Part 2
Bev was at the bed before Caleb understood he should get out of her way.
“Show me.”
Jenna lifted the edge of the blanket. Wes’s right hand lay curled against her breastbone, the thumb tucked inside the fingers. Her voice came out level, the voice she used when a kid in the third row was about to cry and she needed the rest of the room not to notice. “His thumb was out. I’ve been looking at that hand for two hours. It was out.”
Bev didn’t answer. She lifted the stethoscope from around her neck and closed the metal end in her fist for a few seconds before she slid it under the blanket against Wes’s back. She shut her eyes.
The room was so quiet Caleb could hear sleet ticking against the window and the ice machine down the hall dropping a load into its bin. Banjo didn’t move. Jenna didn’t breathe. Bev shifted the stethoscope, listened, shifted it again.
When she opened her eyes, she wasn’t looking at any of them. She reached past Jenna’s shoulder and hit the red button on the wall with the heel of her hand, then pressed it again and held it down.
“I need to take him.”
Jenna’s arms closed around the baby.
“Jenna, look at me. There’s something there. It’s slow and I don’t like it, and he needs a warmer and people who can help him. Let me take him.”
For one second Caleb thought she wouldn’t. Then Jenna opened her arms all at once, before she could stop herself.
Bev laid Wes at the foot of the bed on a folded towel and began rubbing his back and the soles of his feet, hard, harder than Caleb would have dared. A calm voice in the ceiling said a code and the room number, then said it again. Feet came running. Two nurses wheeled in a warmer from the room next door, a respiratory therapist came with a bag and a mask no bigger than a coffee filter, and then Dr. Haugen arrived, saw what lay under Bev’s hands, and for one instant her face went entirely blank.
“Talk to me.”
“Mom noticed a hand position change. I’ve got a heart rate, maybe forty. Slow. He’s warm from her.”
Haugen took over the stethoscope. Somebody told Caleb to get the dog out. Caleb backed against the wall instead, the leash wound short, and nobody had time to make him. Banjo sat pressed to his leg, shaking in long tremors that ran from his shoulders to his tail.
The mask went over a face no wider than Caleb’s palm. The therapist squeezed the bag in a steady count. Haugen pressed two thumbs to the center of Wes’s chest, quick and shallow, while one of the nurses called out numbers Caleb didn’t understand. Jenna had pushed herself up on one elbow against everything her body was telling her, the blanket fallen to her waist.
“Hold,” Haugen said.
Everyone stopped. Haugen listened.
“Sixty. Seventy. Keep bagging.”
Then Wes’s chest moved on its own, a hitch, like a hiccup going the wrong direction. And again, rougher. His mouth pulled open under the mask and a sound came out, thin and creaky, about as loud as a kitten behind a closed door.
Jenna made a noise that wasn’t a word.
Banjo’s tail swept the floor once and went still.
“Okay,” Haugen said, and her voice wavered for the first time. She steadied it. “Okay. We’re going to the NICU. We need to cool him, and we need to start soon. Jenna, I’m going with him.”
“You told me he was gone.”
Haugen didn’t look away from her. She didn’t try to defend herself either. “I’ll come find you. I’ll tell you everything I know and everything I don’t. Right now he needs me upstairs.”
They lifted Wes onto the warmer and were through the door in seconds, a crowd of blue around a lit plastic bed, the therapist still squeezing the bag as they ran. The hospital hat had fallen to the floor. Nobody picked it up.
Then the room was only the three of them and Bev. She peeled off her gloves and sat down on the windowsill, and her hands, which had been perfectly steady, began to shake in her lap. She put them between her knees.
The charge nurse appeared in the doorway, a short woman with her hair in a clip. “Bev. The dog.”
“I know,” Bev said. “He’s going.”
Caleb looked at Jenna. She held out her hand to him, palm up, and for a moment he thought it was for him. Then he understood and gave her the yellow hat. He’d crushed it in his fist during the code without knowing. She smoothed it flat on her knee and ran her thumb across the place where the stitches tightened.
“I’ll put him in the truck and come straight up to the NICU,” Caleb said.
“It’s fifteen minutes to the house,” Jenna said.
“I know.”
“You were gone an hour and a half.”
He had no answer ready. He had not thought she was counting. – “Where were you, Cal?”
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