The Nursery I Moved Into Her Room
What Mama Saw
The thing about putting the baby in my mother’s room is that my mother could not stop seeing her.
She was in and out of that room all day for her own things, her housecoat, her Bible, her pill case off the dresser. And every time she came in, there was Ava in the bassinet with the tube on her face and the machine humming in the corner and the red clip glowing on her foot.
I watched my mother start to watch my daughter.
The third afternoon I came back from the kitchen and Mama was standing over the bassinet with her glasses down on her nose, just looking. She did not know I was in the doorway.
“She’s so little,” Mama said, not to me, to herself or to the baby. “Lord, she’s so little.”
“She’s grown nine ounces since Thursday,” I said.
Mama startled, then recovered. “That tube stays in her nose all night?”
“All night. All day. Until she grows into her lungs.”
“And that number.” She pointed at the oximeter screen. “That’s got to stay up.”
“Above ninety. If it drops and stays down, I pick her up. If I can’t bring it up, we call the ambulance and go back to Harrison.”
My mother was quiet a long minute. Then she said, “I didn’t know it was like this.” And she went out with her pill case and did not say anything else, but I had heard it. I had heard the door in her open a crack.
The sixth night was the bad one. Ava spit up during her two a.m. feeding and went blue around the lips, really blue, and her number crashed into the seventies and the alarm screamed. I had her up and over my arm and was thumping her back and clearing her mouth and saying her name loud, and I was one more bad second from the phone when she coughed and wailed and pinked up and the number ran back up to ninety four.
I was shaking. I sat down on the edge of my mother’s bed with my daughter screaming healthy and furious against my chest, and I looked up and Mama was in the doorway in her housecoat with her hand over her mouth.
She had heard the alarm from the nursery and come running. She stood there in the hall light and she had tears standing in her eyes, and she said, “Is she, is she all right, Heather, tell me she’s all right.”
“She’s all right,” I said. “She’s mad, which is good. Mad means she’s breathing.”
Mama came and sat down on the bed beside me, close, the way she had not sat by me since I was a girl, and she put one hand on the baby’s back next to mine and we just sat there in the hum of the machine until Ava cried herself out.