Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  A nurse steps into the room with Max at her heels. “Look,” he says, handing me a photo of our son. It looks as if it were snapped while he was asleep in a bassinet. His hands are curled on either side of his head. His chin has a tiny dimple.

  Beneath the photo are a handprint and a footprint, too tiny to look real.

  “Mrs. Baxter,” she says softly, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Why are you whispering?” I ask. “Why are you all whispering? Where the hell is my baby?”

  As if I have summoned him, a second nurse enters, carrying my son. He is dressed now, in clothes that are swimming on him. I reach for him.

  For a single day, I worked in an NICU unit. I was playing guitar with the preemies, and singing to them, as part of developmental care—babies who are exposed to music therapy show increased oxygen saturation and decreased heart rate, and some studies have even shown preemies doubling their daily weight gain when music therapy is part of their routine. I’d been working with one mother, singing a lullaby in Spanish to her baby, when a social worker came in and asked for my help.

  “The Rodriguez baby died this morning,” she told me. “The family’s waiting for their favorite nurse to come in and do the last bath.”

  “The last bath?”

  “It helps, sometimes,” the social worker said. “The thing is, it’s a big family, and I think they could use a hand in there.”

  When I walked into the private room where the family was waiting, I understood why. The mother was sitting in a rocking chair with the dead infant in her arms. Her face looked as if it had been carved from stone. The father was hovering behind her. There were aunts and uncles and grandparents milling in silence, a direct counterpoint to the nieces and nephews, who were shrieking and chasing each other around the hospital bed.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Zoe. Would it be all right if I played?” I gestured at the guitar hanging by its strap across my back.

  When the mother didn’t answer, I knelt down in front of the chair. “Your daughter was beautiful,” I said.

  She didn’t answer, nor did anyone else, so I pulled my guitar around and began to sing—the same Spanish lullaby I’d been singing minutes before:

  Duérmete, mi niña

  Duérmete, mi sol

  Duérmete, pedazo

  De mi corazón.

  For a moment, the kids who were running in circles paused. The adults in the room stared at me. I became the focal point, the center of all their energy, instead of that poor infant. As soon as the nurse arrived and undressed the baby for its last bath, I slipped out of the room and went to the administrative offices of the hospital and quit.

  I had played at the bedsides of children who were dying dozens of times; I had always considered it a privilege to swing them from this world into the next with a string of notes, a sweet refrain. But this had been different. I just couldn’t play Orpheus for a dead baby, not when Max and I were trying so hard to get pregnant.

  My own son is cold to the touch. I lay him down between my legs on the hospital mattress and unsnap the blue pajamas in which some kind nurse has dressed him. I cover his torso with my hand, but there’s no heartbeat.

  Duérmete, mi niño, I whisper.

  “Would you like to keep him here for a while?” asks the nurse who was carrying him.

  I look up at her. “I can do that?”

  “You can keep him as long as you like,” she says. “Well . . .” She doesn’t finish the rest of the thought.

  “Where does he stay?” I say.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “When he’s not here. Where does he stay?” I look at the nurse. “In the morgue?”

  “No. He stays with us.”

  She’s lying to me. I know she’s lying. If he had been in a bassinet with the other babies, his skin wouldn’t have a chill to it, like an autumn morning. “I want to see.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t—”

  “Do it.” My mother’s voice crackles with authority. “If that’s what she needs to see, let her.”

  The two nurses look at each other. Then one of them steps outside and brings in a wheelchair. They help me swing my legs off the bed and sit down. The whole time I am holding the baby.

  Max wheels me down the hallway. Behind one door I hear the grunt of a woman in labor. He pushes me a little faster.

  “Mrs. Baxter would like to see where her son has been,” the nurse says to a colleague behind the desk, as if this is the kind of request she fields daily. She leads me past the nurses’ station to a row of shelving units stuffed with plastic-wrapped tubing and stacks of swaddling blankets and diapers. Beside it is a small, stainless steel refrigerator, the kind I used to have in my dorm room at college.

  The nurse opens up the refrigerator. I don’t understand at first, and then when I look inside and see the empty white walls and the single rack, I do.

  I grab the baby closer, but he is so small that it’s hard to feel as if I’ve got him soundly. I might as well be holding a bag of feathers, a breath, a wish. I stand up without a plan in my head—just knowing that I cannot look at that refrigerator anymore—and suddenly I cannot breathe, and the world is spinning, and my chest is being crushed in a vise. All I can think, before I fall to the ground, is that I won’t drop my son. That a good mother wouldn’t let go.

  “What you’re saying,” I tell Dr. Gelman, my OB, “is that I’m a ticking time bomb.”

  After I fainted, was revived, and told the doctors my symptoms, I was put on heparin. A spiral CT scan showed a blood clot that had traveled to my lung—a pulmonary embolism. Now, my doctor’s told me that my blood tests showed a clotting disorder. That this could happen again and again.

  “Not necessarily. Now that we know you’ve got AT III, we can put you on Coumadin. It’s treatable, Zoe.”

  I am a little afraid to move, certain that I will jar the clot and send it right to my brain and have an aneurysm. Dr. Gelman assures me that the shots of heparin I’ve had will keep that from happening.

  There’s a part of me, the part that feels like I’ve swallowed a stone, that is disappointed.

  “How come you didn’t test for it before?” Max asks. “You tested for everything else.”

  Dr. Gelman turns to him. “Antithrombin three deficiency isn’t pregnancy-related. It’s something you’re born with, and this thrombophilia tends to show up in younger people. We often can’t diagnose a clotting disorder until someone’s aggravated it. A broken leg can do that. Or, in Zoe’s case, labor and delivery.”

  “It’s not pregnancy-related,” I repeat, grabbing on to that statement with all my might. “So technically I could still have a baby?”

  The obstetrician hesitates. “The two conditions are not mutually exclusive,” she says, “but why don’t we talk about this in a few weeks?”

  We both turn at the sound of the door closing behind Max, who’s left the room.

  When I am discharged from the hospital, I am wheeled to the bank of elevators by an orderly, with Max carrying my overnight bag. I notice something I didn’t notice during the two days I’ve been there—a single buttercup in a little glass vase that is suctioned to my hospital room door. My room is the only one in the hallway that has a vase. I realize this is some kind of sign, a cue for the phlebotomists and the residents and the candy stripers entering the room that this is not a zone of happiness, that, unlike in every other new mother’s room, here something terrible has happened.

  As we are waiting for the doors to open, another woman is wheeled up beside me. She has a newborn in her arms, and attached to the arm of her wheelchair is a CONGRATULATIONS balloon. Her husband follows, his arms full of flowers. “Is that Daddy?” the woman coos, as the baby stirs. “Are you waving?”

  A bell dings, and the elevator doors open. It is empty, plenty of room for two. The woman is wheeled inside first, and then my orderly begins to pivot the wheelchair, so that I can be wheeled in beside her.

  Max, howeve