Another Marvelous Thing

On a cold, rainy morning in February, Billy Delielle stood by the window of her hospital room looking over Central Park. She was a week and a half from the time her baby was due to be born, and she had been put into the hospital because her blood pressure had suddenly gone up and her doctor wanted her constantly monitored and on bed rest.

A solitary jogger in bright red foul-weather gear ran slowly down the glistening path. The trees were black and the branches were bare. There was not another soul out. Billy had been in the hospital for five days. The first morning she had woken to the sound of squawking. Since her room was next door to the nursery, she assumed this was a sound some newborns made. The next day she got out of bed at dawn and saw that the meadow was full of sea gulls who congregated each morning before the sun came up.

The nursery was an enormous room painted soft yellow. When Billy went to take the one short walk a day allowed her,

she found herself averting her eyes from the neat rows of babies in their little plastic bins, but once in a while she found herself hungry for the sight of them. Taped to each crib was a blue (I’M A BOY) or pink (I’M A GIRL) card telling mother’s name, the time of birth, and birth weight.

At six in the morning the babies were taken to their mothers to be fed. Billy was impressed by the surprising range of noises they made: mewing, squawking, bleating, piping, and squealing. The fact that she was about to have one of these creatures herself filled her with a combination of bafflement, disbelief, and longing.

For the past two months her chief entertainment had been to lie in bed and observe her unborn child moving under her skin. It had knocked a paperback book off her stomach and caused the saucer of her coffee cup to jiggle and dance.

Billy’s husband, Grey, was by temperament and inclination a naturalist. Having a baby was right up his street. Books on neonatology and infant development replaced the astronomy and bird books on his night table. He gave up reading mysteries for texts on childbirth. One of these books had informed him that babies can hear in the womb, so each night he sang “Roll Along Kentucky Moon” directly into Billy’s stomach. Another suggested that the educational process could begin before birth. Grey thought he might try to teach the unborn to count.

“Why stop there?” Billy said. “Teach it fractions.”

Billy had a horror of the sentimental. In secret, for she would rather have died than showed it, the thought of her own baby brought her to tears. Her dreams were full of infants. Babies appeared everywhere. The buses abounded with pregnant women. The whole process seemed to her one half miraculous and the other half preposterous. She looked around her on a crowded street and said to herself: “Every single one of these people was born.”

Her oldest friend, Penny Stern, said to her: “We all hope that this pregnancy will force you to wear maternity clothes, because they will be so much nicer than what you usually wear.” Billy went shopping for maternity clothes but came home empty-handed.

She said, “I don’t wear puffed sleeves and frilly bibs and ribbons around my neck when I’m not pregnant, so I don’t see why I should have to just because I am pregnant.” In the end, she wore Grey’s sweaters, and she bought two shapeless skirts with elastic waistbands. Penny forced her to buy one nice black dress, which she wore to teach her weekly class in economic history at the business school.

Grey set about renovating a small spare room that had been used for storage. He scraped and polished the floor, built shelves, and painted the walls pale apple green with the ceiling and moldings glossy white. They had once called this room the lumber room. Now they referred to it as the nursery. On the top of one of the shelves Grey put his collection of glass-encased bird’s nests. He already had in mind a child who would go on nature hikes with him.

As for Billy, she grimly and without expression submitted herself to the number of advances science had come up with in the field of obstetrics.

It was possible to have amniotic fluid withdrawn and analyzed to find out the genetic health of the unborn and, if you wanted to know, its sex. It was possible to lie on a table and with the aid of an ultrasonic scanner see your unborn child in the womb. It was also possible to have a photograph of this view. As for Grey, he wished Billy could have a sonogram every week, and he watched avidly while Billy’s doctor, a handsome, rather melancholy South African named Jordan Bell, identified a series of blobs and clouds as head, shoulders, and back.

Every month in Jordan Bell’s office Billy heard the sound of her own child’s heart through ultrasound and what she heard sounded like galloping horses in the distance.

