The Nursery I Moved Into Her Room

The Humming Machine

You do not sleep much with a preemie on oxygen. I want that on the record so nobody pictures this as some cozy thing.

The oximeter alarmed four times that first night in Mama’s room. Three of them were false, the clip slipping on her tiny foot, but you do not get to know it is false until you are already across the room with your heart going. The fourth one was real. Her number slid to the low eighties and I picked her up and rubbed her back the way Deborah showed me and said her name until she pinked up and the number climbed.

Every three hours I fed her. She took an ounce and a half of the special formula through the tiniest nipple they make, and it took her forty minutes to do it because sucking and breathing at the same time was still work for her. I burped her sitting up so she would not spit back and choke. I changed a diaper the size of a dollar bill. Then I had maybe an hour before it started again.

Cody took the dawn feeding when he got home from the plant, so I could get a stretch of sleep. He would come in smelling of the cold and the line, wash his hands twice at the kitchen sink the way the unit taught us, and sit in the dark with her against his chest, this big quiet man and this four pound girl, and I would hear him through the wall telling her about his night like she was a buddy on the crew.

The concentrator ran the whole time, that even hum, day and night. You stop hearing it after a while. What you never stop hearing is the quiet when the alarm is about to go.

I kept a log on a steno pad, the way they had me do in the unit. Feeding times, ounces, the oxygen number, her weight every morning on the little kitchen scale with a folded towel on it. Four pounds six. Four pounds nine. Four pounds twelve. She was climbing. Every ounce was Deborah’s voice in my head.

The home health nurse came Tuesdays and Fridays those first two weeks, a young woman out of the county office named Kim who drove a little hatchback up our lane and knew more than her age let on. She weighed Ava on a real scale, listened to her chest, checked the flow on the concentrator and the tape behind her ears, and signed a sheet. She told me I was doing everything right, and on the days I was sure I was failing, that sentence from a woman with a stethoscope was the only thing that held me up.

I kept the portable tanks lined up by the back door, two silver ones the size of a thermos, in case the power went out and the concentrator quit. Winter storms take the power on this ridge two or three times a year. I had figured out that the two tanks together would run her near eight hours, long enough to get to Harrison if the roads were bad. You learn to think like that. You learn to count hours of air the way other people count gas in the tank.

Mama slept in the nursery, in Jesse’s bed, because Jesse had moved his mattress back out to make room for her when he saw how it was. She did not thank me for the arrangement and I did not expect her to. We passed in the kitchen those first days like two women who worked different shifts at the same plant, polite, tired, careful.