“What do you want to know?”
“She … she has cystic fibrosis?”
“Yes.”
Miriam swallowed. “She didn’t tell me. I kept asking what was wrong, but she got so mad at me.”
Dayana gave a grudging chuckle. Or maybe a snort. “She wouldn’t have told you she was pregnant if it wasn’t too far along to hide. That girl’s got more guts than sense.”
Miriam’s response came out half laugh, half sob. “Your daughter’s amazing, Mrs.… Ms.…”
“Just call me Dayana.”
“Dayana.”
“Thank you,” said Dicey’s mother in a low voice. “I should’ve bought her a plane ticket, but it wasn’t an emergency then. I figured maybe she was a little safer traveling with you. At least, I felt better knowing she had a mother in the car.”
The word broke her. Miriam sat down hard on a scrolled iron porch chair, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. She concentrated on her breathing until she had control of her voice again. “So what happened to her?”
“She’s got pneumonia.” The words were flat with exhaustion. “It happens, you know, with CF. She’s on antibiotics all the time. A month on this one, a month on that one. But sometimes it’s not enough. This is one of those times. It comes on sudden.”
Not your fault, Dayana was trying to say, but it didn’t feel that way to Miriam. She sat in front of the quiet duplex, the weight of her decisions settling around her. “I should have put my foot down,” she whispered. “I wanted to take her to a quick care clinic, but I let her win.”
“CF’s a strange beast. You don’t want to talk to just any doctor. She needed to get home, to where—”
A sudden commotion: a jumble of voices; white noise, then muffled, as if Dayana had suddenly forgotten the phone in her hand and shoved it in her pocket.
“Dayana?”
More noise. Then Dayana spoke again, hurriedly. “Dicey and the baby are in distress. We’re going for an emergency C-section. UNM medical center. Text when you get here.” The connection went dead.
Miriam laid her phone on her leg and clenched her fists to stop the trembling.
How long she sat there, she didn’t know. When the door opened, she looked up to see her mother. “Did you find her?”
She nodded.
“What did you find out?”
“Pneumonia,” Miriam said. Her voice did not sound like her own. “She and the baby are in distress. They’re delivering now.”
“How far along is she?”
“Thirty-three weeks,” Miriam said, and raised a shoulder. “And some change.”
Her mother tsked, then sat down beside her.
Slowly, deliberately, Miriam flipped the phone to “silent” and laid it face down on her knee. Dicey had her mother. Miriam’s place was here, with hers.
For a long moment, both women sat silently. Then Sallie exhaled heavily. “Go on,” she said. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
Miriam met her mother’s eyes, acknowledging something she’d never recognized before: the quiet undercurrent of devotion, imperfectly expressed but always present. Love meant letting go, that look said. Trusting that eventually, however long it took, the beloved would return.
She stood to embrace her mother. “I love you,” she whispered, and ran for her keys.
43
WHEN MIRIAM FOUND HER way to the ICU, she had to wait outside the mag-locked doors for Dayana to let her in. Dicey’s mother was an imposing woman, tall, with skin darker than Dicey’s and long braids wound tight on the crown of her head. She led Miriam to a sink to wash her hands. The sign above it admonished her to scrub for two minutes, and Miriam didn’t dare short it—not with Dayana staring her down. Miriam knew a mama bear when she saw one. When Miriam finished, Dayana handed her a surgical mask. The precautions made it clear just how serious Dicey’s condition was.
She followed Dayana to Dicey’s room but stopped short on the threshold. Dicey lay with her eyes closed, her skin so pale, Miriam barely recognized her. Her face was obscured by a mask attached to a tube, and an obnoxious treble hiss flexed and waned in time with Dicey’s breathing. Something clipped to her forefinger glowed red. Miriam couldn’t identify all the wires and tubes coming off her chest, the back of her forearm, and even out of her neck. The room was a bewildering cacophony of blips, beeps, and hisses.
Dayana beckoned. “Come on in. I know it can be overwhelming.”
Miriam tiptoed forward, her breathing shallow and hasty. “What is all of this?”
Dayana gestured. “Antibiotics here, fluids here. This line”—she pointed at the monitor—“tracks her heart rate. And this one is the blood oxygen saturation. It’s too low.”
Miriam squinted at the number at the end of the curving line. “Ninety-two percent doesn’t seem so bad.”
Dayana’s shoulder twitched. “It’s marginal. And she needs the BiPAP to keep it there. As she gets older, she loses more and more of her lung function.” Dayana’s voice was steady, and Miriam couldn’t see enough of her face to tell whether she was as calm as she sounded. Surely she wasn’t. “Baby Girl’s heart rate was falling,” she continued. “If Momma doesn’t have enough oxygen, the baby doesn’t, either. They did a C-section.”
“And maybe it’ll be better for Dicey, now that she’s not breathing for two?”
“Maybe.” Dayana rested her hand on her daughter’s, apparently oblivious to the wires. “Nothing to do but wait and see. It’s always a crapshoot.”
Miriam stared at the mound of braids. Always, Dayana said, as if this were only the latest in a long line of ICU stays. Miriam leaned against the counter. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “If I’d known … if I’d known what she was risking. I tried to get her to go to the doctor, but—”
Dayana’s eyes flashed. “Just stop,” she said. “I know you mean well, but after everything she’s been through the last few days, traveling with you …”
Miriam shrank from the justice of the half-spoken accusation,