Billy went about her business outwardly unflapped. She continued to teach and she worked on her dissertation. In between, when she was not napping, she made lists of baby things: crib sheets, a stroller, baby T-shirts, diapers, blankets. Two months before the baby was due, she and Penny went out and bought what was needed. She was glad she had not saved this until the last minute, because in her ninth month, after an uneventful pregnancy, she was put in the hospital, where she was allowed to walk down the hall once a day. The sense of isolation she had cherished—just herself, Grey, and their unborn child—was gone. She was in the hands of nurses she had never seen before, and she found herself desperate for their companionship because she was exhausted, uncertain, and lonely in her hospital room.

Billy was admitted wearing the nice black dress Penny had made her buy and taken to a private room that overlooked the park. At the bottom of her bed were two towels and a hospital gown that tied up the back. Getting undressed to go to bed in the afternoon made her feel like a child forced to take a nap. She did not put on the hospital gown. Instead, she put on the plaid flannel nightshirt of Grey’s that she had packed in her bag weeks ago in case she went into labor in the middle of the night.

“I hate it here already,” Billy said.

“It’s an awfully nice view,” Grey said. “If it were a little further along in the season I could bring my field glasses and see what’s nesting.”

“I’ll never get out of here,” Billy said.

“Not only will you get out of here,” said Grey, “you will be released a totally transformed woman. You heard Jordan—all babies get born one way or another.”

If Grey was frightened, he never showed it. Billy knew that his way of dealing with anxiety was to fix his concentration, and it was now fixed on her and on being cheerful. He had never seen Billy so upset before. He held her hand.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Jordan said this isn’t serious. It’s just a complication. The baby will be fine and you’ll be fine. Besides, it won’t know how to be a baby and we won’t know how to be parents.”

Grey had taken off his jacket and he felt a wet place where Billy had laid her cheek. He did not know how to comfort her.

“A mutual learning experience,” Billy said into his arm. “I thought nature was supposed to take over and do all this for us.”

“It will,” Grey said.

Seven o’clock began visiting hours. Even with the door closed Billy could hear shrieks and coos and laughter. With her door open she could hear champagne corks being popped.

Grey closed the door. “You didn’t eat much dinner,” he said. “Why don’t I go downstairs to the delicatessen and get you something?”

“I’m not hungry,” Billy said. She did not know what was in front of her, or how long she would be in this room, or how and when the baby would be born.

“I’ll call Penny and have her bring something,” Grey said.

“I already talked to her,” Billy said. “She and David are taking you out to dinner.” David was Penny’s husband, David Hooks.

“You’re trying to get rid of me,” Grey said.

“I’m not,” Billy said. “You’ve been here all day, practically. I just want the comfort of knowing that you’re being fed and looked after. I think you should go soon.”

“It’s too early,” said Grey. “Fathers don’t have to leave when visiting hours are over.”

“You’re not a father yet,” Billy said. “Go.”

After he left she waited by the window to watch him cross the street and wait for the bus. It was dark and cold and it had begun to sleet. When she saw him she felt pierced with desolation. He was wearing his old camel’s hair coat and the wind blew through his wavy hair. He stood back on his heels as he had as a boy. He turned around and scanned the building for her window. When he saw her, he waved and smiled. Billy waved back. A taxi, thinking it was being hailed, stopped. Grey got in and was driven off.

Every three hours a nurse appeared to take her temperature, blood pressure, and pulse. After Grey had gone, the night nurse appeared. She was a tall, middle-aged black woman named Mrs. Perch. In her hand she carried what looked like a suitcase full of dials and wires.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Mrs. Perch said. She had a soft West Indian accent. “It is only a portable fetal heart monitor. You get to say good morning and good evening to your baby.”

She squirted a blob of cold blue jelly on Billy’s stomach and pushed a transducer around in it, listening for the beat. At once Billy heard the sound of galloping hooves. Mrs. Perch timed the beats against her watch.

“Nice and healthy,” Mrs. Perch said.

“Which part of this baby is where?” Billy said.

“Well, his head is back here, and his back is there and here is the rump and his feet are near your ribs. Or hers, of course.”

“I wondered if that was a foot kicking,” Billy said.

