Part 2
Tess lifted Ellis onto the examination surface and called for the resuscitation team. Graham backed against the door with Birdie between his knees. Dr. Sloane came in running, followed by a second nurse pushing a warmer.
The doctor listened, then fitted the tiny mask over Ellis’s face. His chest rose when she squeezed the bag. A nurse attached heart-monitor leads, and a number appeared on the screen: thirty-eight.
Dr. Sloane adjusted the mask and continued giving breaths. When the number stayed low, she asked for the breathing tube. The nurse moved beside her, and Graham lost sight of his son’s face behind their hands.
Mara tried to sit forward. Tess supported her shoulders and told her they needed room to work. The flannel blanket had fallen onto the bed beside her; Mara gripped its edge with both hands.
“Ellis,” she called. “Ellis, we’re right here.”
With the tube in place, Ellis’s chest rose with each assisted breath, but his heart rate remained below sixty. The second nurse began compressions. Graham watched the number. It climbed, dropped, then climbed again.
Birdie pressed against his legs. He put one hand beneath her collar and held her there. When Tess told him to take the dog outside, he hesitated until she repeated it.
Owen was at the courtyard door. Graham handed him the leash.
“He’s alive. They found a heartbeat.”
His brother looked past him into the passage. “What?”
“Stay here. Please just stay here.”
Graham returned before the door had closed. The monitor showed a faster heart rate now. No one had stopped working, but the nurse who had been doing compressions took her hands away.
Dr. Sloane secured the tube and spoke to the respiratory therapist who had joined them. Then she came to the bed.
“His heart is beating,” she told Mara. “He needs help breathing, and he needs intensive care. We’re arranging a transfer.”
Mara looked at the warmer. “Can you keep him alive?”
“We’re going to do everything we can. I can’t promise you the outcome.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said.”
The doctor looked at both of them. “I can’t explain this yet. I can’t tell you whether his circulation returned after we stopped or whether there was activity we failed to detect. We’ll review what happened. Right now he needs intensive care and treatment for the time he went without enough oxygen.”
“You can ask me anything later,” she said. “I’ll make myself available.”
Graham wanted to ask her how he was supposed to let anyone take his son out of this room. Instead he asked where the ambulance would go.
The children’s hospital was thirty miles away, in Cincinnati. A transport team was coming to stabilize Ellis for the trip. Mara had just had surgery and couldn’t leave with them; her doctor would decide when she could be discharged.
“I’ll go with him,” Graham said.
Mara nodded, then caught his hand. “Call June first. Tell her to come here.”
June was Mara’s oldest friend. She ran a small hair salon, spoke loudly even when whispering, and had offered to drive over that morning with coffee. Graham had told her they’d call when there was news.
“Owen can stay with you.”
“I want June.”
“Okay.”
He took out his phone. There were messages from his brother, his mother, and June. He opened June’s first and stared at the question she’d sent: How’s our girl doing?
He could still see the doctor’s face when she’d told him Ellis had died. He imagined June arriving with that question in her mouth, wanting to know what had happened, crying before Mara could begin to answer. He imagined saying the words again.
He typed: It’s been a hard morning. Baby’s being transferred. Please don’t come yet. Mara needs to rest. I’ll keep you posted.
June replied almost immediately: I can just sit. She won’t have to talk.
Not today, he wrote.
Then he slid the phone into his pocket. When Mara asked whether he’d reached her, he said yes.
The transport team arrived with equipment Graham had never seen. A nurse explained each tube before fastening it, and someone checked the breathing tube again. Mara was allowed to put a hand on Ellis’s head. She held it there until they needed to move the warmer.
Graham bent beside her. She pressed her lips to his cheek, missing the corner of his mouth.
“Find out where I can call,” she said. “Write it down for me.”
He did. Tess checked the number on the paper before he left.
Owen drove him behind the ambulance because there wasn’t room for him with the transport team. Birdie lay on the back seat, her leash still attached. At a red light, Graham turned and touched her head.
“What did you hear?” he whispered.
She licked the base of his thumb. Owen kept his eyes on the road.
At the children’s hospital, a nurse took Graham through locked doors and showed him where to wash his hands. Ellis lay on a cooling mattress, with the breathing tube taped in place and thin wires fastened to his scalp. Medication kept him comfortable. The nurse said the cooling treatment would last three days and might limit injury to his brain.
Graham asked whether he should put a blanket over him. The baby’s skin looked pale and chilled.
“We control his temperature very carefully,” she said. “You can touch him here.”
She showed him how to rest a hand against his son without stroking. Ellis’s body fit between the places where Graham’s thumb and little finger touched the mattress.
Dr. Malik, the neonatologist, came by that evening. She explained what they were watching for: seizures, breathing trouble, changes in his organs after the loss of oxygen. An MRI after the cooling treatment would help them see whether his brain had been injured. She couldn’t tell Graham yet what Ellis would be able to do as he grew.
“His mother should hear this,” Graham said.
They called Mara together. Graham held the phone near the doctor and listened while Mara asked questions he’d been unable to form. Could Ellis hear them? Was he hurting? Would she be allowed to hold him when she came?
After the doctor left, Mara asked him to put the phone close to the bed. She told Ellis about Birdie’s breakfast habits, how the dog wouldn’t finish eating until she’d checked whether anyone else had something better. Graham held the phone until his shoulder ached. When Mara finally said she needed to sleep, he didn’t want her to hang up.
Owen came back with food and the folder from that morning. He left the food on a chair and kept the folder under his arm.
“We don’t need to talk about this now,” he said. “I just don’t want it getting lost in my truck.”
Graham had spent eighteen years working for other people. Owen’s offer would make him a partner in the restoration business and put him in charge of their new workshop. They’d found a building west of town, with enough space to repair the large church doors and staircases that kept filling the old shop. Graham had already drawn a floor plan on their kitchen table, and Mara had measured it again because he’d left no room to open the office door.
They were supposed to sign the papers a week from Friday. Until that morning, he had been counting the days.
“Leave it here,” he said.
His brother set it beneath the food. “I’ve got Birdie. Don’t worry about her.”
Graham ate three bites of a sandwich, then put it down when Ellis’s monitor sounded. The nurse checked him, adjusted a sensor, and told Graham what had happened. He resumed eating only after she returned to her desk.
For two days, Mara’s voice came from his phone. She was recovering from surgery at the community hospital, and he went back once, while Owen stayed near Ellis. June had called her directly. Graham knew this because Mara stopped asking him to pass along messages.
On Wednesday afternoon, June brought her to the NICU in a wheelchair. Mara had the flannel blanket folded on her lap. She held out a hand to Graham but looked past him toward the bed before he could take it.
He walked beside the chair. At Ellis’s bedside, June set the brakes and stepped away. Mara studied the wires, the tube, the small exposed feet.
“June told me why she stayed away,” Mara said quietly. He crouched beside her. “I didn’t want you bothered.” She looked at him then, her mouth trembling with the effort of keeping it steady. “Give me your phone. I want to read what you told June…”
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