo has been here forty-seven days. She has had two surgeries, one to repair a tiny hole in her heart, another to stop a brain bleed. I am sure there were times when Jocelyn never thought she would see this day, the day that Cleo is going home.
    "That’s great," we all say in chorus.
    Jocelyn starts crying, and I can’t say that I blame her.
    "We’re going to miss you," Nancy says, wrapping her arm around Jocelyn’s shoulder. Nancy has been here far longer than I, going on twenty-seven days today. But even she can’t rival Jocelyn for longevity.
    Today turns out to be moving day here on the fourth floor. Cleo is indeed being sprung, as are two other babies in pink. Jeremy is being upgraded—at last! Moved from green to yellow, having spent, to Nancy’s relief, a brady-free night. Monica, the biggest of the triplets, is moving from yellow down to pink. And so, surprise! is Sarah.
    Later, when Sam comes after work, I watch from across the room as he heads to yellow to see Sarah. You can see the terror in his face when he realizes she’s not there. Then the relief when Georgia, one of the nicest nurses, says something to him and turns and points him towards pink. Now the distance is even greater back to green to see Luke.

Day nine. There are good days and bad days here. Today is a bad day. Maddy had two more brain bleeds in the night. Lizzie and Bart are meeting with the doctors now to go over their options. And the little black boy is gone. At first, I think maybe he has been moved up to yellow, but when I go down to yellow with Nancy to look in on Jeremy he is no where to be seen. There is no need to ask what happened. All I can hope is that he was not alone. I pray one of the nurses, preferably Georgia or Jasmine, the large black lady from Grenada, was there at the end as his sweet little soul surrendered. I call Sam in tears from the pay phone in the hall and he tries to comfort me, but what can he say?
    It gets worse. Quadruplets are born at twenty-eight weeks to an Italian couple from Brooklyn, but one of the babies, baby "B," doesn’t make it. The missing baby is little a phantom limb that we all can feel as we walk through green. There’s Rosetto baby "A," Rosetto baby "C" and Rosetto baby "D"—but no baby "B." The doctors pull off miracles, perform magic, here every day. But they are not God. Sometimes the rabbit doesn’t come out of the hat.
    It is on this worst of all days, at 5:15 in the afternoon that Luke finally comes off the respirator. Sam and I go home that night and drink a bottle of champagne, but it is hard to feel too festive. Even as we are toasting Luke and our own good fortune, I can’t help but think about all that has happened on the fourth floor that day, especially about Maddy. Still, Luke, our son, is now breathing on his own!
    "What would you do if you were Bart and Lizzie?" I ask later in bed.
    "I’d let her go," Sam says.
    "How could you?" I say. "How could you not want the doctors to do everything possible?"
    "How could you put her through ‘everything possible?’ Hasn’t she been through enough?" he retorts. We are lying next to each other under a sheet no one has had time to wash, but we are not touching. In a way, Sam’s right, but it’s not what I want to hear.
     "If it were Luke—" I say, unable to finish the sentence.
    "It’s not Luke, okay? Luke’s fine. He’s breathing on his own. Go to sleep Kassie. It’s late."
    Four a.m. that very same night. The phone rings. I am groggy with the champagne, creeping up on a hangover, but somehow find the receiver. "Hello?" I say.
    It is the hospital. Sarah has had an episode. A seizure of some sort. They don’t know exactly what it is, or how bad, but they thought they should call us, let us know.
    "Are you sure you heard right? Sarah?" Sam asks. He has one leg in his jeans already.
    "Yes, Sarah," I say, pulling a sweater over my head.
    "But Sarah was fine. I don’t understand—"
    "Come on. Let’s go," I say.
    The cab ride over Sam and I hold hands. At first we don’t say anything, but then I blurt out what I have been thinking. "You wish it were Luke, don’t you?"
    "Jesus, Kassie. Don’t be ridiculous." Sam looks at me like I’m insane and I know immediately it was a stupid thing to say.
    "I’m sorry," I say. Tears start—tears for Sarah and for us and for all the babies over there and all their mommies and daddies.
    "What I wish," Sam says, "is that the fucking phone had never rung."
    Sarah is hooked up to all sorts of new machines and there are four monitors going. She is stone still, the tiny little creature dubbed the aerobics queen by the nurses because of her perpetual tai-chi gyrations, is not moving at all. Otherwise, she looks the same. The same little upturned nose. The same rosebud mouth. The same perfect little fingers.
    Sam and I pull up chairs and start the vigil. We cannot hold her. Nurses come by every ten minutes, a doctor every hour, to check her signs. No one knows what happened or why. The doctors don’t think any permanent damage was done, a thought that throws me for a loop. I had considered the best and worst case scenarios, but not the middle ground, not a damaged masterpiece. The next twenty-four hours are key, they say. That will tell the story. At some point, Sam squeezes my hand. "I’m going down to check on Luke," he says. "I want to see my son."
    The night creeps by. The next morning, for the first time, I beat Nancy to the breast pumps.

