Always before it had been of no consequence: someone else’s intensive care. It had meant nothing to her in her normal life that, all day and all night, through waxing and waning moons and in every season, a child balanced on the eggshell edge of life, and someone else simply waited. Someone else bit the skin around her fingernails. Someone else left lipstick lips on coffee cups and marked waiting-room magazines with sweat stains of worry. Someone else. Not her.
Now she watched the nurses and doctors through the soundproof glass as they worked on her son: a frail, jumpy, hairy creature, like the newborn monkey she’d once seen in a zoo nursery. Her son: without even a middle name yet, his head the size of a ripe orange, naked skin and bones, viable plasma, miraculously alive. The forces of Good, dressed in blinding white, monitored and measured him, attached wires and tubes to him and through him at his nose, his lungs, his stomach, his feet, and mystical points in between. He was their science-fair exhibit.
