The Nursery I Moved Into Her Room
The Room With the Lock
We came up the gravel lane a little after four, and I had the discharge folder on my knees like it was made of glass. Ava was four pounds and three ounces in a car seat that swallowed her whole. Cody drove the last quarter mile at a crawl so the ruts would not jostle her. I watched her chest the whole way, the little cannula taped to her cheeks, the way they taught me to watch it in the unit.
Thirty one days I had waited to bring her up that lane. I had pictured the turn into the yard so many nights in the hospital chair that the real thing felt like a dream I had already had.
Cody carried the car seat. I carried the diaper bag, the folder, and the small portable oxygen tank in its black sling. The big machine, the concentrator, was still in the trunk. We would need both hands for that one.
The farmhouse was my mother’s. It had been my grandfather’s before her. Cody and I had moved into the back two rooms the winter I got pregnant, after the plant cut his hours and we could not make the rent in town. Mama said family does not charge family, and I believed her, and I was grateful.
I went straight down the hall to the nursery. I had the door half open in my head before I ever touched it, the gray walls, the white crib, the lamb I had stenciled over the changing table.
The door would not give. Something was behind it.
I pushed harder and it opened a foot and stopped against a weight bench. My brother Jesse’s weight bench, with a towel thrown over the bar.
His clothes were on the floor in a laundry basket. His truck magazines were stacked on the changing table where the wipes should have been. The crib was gone. In its place was Jesse’s full-size mattress, no sheet, and his work boots at the foot of it.
I stood there with the oxygen sling cutting into my shoulder and I could not make the room be what it was.
Mama came up behind me in the hall, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She had her reading glasses pushed up in her hair.
“Now, Heather,” she said. “Before you get started.”