The Forty Redbuds Along His Road

I also know Dustin. He sat on his grandmother’s porch every Sunday of his life after his daddy died.

When I told him June had called, he put his face in his hands, and he said, “I can’t do that to her, Bri. I can’t be the one who does that to her.”

So we didn’t. We did not call anybody. We did not post anything.

We let it sit, because there was a two-pound baby on the third floor, and he was the only thing either of us had room for.

I went back to the NICU, and I stayed there. And I am going to tell you about the NICU for a minute, because it matters to the rest of this, and because those forty days were the hardest and the holiest days of my life.

Megan worked days, mostly. She was a few years older than me, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a voice like somebody’s favorite aunt.

She was the one who taught me to read his monitor without staring at it.

Kayla worked nights. She was barely older than I was, a farm girl from up by Buffalo, and she talked to every baby on her assignment like they were grown men.

“All right, Mister Kolb,” she would say to Beau. “Let’s not have any drama tonight.”

The first time they let me hold him skin to skin was day nine. Megan did it.

She lifted him out with all his wires and his tube and laid him on my bare chest, under my shirt, and tucked a warm blanket over both of us.

He was so light I could not feel his weight at all. I could only feel his warmth, and his heart going fast against mine like a little bird.

Megan stood there with her hand on the monitor and watched his numbers come up and settle while I held him.

“See that?” she said quietly. “He knows you. His heart rate just came down. He knows exactly who you are.”

I do not have words for what that did to me. I sat there an hour and did not move, and when my leg went numb I still did not move.

Megan brought me a cup of ice water and a straw and held it for me so I would not have to let go.

Kayla knitted him a hat. She did it on her breaks over three nights, out of soft mustard-gold yarn, and it was about the size of a teacup.

She brought it in folded in a sandwich bag and said she had made it too big on purpose so he would have something to grow into.

Dustin came up every night. He would come in still smelling like the truck, wash up, and sit with Beau on his chest for as long as they would let him.

Sometimes he fell asleep in that recliner, and the night nurses let him.

He never once said Wayne’s name in that room. Not one time in forty days.

When I asked him why, he said that room was for Beau, and he was not going to carry anything in there that did not belong to Beau.