Part 3
Jess closed her eyes. When she opened them she wasn’t looking at Owen anymore. She was looking at the warmer, at the tangle of tape and tubing and the small chest moving with the bag.
“Then go hold his hand,” she said. “Right now. While they’ll let you.”
The therapist shifted to make room. Owen found Sam’s left hand under a fold of blanket and an IV board and slid one finger into the curl of it. The fingers were cool and loose, not cold, and smaller around than the teats he’d dipped that morning. He stood that way until the transport team came through the door at twelve-forty with snow on their shoulders and an incubator on wheels the size of a chest of drawers.
The team was a nurse and a respiratory therapist from Burlington. Both were younger than Owen, and both moved like people who did this three times a week. The nurse knelt by Jess’s wheelchair and explained the drive and the unit upstairs at the university hospital. Then she told Jess she couldn’t come. She’d lost a lot of blood and needed two units of it, plus at least a day of watching, before anybody would let her ride two hours in a snowstorm.
“One parent can ride up front,” the nurse said.
Jess reached out and took a fistful of Owen’s jacket.
“You go with him. You don’t get out of that ambulance till he’s in a bed, and you don’t leave the bed. Not to eat. Not for the farm. Not for your father.” She let go. “I’ll come when they let me.”
Walt drove the pickup home with the dog and the empty hospital bag. Owen rode two hours north on the interstate in the passenger seat of an ambulance doing forty-five. He watched the wipers fight the snow and listened to the soft alarms behind him go off and get answered. Nobody needed him to do anything. He kept his hand flat on the partition window anyway.
The neonatal unit in Burlington was on the fourth floor. They put Sam on a mattress that ran cold water through it and taped a fan of wires to his scalp that drew his brain as a green band across a monitor. Owen sat on a vinyl chair beside him and didn’t know where to put his hands.
His nurse that first night was Renata, broad and unbothered, with a Boston accent she’d stopped apologizing for twenty years ago. At midnight she pulled a stool over and sat beside him.
“You can touch him.”
“He’s cold. They want him cold.”
“They want his brain cold. They don’t want him lonely.” She took Owen’s right hand and set it, cupped, over the top of Sam’s head, careful of the wires. Then she guided his left around both small feet at once. “Don’t stroke. That’s too much for him. Just hold still, like you’re keeping a lid on a pot that’s thinking about boiling.”
Owen’s hands covered most of his son. He held still. He couldn’t see anything change on the monitor, but after a few minutes Renata said, “There,” nodded at a number, and went back to her charting.
On Wednesday morning Walt drove up through the tail of the snow with a soft cooler on the seat beside him. Inside, packed in ice, were six tiny syringes labeled in Jess’s handwriting. She’d been pumping every three hours at Caledon Falls since Tuesday afternoon, a few drops at a time.
“The nurses down there said this was important,” Walt said, holding the cooler out like a casserole. “Gil showed her how. That fella’s not afraid of anything, is he.”
Renata took one syringe and a packet of long-handled swabs and handed both to Owen. “Colostrum. Mom’s first milk. He can’t eat yet, but every three hours we paint a little inside his cheeks. It’s good for his gut and his immune system. Some people think he can taste it.”
Owen turned the syringe in his fingers. There wasn’t half a teaspoon in it.
He had tubed colostrum into newborn calves for twenty years: four quarts into the stomach in the first six hours. A calf that missed it might stand and nurse and look fine for a week, and then the first bug in the barn would take it. He’d driven to neighbors’ farms at two in the morning for frozen bags of the stuff. He’d measured it with a hydrometer. He knew to the hour how long a calf’s gut stayed open to it.
He dipped the swab the way Renata showed him and touched it to the inside of Sam’s left cheek, then his right. The baby’s mouth gave a small jerk around the breathing tube. Owen’s hand stopped.
“That’s him,” Renata said. “That’s normal. Keep going.”
He did it at nine, at noon, and at three. He left the room only once, to use the bathroom, and he ran there and back.
Walt stayed till two. He stood at the foot of the bed with his cap in both hands and looked at his grandson for a long time. Before he left, Owen asked about the farm. His father said the farm was fine and asked whether Owen had eaten, and Owen said he had, which was not true.
On his way out Walt took the striped blanket Sam had been wrapped in at Caledon Falls, folded small inside a plastic bag. Renata had suggested it, so the dog could learn his smell before he came home.
Jess got there Wednesday evening. Gil had driven her up himself after his shift, when Caledon Falls let her go. He pushed her in from the elevator in a wheelchair she plainly hated, a pillow held against her incision. She looked at Sam for a long time without touching him. Then Renata showed her where to put her hands. She put them there, and her shoulders dropped an inch.
Gil said he’d go find coffee and was gone before anyone answered.
Jess didn’t look up from the baby. “Your father called me this morning to ask how much ice to pack around the milk. He doesn’t lie when you ask him straight, so I asked him things.” She adjusted one finger on Sam’s foot. “He says you got home at quarter to nine and the chores were done at seven. He says you sat on the gate of the calving pen for an hour.”
She lifted her eyes to him. “Is that true?”
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