Part 2
Owen grabbed the blanket off Gil’s arm.
“Gil. His head. It’s moving.”
He worked the warm flannel up under the other blankets against Sam’s back and started rubbing hard, the long strokes he used on a flat calf. Jess’s arms tightened, then stopped fighting him. Gil was already on his knees beside them with the stethoscope out. He pressed it to the tiny chest between Jess’s hands and went perfectly still for a few seconds that lasted longer than the drive down Route 5.
“I’ve got something.” Gil’s voice had gone flat and quick, the EMT under the nurse. “Slow. Twenty, maybe twenty-five. Owen, keep rubbing till I lift.”
Jess was already opening her arms. Gil got Sam against his own chest, IV pole be damned, and was through the door into the hall before Owen got off his knees, his free hand already on his phone. “Neonatal code, nursery. Neonatal code.”
Owen ran behind him. Behind Owen, Rudy came up off the carpet in one motion and hit the end of the baling twine, and Walt braced against the doorframe and held on.
The nursery was a single room with two warmers and a window onto the hall. Gil laid Sam on the nearest warmer, switched on the heat lamp, and kept rubbing with the flat of his palm. Then the room was full: a respiratory therapist with a bag and a mask the size of a jar lid, the night supervisor still in her coat, and Dr. Kittredge. She came in running, then stopped short at the foot of the warmer with her face gone white.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Dad saw the fontanelle pulsing. Heart rate’s in the twenties. He’s been skin to skin with Mom, with warm blankets every half hour since eight.”
Kittredge took the stethoscope. The mask went on. The therapist squeezed the bag in a steady rhythm, and Kittredge began compressions with both thumbs on Sam’s breastbone, quick and shallow, while someone said numbers out loud. Owen stood against the wall with his hands open at his sides. They were still warm from the blanket.
“Stop. Check.”
Nobody moved.
“Sixty. Sixty-five. Keep breathing for him.”
Owen didn’t know what the numbers were supposed to be. He knew what a calf did when it decided to stay. The ribs jerked once, as if something had kicked them from inside, the tongue pulled back, and the first breath came out as a cough.
Sam’s chest jerked under the mask, then jerked again. His mouth opened, and a sound came out too thin to be a cry, like a gate hinge working in the cold.
From the end of the hall, faint through two doors, Rudy barked once.
After that they put a tube down Sam’s throat and lines into the stump of his cord, and Owen couldn’t see him for the people. Kittredge was on the wall phone with the university hospital in Burlington, saying things he only half followed: how long without a heartbeat they thought, how long since, his temperature. Then she hung up and did something that made no sense to him. She reached over and switched off the heat lamp.
“He just got warm,” Owen said.
“I know.” She came over to him. “Cooling him a few degrees for three days can protect his brain after a long time without enough oxygen. The team from Burlington will do it properly. Until they get here, we stop warming him. The helicopter can’t fly in this, so they’re coming by road. Two hours, maybe more.”
Walt wheeled Jess in a few minutes later. Rudy was gone; later Owen saw him through the window, sitting upright in the passenger seat of the pickup while snow built up on the windshield. Donna, the charge nurse, came to the nursery door with her arms folded. She looked at Gil and said, “We’re going to talk.” Gil said, “Yes, we are,” and neither of them said anything else.
At first Jess wouldn’t look at the warmer. She looked at Kittredge.
“You told me there was nothing.”
“There was nothing I could find.” Kittredge didn’t sit and didn’t soften it. “I listened, I watched the monitor, and I decided. If his heart was going that slowly and that faintly, I missed it. I’ll tell the people in Burlington exactly what I did and when, every minute of it.” She drew a breath. “I need to understand the last three hours. Jess, did you notice anything? Color, a twitch, anything?”
“He never got stiff.” Jess’s voice cracked once and came back. “I kept waiting for him to. I thought it was the blankets.”
Kittredge nodded slowly and turned. “Owen. When you held him, before Jess woke up. Did he feel any different to you?”
“He held him first,” Jess said. “While I was asleep.”
She was looking at Owen now. Everyone was. “I didn’t hold him,” Owen said…
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