Here is the reason why the doctors took Nonny’s baby away:
Think of your heart like a house. Two rooms on the bottom floor, two rooms on the top.
Nonny’s baby has a hole in her house. A hole between the rooms on the top floor.
That is called an atrial septal defect.
And the doctors told us they had to open her up. Patch up the holey wall in her heart.
The next morning we were in Nonny’s hospital room, waiting, frozen silent like the TV nobody had thought to turn on. Dad stood against the wall. We’d offered him a chair a long time ago but he’d refused. Couldn’t sit down, he said. Mom sat by the window, looking at her hands. Thomas arrived about three minutes before they took the baby away. He was lying next to Nonny in the bed, one arm around her shoulder and one across her chest like he was a seat belt and Captain America’s shield rolled into one. Nobody had moved in a while.
I thought that when we got home I would take down my posters of the muscular system and the Milky Way. Muscles got tears and holes. Stars hadn’t heard my wishes. I’d tried to be a defender and my defenses had failed. I had failed. I couldn’t do enough.
It had been one hour since they’d taken the baby away.
Ten minutes ago, a nurse told us they’d started surgery.
Sometimes you don’t need an X-ray or stethoscope to see a hole in a wall. Sometimes it’s right there in front of you, gaping. Sometimes you look at people in a room with you, and it’s not only a hole in a wall, but a sunken roof, a shattered window, crumbling bricks, and a foundation with a crack right down the middle.
We will both have scars along our ribs, the baby and me. We will both have patched-up hearts.
When I was thinking of things I wanted Nonny’s baby and me to have in common, this was not what I had in mind.