“My second boy got his foot under my rib and kicked with all his might,” Mrs. Perch said.

Billy sat up in bed. She grabbed Mrs. Perch’s hand. “Is this baby going to be all right?” she said.

“Oh my, yes,” Mrs. Perch said. “You’re not a very interesting case. Many others much more complicated than you have done very well and you will, too.”

At four in the morning, another nurse appeared, a florid Englishwoman. Billy had spent a restless night, her heart pounding, her throat dry.

“Your pressure’s up, dear,” said the nurse, whose tag read “M. Whitely.” “Dr. Bell has written orders that if your pressure goes up you’re to have a shot of hydralazine. It doesn’t hurt baby—did he explain that to you?”

“Yes,” said Billy groggily.

“It may give you a little headache.”

“What else?”

“That’s all,” Miss Whitely said.

Billy fell asleep and woke with a pounding headache. When she rang the bell, the nurse who had admitted her appeared. Her name was Bonnie Near and she was Billy’s day nurse. She gave Billy a pill and then taped a tongue depressor wrapped in gauze over her bed.

“What’s that for?” Billy said.

“Don’t ask,” said Bonnie Near.

“I want to know.”

Bonnie Near sat down at the end of the bed. She was a few years older than Billy, trim and wiry with short hair and tiny diamond earrings.

“It’s hospital policy,” she said. “The hydralazine gives you a headache, right? You ring to get something to make it go away and because you have high blood pressure everyone assumes that the blood pressure caused it, not the drug. So this thing gets taped above your bed in the one chance in about fifty-five million that you have a convulsion.”

Billy turned her face away and stared out the window.

“Hey, hey,” said Bonnie Near. “None of this. I noticed yesterday that you’re quite a worrier. Are you like this when you’re not in the hospital? Listen. I’m a straight shooter and I would tell you if I was worried about you. I’m not. You’re just the common garden variety.”

Every morning Grey appeared with two cups of coffee and the morning paper. He sat in a chair and he and Billy read the paper together as they did at home.

“Is the house still standing?” Billy asked after several days. “Are the banks open? Did you bring the mail? I feel I’ve been here ten months instead of a week.”

“The mail was very boring,” Grey said. “Except for this booklet from the Wisconsin Loon Society. You’ll be happy to know that you can order a record called ‘Loon Music.’ Would you like a copy?”

“If I moved over,” Billy said, “would you take off your jacket and lie down next to me?”

Grey took off his jacket and shoes, and curled up next to Billy. He pressed his nose into her face and looked as if he could drift off to sleep in a second.

“Childworld called about the crib,” he said into her neck. “They want to know if we want white paint or natural pine. I said natural.”

“That’s what I think I ordered,” Billy said. “They let the husbands stay over in this place. They call them ‘dads.’”

“I’m not a dad yet, as you pointed out,” Grey said. “Maybe they’ll just let me take naps here.”

There was a knock on the door. Grey sprang to his feet and Jordan Bell appeared.

“Don’t look so nervous, Billy,” he said. “I have good news. I think we want to get this baby born if your pressure isn’t going to go down. I think we ought to induce you.”

Billy and Grey were silent.

“The way it works is that we put you on a drip of pitocin, which is a synthetic of the chemical your brain produces when you go into labor.”

“We know,” Billy said. “Katherine went over it in childbirth class.” Katherine Walden was Jordan Bell’s nurse. “When do you want to do this?”

“Tomorrow,” Jordan Bell said. “Katherine will come over and give you your last Lamaze class right here.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“It usually does,” said Jordan Bell. “And if it doesn’t, we do a second-day induction.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“It generally does. If it doesn’t, we do a cesarean, but you’ll be awake and Grey can hold your hand.”

“Oh what fun,” said Billy.

When Jordan Bell left, Billy burst into tears.

“Why isn’t anything normal?” she said. “Why do I have to lie here day after day listening to other people’s babies crying? Why is my body betraying me like this?”

Grey kissed her and then took her hands. “There is no such thing as normal,” he said. “Everyone we’ve talked to has some story or other—huge babies that won’t budge, thirty-hour labors. A cesarean is a perfectly respectable way of being born.”