It is now some sixteen months later. A drab November day with cool, crisp air and dead leaves scuttling at your feet. Sam is home with the children and I have escaped to run a few errands. I am in Barnes & Noble, looking for a gift for my niece who is turning five. My fingers touch the classic Madeline and I can’t help but wonder about Lizzie and Maddy.
    We took Sarah home after seventeen days, Luke after twenty-two. They are both fine. Sarah’s episode was never repeated and never explained. Just one of those things the nurses said with a shrug. When we left with Luke, two of the triplets had been sprung, but Maddy, of course, was still there. I don’t know how Lizzie managed it, splitting herself like that, between two at home and one still in green on the fourth floor of Mercy. I called her twice and left messages, once a week after we took Luke home, and again towards the end of the summer, but she never called me back. Maybe Maddy made it. Maybe she is fine, just a third pea in a pod, and Lizzie is just too busy to call. I understand busy. Or maybe she isn’t fine, or isn’t even here anymore, and talking to anyone from that time, especially someone who took home two healthy babies, is too much to bear. Or maybe we were just the cliché two ships whose paths crossed on a very stormy night, each en route to our own distant port of call. The way life goes. In the end I pass on Madeline and opt for Babar instead.
    Downstairs, I stop at the fiction section briefly, kidding myself into thinking there is time to read a novel, even a very short one, when I hear, "Hey—"
    I turn and there is a woman pushing a big navy stroller, someone I recognize but can’t quite place.
    "Stella. From Mercy—" she says, and I’m back there in a flash.
    "How are you?" I ask, looking down at this mini-Michelin man crammed into the stroller. The baby has chubby, apple-red cheeks. He grins and I can see a row of little white picket fence teeth.
    "Benjamin," Stella says. "You remember Benjy."
    "He’s huge," I say. No need to remind her that, back then, Benjamin didn’t have a name.
    Stella laughs. "Yeah, seventy-fifth percentile weight-wise the pediatrician says. You’d never guess he was a premie. How are your guys doing? Luke and—" she pauses.
    "Sarah," I say, rescuing her. "And they’re fine. Happy. Healthy. A handful."
    "I wish you had them with you. It would have been fun to see them again. Pictures?"
    I whip out the requisite half a dozen photos and Stella oohs and aahs.
    "You live near here?" I ask.
    "No. East side. We’re over for a birthday party."
    There is nothing much else to say. Had she lived in the neighborhood, I might have suggested exchanging numbers, gone through the motions of proposing play dates, a rendez-vous in the Hippo Park. But she doesn’t, so I didn’t. Besides, neither of us really wants to go back and revisit the place where our lives once, briefly, intersected. That was then, and this is here and now.
    "Well, nice seeing you," Stella says. She bends down and tucks the blanket in tighter around Benjy. She looks up at me suddenly. "We got lucky," she says.

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