Kalila (19 page)

A lovely little house, the heart monitor lady says, as they step into the porch, down my lovely little stairs, and into cold March sunshine.

The house is golden with late-afternoon light when I make my way back to Kalila's room. I pass my untouched scones. The drying homemade jam. The cradle, abandoned in a dusty sunbeam, Kalila sucking on her tongue. Tsk tsk tsk. Her palms are flat open, one lying upon the other, as if interrupted in a hand game. Her eyes follow me. She has a tiny double chin. I look at the bones in Kalila's hands, hands stained brown and blue from intravenous lines.
Twenty-three days. Twenty-three days I've had with you. Just fourteen more
.

A discordant scale slides backward, forward, backward. My breaths come through a gaping hole. How will we suction the baby without the machine? How will we know if, during the night, Kalila slips into a bradycardia, suffers cardiac arrest? Kalila stares at me, one hand curls into a fist. The fist slides to her mouth. Tsk. Tsk. I'm slapped with sudden knowledge. The baby's hungry. I'm thirty-four minutes late with feeding. What kind of mother doesn't feed her child? An unmother. That's who. My hands shake as I secure the tube, pinch the tag that slows the feeding to a slow drip, pour 4 cc of Prosobee into the test tube attached to Kalila's stomach tube.

Kalila, I cleaned the house for you
.

I cleaned too well
.

I grope for the child who expels a little breath of air. Haaa.

We work out a system after Brodie phones Upjohn for the seventh time. We'll lose the night nurse but keep the equipment. I stop walking Skipper altogether. I clean tubes, scrub floors, bake bread, tell Kalila stories. Damn every-fuckingbody. We will not give in.

BEEE-BEEEE-BEEE. You are on your feet and running before either of you is awake. A red light blinks in the semidarkness where Kalila thrashes. 96-94-92 reads the heart monitor printout. Turn her over! Shake her! Brodie! Flex her arms! 84-82-80. For God's sake! 77-74. Press on her ribcage!

You stand in grey predawn. The clock reads 4:04 a.m.

Kalila, colour restored, breathes the quick breaths of a baby.

You replace the oxygen tent around her crib, ensuring the plastic is tucked within the bumper.

In bed, not touching, you listen to the dawn: dog bark, birdsong, repeated squeal of tires in the street.

For three days the baby gags, coughs phlegm, croons thickly in her throat.

It's because her lungs are congested, the cardiologist says over the phone. Bring her in at month's end.

Domestic rituals abandoned, I turn to the Yellow Pages. Phone a new cardiologist. Beg an appointment. Turn on the radio. The days are getting longer, the announcer says. I cannot take longer days.

Brodie takes the afternoon off school. The new cardiologist, Dr. Rosewood, thin, blue sweater, no static cling, no doctor's coat, examines Kalila with long fine fingers, examines her as if the only thing in the world is this small dusky baby. At her touch, Kalila stills. After some time, the doctor sets her stethoscope aside, regards us, stuck together like glue.

What
is a baby this blue doing out of the hospital?

We stare at the floor, two misbehaving school kids, caught in the act.

This babe needs heart surgery. Dr. Rosewood sits down on her stool. She contemplates us. Now.

There is an ordinariness about Dr. Rosewood. Her face is frank, not moral, not sealed up. Look at her. A doctor who sees possibility, who dares to see the whole.

I fall in love with Dr. Rosewood then and there. It is a fierce and angry love: in love with her skinniness, her saggy sweater, her pale and freckled face. Her sharp insistence.

Brodie looks like he's caught hold of something he didn't know he'd lost.

In this way, it is settled. No fanfare. We relinquish Kalila back into the glare of lights, this time to the Children's Hospital. March 30. The child is five months, twenty-four days old.

No worries, the doctor says. She's not a newborn. Go home. Get some rest.

The glass house cradled the princess as an oyster cradles a pearl. Then one day her glass walls shifted, and the princess knew the caress of wind, the wheeling touch of sun, the melody of rain.

This little princess tasted hope, salty on her tongue.

Day four. Go home and pack a suitcase. The nurses' strike is on. Only one hospital in the province performing heart surgery.

Everything happens at once. Snatching up scattered clothes, the goodbye kisses, suppressed excitement, the taxi ride to the airport. Kalila loaded on the little plane.

Bucking headwinds, the draughty airplane arrows north. Sun in my eyes, squashed against a frozen window, I stare down at patchwork quilts of white, mouse-brown, glacier-blue, snagged through by frozen tinsel. Kalila's isolette takes up most of the space behind the pilot. The hospital staff hovers, backs to me. We speed through the sky toward icy Edmonton.

An ambulance screams onto the runway as we bump down, doors flung ajar, the baby, then I, deposited inside. Doors barely closed, it skids off in a flash of lights and wailing sirens.

Cut the melodrama! What's the fuss? It's no big deal. A routine operation. I don't want my baby a star. I just want life to reconvene. But the ambulance driver is a lunatic, careening corners, whizzing red lights. Watch me! Watch me! And thanks to Mr. Friggin' Action, the people of Edmonton do. They stand on street corners and stare at two lives streaking past. Kalila wheezewheezewheezing on the ride.

An orderly waits as the ambulance screeches to a halt. He wheels her through the doors. The baby disappears. I leap out in pursuit, suitcase banging my legs. The wards are in disarray. Patients mixed up in every unit. Beds stuck in any bit of space. The hospital staff ignores me. Sorry, god knows where a baby might have gone.

I locate her finally on the seventh floor in a wing of seven patients. With the exception of Kalila, all are adult. The doughy man beside Kalila's isolette tried to kill himself last night. Nurses run bleating in all directions, annoyed at inconsiderate Donald, whose six-foot-four frame hangs off the bed like his knee joints and elbows belong to someone else.

Come on, Donald.

Turn over, Donald.

You're a big man, Donald, feed yourself.

Sit up, Donald.

Donald, for Pete's sake, lift your arms.

Donald's placid body doesn't want to cooperate. The nurses prod him, shove him, roll him over, roll their eyes, force down his medication. Donald squeezes his eyes tight against the stares.

I plunk my suitcase down beside Kalila's isolette. It and the end of Donald's bed are lightly touching. I discreetly push her the last few centimetres toward the wall. Is this grab for death catching? I eye Donald's muddled sheets.
Park at your own risk
.

I locate a washroom, throw up. The frigging ambulance driver's fault. When I return, the nurse says, Oopsie-daisy! Honey, please wait in the hall.

What for?

Your baby. We have to suction her. This nurse with a rubber band around her ponytail lowers her voice clandestinely. It's not pretty to watch.

The prim young woman disappears into the chaos. I stand in the hall until the light turns grey. I haven't been punished so since elementary school. Home lies like a book abandoned, three hundred kilometres away. Brodie on a kitchen chair in the dim light, grading physics papers, back bent in a hopeful question mark.