“What about me? What about me getting all stuck up with tubes and cut up into little pieces?” Billy said, and she was instantly ashamed. “I hate being like this. I feel I’ve lost myself and some whimpering, whining person has taken me over.”

“Think about how in two months we’ll have a two-month-old baby to take to the park.”

“Do you really think everything is going to be all right?” Billy said.

“Yes,” said Grey. “I do. In six months we’ll be in Maine.”

Billy lay in bed with her door closed reading her brochure from the Loon Society. She thought about the cottage she and Grey rented every August in Jewell Neck, Maine, on a lagoon. There at night with blackness all around them and not a light to be seen, they heard hoot owls and loons calling their night cries to one another. Loon mothers carried their chicks on their back, Billy knew. The last time she had heard those cries she had been just three months pregnant. The next time she heard them she would have a child.

She thought about the baby shower Penny had given her—a lunch party for ten women. At the end of it, Billy and Grey’s unborn child had received cotton and wool blankets, little sweaters, tiny garments with feet, and two splendid Teddy bears. The Teddy bears had sat on the coffee table. Billy remembered the strange, light feeling in her chest as she looked at them. She had picked them both up and laughed with astonishment.

At a red light on the way home in a taxi, surrounded by boxes and bags of baby presents, she saw something that made her heart stop: Francis Clemens, who for two years had been Billy’s illicit lover.

With the exception of her family, Billy was close only to Grey and Penny Stern. She had never been the subject of anyone’s romantic passion. She and Grey, after all, had been fated to marry. She had loved him all her life.

Francis had pursued her: no one had ever pursued her before. The usual signs of romance were as unknown to Billy as the workings of a cyclotron. Crushes, she had felt, were for children. She did not really believe that adults had them.

Without her knowing it, she was incubating a number of curious romantic diseases. One day when Francis came to visit wearing his tweed coat and the ridiculously long paisley scarf he affected, she realized that she had fallen in love.

The fact of Francis was the most exotic thing that had ever happened in Billy’s fairly stolid, uneventful life. He was as brilliant as a painted bunting, He was also, in marked contrast to Billy, beautifully dressed. He did not know one tree from another. He felt all birds were either robins or crows. He was avowedly urban and his pleasures were urban. He loved opera, cocktail parties, and lunches. They did not agree about economic theory, either.

Nevertheless, they spent what now seemed to Billy an enormous amount of time together. She had not sought anything like this. If her own case had been presented to her she would have dismissed it as messy, unnecessary, and somewhat sordid, but when she fell in love she fell as if backward into a swimming pool. For a while she felt dazed. Then Francis became a fact in her life. But in the end she felt her life was being ruined.

She had not seen Francis for a long time. In that brief glance at the red light she saw his paisley scarf, its long fringes flapping in the breeze. It was amazing that someone who had been so close to her did not know that she was having a baby. As the cab pulled away, she did not look back at him. She stared rigidly frontward, flanked on either side by presents for her unborn child.

The baby kicked. Mothers-to-be should not be lying in hospital beds thinking about illicit love affairs, Billy thought. Of course, if you were like the other mothers on the maternity floor and probably had never had an illicit love affair, you would not be punished by lying in the hospital in the first place. You would go into labor like everyone else, and come rushing into Maternity Admitting with your husband and your suitcase. By this time tomorrow she would have her baby in her arms, just like everyone else, but she drifted off to sleep thinking of Francis nonetheless.

At six in the morning, Bonnie Near woke her.

“You can brush your teeth,” she said. “But don’t drink any water. And your therapist is here to see you, but don’t be long.”

The door opened and Penny walked in.

“And how are we today?” she said. “Any strange dreams or odd thoughts?”

“How did you get in here?” Billy said.

“I said I was your psychiatrist and that you were being induced today and so forth,” Penny said. “I just came to say good luck. Here’s all the change we had in the house. Tell Grey to call constantly. I’ll see you all tonight.”

