The Tiny Caps I Knit for the Nursery
They were calm about it, the way good people are when they are not calm. They said the baby needed to come out, and that she needed to come out in a place that could take care of a baby that small. They had an ambulance take Jenna to the children’s hospital in Wichita, with Caleb following in the pickup.
Gene and I drove down behind them in the dark, on the highway, with the radio off. Neither of us said anything for twenty miles. Then Gene said, “She’s going to be all right, Marcie,” and I said I knew, and we both pretended the other one believed it.
Josie was born at four in the morning on the thirtieth of August. She weighed two pounds, eleven ounces. She was the length of my hand and forearm.
Her skin was nearly see-through. Her fingers were the width of a matchstick. There was a little tube taped to her face and a wire on her foot and another on her chest, and a machine that breathed beside her.
But she was a whole person. She had her father’s chin and her mother’s eyebrows, and when a nurse touched her foot she pulled it away, annoyed, exactly the way Jenna did at that age.
The hospital in Wichita put a cap on her. It was a knit one, purple and white, with a little stripe, probably made by some volunteer at some church in some town. I studied that cap the way a farmer studies another man’s wheat. The tension was a bit loose, I thought, and the brim a bit tight. I am not proud of that. But a knitter is a knitter.
I never imagined, in that hospital or any other, that I would be looking at one of my own.
We spent five weeks on that highway. Gene drove most days, because my knee does not like the pedals for forty minutes each way, but we took turns. I carried a thermos of coffee in the cup holder and a tin of Lorraine Dietz’s lemon bars on my lap.
Lorraine is in my circle at church. She is seventy-one, and every Friday she handed us one tin of lemon bars for the road and a second tin for the nurses, without being asked.
We learned a new language that month. A baby that small does not grow the way a baby does inside you. She grows in grams, in the number on a scale that they write on a whiteboard each morning. I came to love that whiteboard. I would read it through the window before I read anything else.
We learned what the alarms mean, and which ones to ignore. We learned to scrub our hands at the sink for the full thirty seconds, to the elbow, with the water as hot as we could stand it.
We learned how to stand very still. This is the thing nobody tells you. The best thing you can do for a baby that small is touch her gently and say nothing. I put my hand on her back through the side of the box, and my hand covered the whole back, from shoulders to bottom, and I held it there while she slept.