Unwanted, another memory comes back to me, of sitting in the clinic, the shabby, false hominess of it. I see the loose couch, the dirty-blond color of the young man’s long hair, the crack of a bat during an afternoon ball game. The air in the room was blue from the television, hopeless. The sound of a woman crying from one of the closed doors.
Your daughter would kill me if I did that, my son-in-law says, laughing.
I force a laugh that sounds more like a choke. My son-in-lawdoes not notice. That long-ago day at the clinic when my wife returned, her eyes were blazing with light, the hair at her forehead curly and damp. She limped.
My son-in-law looks at me and smiles. I said I didn’t care whether I had a boy or girl, he says. I just wanted it to be healthy. But now I’m glad she’ll be a girl.
Later, there is time for many boys, I say, my heart clenching tight.
He laughs.
My son-in-law leads me into the room where my wife and daughter are waiting. The light in the room is dim, for my daughter should be resting. I have never seen a hospital room such as this. I would think I was standing in an ordinary American bedroom were it not for the machines and their small twinkling lights. There is even one showing the heartbeats of the baby, how many and how fast.
My daughter smiles to see her husband. She looks tired and weak, and asks me if I have eaten anything. I want to ask her if she is afraid, but do not. Instead, I watch her and my son-in-law speak softly to each other. I understand then that she is no longer mine, but she was once. She was.
I am sitting with my wife on a small couch when a loud, insistent beeping erupts from one of the machines. We watch it as if it were a television.
What’s that? David says.
A nurse rushes in, pushes a button that silences the short bursts of sound, and examines the long roll of paper that is coming from the machine. Sounds like the baby’s heartbeat has dipped a little, she says, patting my daughter’s hand. She picks up the phone and asks for a doctor with a foreign-sounding name. She says to my daughter, Let’s just take a look, and pulls back the bedsheets. It is startling. At first, I think there must be a mistake. Why would they put red sheets on the bed? Butthen I see that it is blood, there are dark clots of it. It is many colors, many shades of red and black. My daughter screams.
David is shouting something I don’t understand. My wife rushes to my daughter and tries to enfold her. Several people have swept into the room and are unhooking my daughter from the machines, putting a needle into her arm. It is like being in the middle of a tornado, so much flying movement and myself so still. My mind has gone useless and I stand like a shadow of a man until David shouts at me, Pull her off!
I wake, I grab my wife’s arms, pull her to me so that the doctor and nurses can lift my daughter onto another bed and wheel her away. David runs alongside them, shouting my daughter’s name.
Then begins the long waiting. My wife and I stay in the room until we are told by a nurse that they need it for another patient. My wife is rigid with fear; the hand I hold is bloodless, cold. We move into a small room where a game show is playing on the television. Loud cheers punctuate the silence. Will David know we are here? my wife asks.
I think of the worst that could happen. I must. I must prepare for it. I imagine the death of the baby, the death of my daughter. I see the three of us departing the hospital alone, leaving my daughter behind. It will be sunny and bright and we will have to blink many times and squint in order to see anything. It will be the first day without her and it will be unbearable. I must try to know this pain before it comes to fell me.
When my daughter was two, maybe younger, when we still lived in Korea, she once grew feverish and ill. For days, she lay without moving, breathing heavily while two red circles appeared brightly on her cheeks. When she was awake, she stared at us unknowingly while we put cold cloths on her forehead and gave her medicine to drink, never complaining about its bitter taste. My wife lay beside her and sang to her, littlesongs about rabbits and frogs and twinkling stars. We took her to the hospital, but they could not tell us what was wrong. They tried one test after another, put needles and tubes into her tiny hands and arms, and still the fever continued.
People started gathering around as though they knew a funeral was about to happen, like vultures circling a fallen comrade. At first I promised