Billy was taken to the labor floor and hooked up to a fetal heart monitor whose transducers were kept on her stomach by a large elastic cummerbund. A stylish-looking nurse wearing hospital greens, a string of pearls, and perfectly applied pink lipstick poked her head through the door.

“Hi!” she said in a bright voice. “I’m Joanne Kelly. You’re my patient today.” She had the kind of voice and smile Billy could not imagine anyone’s using in private. “Now, how are we? Fine? All right. Here’s what we’re going to do. First of all, we’re going to put this IV into your arm. It will only hurt a little and then we’re going to hook you up to something called pitocin. Has Dr. Bell explained any of this to you?” Joanne Kelly said.

“All,” said Billy.

“Neat,” Joanne Kelly said. “We like an informed patient. Put your arm out, please.”

Billy stuck out her arm. Joanne Kelly wrapped a rubber thong under her elbow.

“Nice veins,” she said. “You would have made a lovely junkie.

“Now we’re going to start the pitocin,” Joanne Kelly said. “We start off slow to see how you do. Then we escalate.” She looked Billy up and down. “Okay,” she said. “We’re off and running. Now, I’ve got a lady huffing and puffing in the next room so I have to go and coach her. I’ll be back real soon.”

Billy lay looking at the clock, or watching the pitocin and glucose drip into her arm. She could not get a comfortable position and the noise of the fetal heart monitor was loud and harsh. The machine itself spat out a continual line of data.

Jordan Bell appeared at the foot of her bed.

“An exciting day—yes, Billy?” he said. “What time is Grey coming?”

“I told him to sleep late,” Billy said. “All the nurses told me that this can take a long time. How am I supposed to feel when it starts working?”

“If all goes well, you’ll start to have contractions and then they’ll get stronger and then you’ll have your baby.”

“Just like that?” said Billy.

“Pretty much just like that.”

But by five o’clock in the afternoon nothing much had happened.

Grey sat in a chair next to the bed. From time to time he checked the data. He had been checking it all day.

“That contraction went right off the paper,” he said. “What did it feel like?”

“Intense,” Billy said. “It just doesn’t hurt.”

“You’re still in the early stages,” said Jordan Bell when he came to check her. “I’m willing to stay on if you want to continue, but the baby might not be born till tomorrow.”

“I’m beat,” said Billy.

“Here’s what we can do,” Jordan said. “We can keep going or we start again tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” said Billy.

She woke up exhausted with her head pounding. The sky was cloudy and the glare hurt her eyes. She was taken to a different labor room.

In the night her blood pressure had gone up. She had begged not to have a shot—she did not see how she could go into labor feeling so terrible, but the shot was given. It had been a long, sleepless night.

She lay alone with a towel covering one eye, trying to sleep, when a nurse appeared by her side. This one looked very young, had curly hair, and thick, slightly rose-tinted glasses. Her tag read “Eva Gottlieb.” Underneath she wore a button inscribed EVA: WE DELIVER.

“Hi,” said Eva Gottlieb. “I’m sorry I woke you, but I’m your nurse for the day and I have to get you started.”

“I’m here for a lobotomy,” Billy said. “What are you going to do to me?”

“I’m going to run a line in you,” Eva Gottlieb said. “And then I don’t know what. Because your blood pressure is high, I’m supposed to wait until Jordan gets here.” She looked at Billy carefully. “I know it’s scary,” she said. “But the worst that can happen is that you have to be sectioned and that’s not bad.”

Billy’s head throbbed.

“That’s easy for you to say,” she said. “I’m the section.”

Eva Gottlieb smiled. “I’m a terrific nurse,” she said. “I’ll stay with you.”

Tears sprang in Billy’s eyes. “Why will you?”

“Well, first of all, it’s my job,” said Eva. “And second of all, you look like a reasonable person.”

Billy looked at Eva carefully. She felt instant, total trust. Perhaps that was part of being in hospitals and having babies. Everyone you came in contact with came very close, very fast.

Billy’s eyes hurt. Eva was hooking her up to the fetal heart monitor. Her touch was strong and sure, and she seemed to know Billy did not want to be talked to. She flicked the machine on, and Billy heard the familiar sound of galloping hooves.

