Part 6
She was there before he finished saying her name. She looked at the foot and then at the screen, hit the call light with her elbow, and was already pulling a syringe from the drawer.
“It’s a seizure. Babies who’ve been through what he has can have them, and we’ve been watching for exactly this. So this is the part where it goes the way it’s supposed to.” She was talking to the resident coming through the curtain now. “Left foot, rhythmic, about ninety seconds, and it’s on the strip.”
“Do I let go?” Owen said.
“Do you want to?”
“No.”
“Then don’t. Keep your hand where it is. You’re not hurting him.”
The resident gave the medicine through one of the lines. Owen kept his left hand around both feet and felt the left one go on knocking against his palm, steady and stubborn, for longer than anything should take. Then it slowed, and then it stopped. The green band settled back to its low, ragged line.
Renata waited a full minute before her shoulders came down. “Should we get Mom?” she asked.
“Call her,” Owen said. “I’m not leaving him.”
Jess came down in hospital socks, with one of his flannel shirts over her gown. She held the elevator rail, then the wall, then the end of Sam’s bed. Renata and the resident told her what had happened and what came next: more medicine, a closer watch, more wires. When they left, she sat down on the stool and looked at Owen’s hands, still on their son, and at the phone number inked on the back of the left one.
“What’s that?”
He told it plainly: the power, the tractor, his father on speaker, Gil.
She sat with that a long time.
“You called Gil Bouchard,” she said finally. “At eleven o’clock at night. And asked him for help.”
“Yes.”
Jess put her hand on top of his, on top of Sam’s head, so the three of them were stacked there like stones on a wall. Neither of them said anything else until Walt called at twenty past five.
The generator was running and the first group was through the parlor. Gil Bouchard milked faster than Dylan and complained less, and Rudy had come out of the kitchen for the first time since Tuesday and brought every group up to the parlor for him without being asked. And the heifer from the calving pen, who had stood bawling at the empty corner since Walt and Dylan dragged the calf out Tuesday night, had finally put her head in the bunk and eaten.
“Give her credit,” Walt said. “Three days is a long time for a heifer.”
They dumped two milkings’ worth Friday morning. The power came back at noon.
That afternoon they began to warm Sam, half a degree an hour, a nurse checking the numbers so often it felt like ceremony. There were no more seizures. By Saturday morning his skin had lost its mottling and turned the ordinary pink-red of any newborn.
On Saturday evening they took out the breathing tube, and he breathed on his own, a little fast and a little noisy, with a nasal cannula taped to his cheeks. An hour later Owen asked the nurse, before anyone could offer, whether he could hold his son. She settled Sam into his arms with the wires gathered behind him, and Owen sat in the vinyl chair he’d slept in for four nights and didn’t give him back until the nurse had asked twice whether his arms were tired.
On Sunday Sam opened his eyes twice, both times at Jess’s voice.
The MRI was Monday morning. That afternoon Dr. Ofori, the neonatologist, sat down with them in a small room with a box of tissues on every flat surface. She was a slight woman with very still hands. She drew on a pad of paper, because she said she trusted paper more than screens.
Before she drew anything, she told them she had read of only a handful of babies whose hearts kept beating too faintly to find, none who had waited this long, and that she believed Jess’s skin and Gil’s blankets were most of the reason he had.
“There’s an injury,” she said, and sketched two small shaded spots deep in the middle of a brain, one on each side. “These areas help coordinate things that are supposed to happen without thinking: sucking, swallowing, and later some kinds of movement. It’s not the widest pattern we see, and not the smallest.” She put the pen down. “Right now I’m most worried about feeding. He doesn’t yet have a safe rhythm of sucking, swallowing, and breathing. We’ll put a thin tube through his nose to his stomach, and a therapist will start working with him tomorrow.”
“For how long?” Jess asked.
“I don’t know. Some babies with this get the hang of it in a few weeks. Some need the tube for months. A few need help eating for a very long time.” Dr. Ofori looked from one of them to the other and let the silence sit. “I’m not going to tell you which one he is, because I don’t know yet, and neither does he.”
Jess looked down at Owen’s hands. “Then he’s going to need somebody who doesn’t hurry,” she said…
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