Another Man's Child

“Don’t go.” She was breaking his rules.

“I’m right here.” But he was looking at her, not the window.

Lisa held his gaze for another second and then slowly turned. Her eyes found her daughter instantly, knowing just which part of the nursery housed the neonatal babies. Cartwright Girl, she saw. Sara. Her name is Sara.

They were going to have to change that card.

And then she brought her gaze to the minuscule body lying so quietly in the cellophane-wrapped warming bed.

Forgetting everything, even, in that moment, her husband standing behind her, Lisa rose from her chair, motioned for a nurse to let her in and went through the door into the overly warm nursery. She saw nothing but the baby in front of her. Her baby. Her Sara.

Mindless of her own discomfort, she scrubbed at the sink by the baby’s crib and tied a mask over her face, her eyes still on her daughter. She had a daughter. She was finally a mother.

With tears in her eyes, gloves on her hands and more than nine hours after giving birth to her, Lisa finally touched her baby. She couldn’t hold her, couldn’t take her away from the healing warmth of her crib, but she touched her.

“Hello, my precious,” she whispered through her tears, running one finger lightly along the baby’s side.

Sara was lying on her back, completely still, breathing only with the help of the tube taped to her mouth.

Careful of the various wires and vials attached to the baby’s body, Lisa lay her hand against Sara’s belly, needing the contact, needing her daughter to feel her touch, despite the gloves she wore and the plastic covering the baby. Her baby. Her Sara. Lisa had never felt such an overwhelming rush of love in her life.

“Mama’s here, my Sara,” she said, her voice stronger. “You be a good little girl and do just what the doctor tells you, you hear?”

Lisa stood beside the crib for the entire hour she’d been allotted, rejecting the rocker a nurse brought over to her. She wanted to be as close to Sara as she could possibly get.

And throughout the hour, one eye on the monitors attached to Sara, she talked to the baby, bonding with her new daughter, not in the usual way, but bonding with her just the same.

The nurse told her when her hour was up, and Lisa nodded, running her hand along Sara’s side one more time. “You’re going to be just fine, Sara. Just fine. Mama’s going to be watching over you every second now, so don’t you worry.”

“She’s a strong one, Doctor. If ever a preemie had a chance, it’s this one,” the nurse said, smiling down at Sara.

“She hasn’t opened her eyes, has she?” Lisa asked, still watching her daughter.

She knew the answer even before she heard it. “No. It could take weeks.”

Lisa nodded. “I know,” she said. But they’d be blue when she did. They were meant to be blue. Like Marcus’s. Except that he couldn’t allow himself to claim them.

“Her pulse and blood pressure are fluctuating,” Lisa said, glancing again at one of the monitors attached to her little darling.

The nurse nodded. “It’s something we expect at this stage.”

Glancing at the monitors, the nurse took a small blood-pressure cuff from a tray beside the crib and lifted the plastic around the baby enough to fit the oneinch-long cuff around the baby’s arm. Sara’s arm was barely as thick as the nurse’s middle finger.

Lisa couldn’t bear to watch anymore.

“I love you, Sara,” she said one last time, bending to brush her masked face against the tip of the cap covering the baby’s head. Sara didn’t respond.

Stopping only long enough to ask that the baby’s nameplate be changed, Lisa stripped off her sanitary garb and went out to find Marcus, more afraid than she’d ever been in her life.

She practically fell into the wheelchair he had waiting for her, only then becoming aware of how much she ached, thankful she didn’t have to make it down to the car on her own. She wasn’t sure she had the strength even to make it out to the hallway. Nor the will. She’d just left her heart with a tiny bit of humanity who couldn’t so much as open her eyes. Or cry when she was hurt.

Marcus didn’t once look toward the nursery as he helped her into her coat and wheeled her out, and all during the drive home, Lisa waited for him to say something, anything, about the child they were leaving behind.

She waited in vain.

MARCUS DROVE Lisa back to the hospital that evening for her second hour with her baby. He hated the toll this premature birth and resulting vigil was taking on Lisa, the panic that came to her eyes every time the telephone rang. He hated, too, his helplessness to make things better.

This was supposed to have been a happy time for her. One of the happiest times of her life. Instead, she’d cried when Hannah had met her at the door with an uncharacteristic hug. And she’d cried over the cards and flowers and gifts that had been arriving steadily all day—from her colleagues, from his, and from the matriarchs of the families on New Haven’s social register.