“Is there any way to turn it down?” Billy said.

“Sure,” said Eva. “But some people find it consoling.”

As the morning wore on, Billy’s blood pressure continued to rise. Eva was with her constantly.

“What are they going to do to me?” Billy asked.

“I think they’re probably going to give you magnesium sulfate to get your blood pressure down and then they’re going to section you. Jordan does a gorgeous job, believe me. I won’t let them do anything to you without explaining it first, and if you get out of bed first thing tomorrow and start moving around you’ll be fine.”

Twenty minutes later, a doctor Billy had never seen before administered a dose of magnesium sulfate.

“Can’t you do this?” Billy asked Eva.

“It’s heavy-duty stuff,” Eva said. “It has to be done by a doctor.”

“Can they wait until my husband gets here?”

“It’s too dangerous,” said Eva. “It has to be done. I’ll stay with you.”

The drug made her hot and flushed, and brought her blood pressure straight down. For the next hour, Billy tried to sleep. She had never been so tired. Eva brought her cracked ice to suck on and a cloth for her head. The baby wiggled and writhed, and the fetal heart monitor gauged its every move. Finally, Grey and Jordan Bell were standing at the foot of her bed.

“Okay, Billy,” said Jordan. “Today’s the day. We must get the baby out. I explained to Grey about the mag sulfate. We both agree that you must have a cesarean.”

“When?” Billy said.

“In the next hour,” said Jordan. “I have to check two patients and then we’re off to the races.”

“What do you think,” Billy asked Grey.

“It’s right,” Grey said.

“And what about you?” Billy said to Eva.

“It has to be done,” Eva said.

Jordan Bell was smiling a genuine smile and he looked dashing and happy.

“Why is he so uplifted?” Billy asked Eva after he had dashed down the hall.

“He loves the OR,” she said. “He loves deliveries. Think of it this way: you’re going to get your baby at last.”

Billy lay on a gurney, waiting to be rolled down the hall. Grey, wearing hospital scrubs, stood beside her holding her hand. She had been prepped and given an epidural anesthetic, and she could no longer feel her legs.

“Look at me,” she said to Grey. “I’m a mass of tubes. I’m a miracle of modern science.” She put his hand over her eyes.

Grey squatted down to put his head near hers. He looked expectant, exhausted, and worried, but when he saw her scanning his face he smiled.

“It’s going to be swell,” Grey said. “We’ll find out if it’s little William or little Ella.”

Billy’s heart was pounding but she thought she ought to say something to keep her side up. She said, “I knew we never should have had sexual intercourse.” Grey gripped her hand tight and smiled. Eva laughed. “Don’t you guys leave me,” Billy said.

Billy was wheeled down the hall by an orderly. Grey held one hand, Eva held the other. Then they left her to scrub.

She was taken to a large, pale green room. Paint was peeling on the ceiling in the corner. An enormous lamp hung over her head. The anesthetist appeared and tapped her feet.

“Can you feel this?” he said.

“It doesn’t feel like feeling,” Billy said. She was trying to keep her breathing steady.

“Excellent,” he said.

Then Jordan appeared at her feet, and Grey stood by her head.

Eva bent down. “I know you’ll hate this, but I have to tape your hands down, and I have to put this oxygen mask over your face. It comes off as soon as the baby’s born, and it’s good for you and the baby.”

Billy took a deep breath. The room was very hot. A screen was placed over her chest.

“It’s so you can’t see,” said Eva. “Here’s the mask. I know it’ll freak you out, but just breathe nice and easy. Believe me, this is going to be fast.”

Billy’s arms were taped, her legs were numb, and a clear plastic mask was placed over her nose and mouth. She was so frightened she wanted to cry out, but it was impossible. Instead she breathed as Katherine Walden had taught her to. Every time a wave of panic rose, she breathed it down. Grey held her hand. His face was blank and his glasses were fogged. His hair was covered by a green cap and his brow was wet. There was nothing she could do for him, except squeeze his hand.

“Now, Billy,” said Jordan Bell, “you’ll feel something cold on your stomach. I’m painting you with Betadine. All right, here we go.”

Billy felt something like dull tugging. She heard the sound of foamy water. Then she felt the baby being slipped from her. She turned to Grey. His glasses had unfogged and his eyes were round as quarters. She heard a high, angry scream.

“Here’s your baby,” said Jordan Bell. “It’s a beautiful, healthy boy.”

Eva lifted the mask off Billy’s face.

“He’s perfectly healthy,” Eva said. “Listen to those lungs.” She took the baby to be weighed and tested. Then she came back to Billy. “He’s perfect but he’s little—just under five pounds. We have to take him upstairs to the preemie nursery. It’s policy when they’re not five pounds.”

“Give him to me,” Billy said. She tried to free her hands but they were securely taped.

“I’ll bring him to you,” Eva said. “But he can’t stay down here. He’s too small. It’s for the baby’s safety, I promise you. Look, here he is.”

The baby was held against her forehead. The moment he came near her he stopped shrieking. He was mottled and wet.

“Please let me have him,” Billy said.

“He’ll be fine,” Eva said. They then took him away.

The next morning Billy rang for the nurse and demanded that her IV be disconnected. Twenty minutes later she was out of bed slowly walking.

“I feel as if someone had crushed my pelvic bones,” Billy said.

“Someone did,” said the nurse.

Two hours later she was put into a wheelchair and pushed by a nurse into the elevator and taken to the Infant Intensive Care Unit. At the door the nurse said, “I’ll wheel you in.”

“I can walk,” Billy said. “But thank you very much.”

Inside, she was instructed to scrub with surgical soap and to put on a sterile gown. Then she walked very slowly and very stiffly down the hall. A Chinese nurse stopped her.

“I’m William Delielle’s mother,” she said. “Where is he?”

The nurse consulted a clipboard and pointed Billy down a hallway. Another nurse in a side room pointed to an isolette—a large plastic case with porthole windows. There on a white cloth lay her child.

He was fast asleep, his little arm stretched in front of him, an exact replica of Grey’s sleeping posture. On his back were two discs the size of nickels hooked up to wires that measured his temperature and his heart and respiration rates on a console above his isolette. He was long and skinny and beautiful.

“He looks like a little chicken,” said Billy. “May I hold him?”

“Oh, no,” said the nurse. “Not for a while. He mustn’t be stressed.” She gave Billy a long look and said, “But you can open the windows and touch him.”

Billy opened the porthole window and touched his leg. He shivered slightly. She wanted to disconnect his probes, scoop him up, and hold him next to her. She stood quietly, her hand resting lightly on his calf.

The room was bright, hot, and busy. Nurses came and went, washing their hands, checking charts, making notes, diapering, changing bottles of glucose solution. There were three other children in the room. One was very tiny and had a miniature IV attached to a vein in her head. A pink card was taped on her isolette. Billy looked on the side of William’s isolette. There was a blue card and in Grey’s tiny printing was written “William Delielle.”

Later in the morning, when Grey appeared in her room he found Billy sitting next to a glass-encased pump.

“This is the well-known electric breast pump. Made in Switzerland,” Billy said.

“It’s like the medieval clock at Salisbury Cathedral,” Grey said, peering into the glass case. “I just came from seeing William. He’s much longer than I thought. I called all the grandparents. In fact, I was on the telephone all night after I left you.” He gave her a list of messages. “They’re feeding him in half an hour.”

Billy looked at her watch. She had been instructed to use the pump for three minutes on each breast to begin with. Her milk, however, would not be given to William, who, the doctors said, was too little to nurse. He would be given carefully measured formula, and Billy would eventually have to wean him from the bottle and onto herself. The prospect of this seemed very remote.

As the days went by, Billy’s room filled with flowers, but she spent most of her time in the Infant ICU. She could touch William but not hold him. The morning before she was to be discharged, Billy went to William’s eight o’clock feeding. She thought how lovely it would be to feed him at home, how they might sit in the rocking chair and watch the birds in the garden below. In William’s present home, there was no morning and no night. He had never been in a dark room, or heard bird sounds or traffic noise, or felt a cool draft.

William was asleep on his side wearing a diaper and a little T-shirt. The sight of him seized Billy with emotion.

“You can hold him today,” the nurse said.

“Yes?”

“Yes, and you can feed him today, too.”

Billy bowed her head. She took a steadying breath. “How can I hold him with all this hardware on him?” she said.

“I’ll show you,” said the nurse. She disconnected the console, reached into the isolette, and gently untaped William’s probes. Then she showed Billy how to change him, put on his T-shirt, and swaddle him in a cotton blanket. In an instant he was in Billy’s arms.

He was still asleep, but he made little screeching noises and wrinkled his nose. He moved against her and nudged his head into her arm. The nurse led her to a rocking chair and for the first time she sat down with her baby.

All around her, lights blazed. The radio was on and a sweet male voice sang, “I want you to be mine, I want you to be mine, I want to take you home, I want you to be mine.”

William opened his eyes and blinked. Then he yawned and began to cry.

“He’s hungry,” the nurse said, putting a small bottle into Billy’s hand.

She fed him and burped him, and then she held him in her arms and rocked him to sleep. In the process she fell asleep, too, and was woken by the nurse and Grey, who had come from work.

“You must put him back now,” said the nurse. “He’s been out a long time and we don’t want to stress him.”

“It’s awful to think that being with his mother creates stress,” Billy said.

“Oh, no!” the nurse said. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, in his isolette it’s temperature controlled.”

Once Billy was discharged from the hospital she had to commute to see William. She went to the two morning feedings, came home for a nap, and met Grey for the five o’clock. They raced out for dinner and came back for the eight. Grey would not let Billy stay for the eleven.

Each morning she saw Dr. Edmunds, the head of neonatology. He was a tall, slow-talking, sandy-haired man with hornrimmed glasses.

“I know you will never want to hear this under any other circumstances,” he said to Billy, “but your baby is very boring.”

“How boring?”

“Very boring. He’s doing just what he ought to do.” William had gone to the bottom of his growth curve and was beginning to gain. “As soon as he’s a little fatter he’s all yours.”

Billy stood in front of his isolette watching William sleep.

“This is like having an affair with a married man,” Billy said to the nurse who was folding diapers next to her.

The nurse looked at her uncomprehendingly.

“I mean you love the person but can only see him at certain times,” said Billy.

The nurse was young and plump. “I guess I see what you mean,” she said.

At home William’s room was waiting. The crib had been delivered and put together by Grey. While Billy was in the hospital, Grey had finished William’s room. The Teddy bears sat on the shelves. A mobile of ducks and geese hung over the crib. Grey had bought a secondhand rocking chair and had painted it red. Billy had thought she would be unable to face William’s empty room. Instead she found she could scarcely stay out of it. She folded and refolded his clothes, reorganized his drawers, arranged his crib blankets. She decided what should be his homecoming clothes and set them out on the changing table along with a cotton receiving blanket and a wool shawl.

But even though he did not look at all fragile and he was beginning to gain weight, it often felt to Billy that she would never have him. She and Grey had been told ten days to two weeks from day of birth. One day when she felt she could not stand much more Billy was told that she might try nursing him.

Touch him on his cheek. He will turn to you. Guide him toward the breast and the magical connection will be made.

Billy remembered this description from her childbirth books. She had imagined a softly lit room, a sense of peacefulness, some soft, sweet music in the background.

She was put behind a screen in William’s room, near an isolette containing an enormous baby who was having breathing difficulties.

She was told to keep on her sterile gown, and was given sterile water to wash her breasts with. At the sight of his mother’s naked bosom, William began to howl. The sterile gown dropped onto his face. Billy began to sweat. All around her, the nurses chatted, clattered, and dropped diapers into metal bins and slammed the tops down.

“Come on, William,” Billy said. “The books say that this is the blissful union of mother and child.”

But William began to scream. The nurse appeared with the formula bottle and William instantly stopped screaming and began to drink happily.

“Don’t worry,” the nurse said. “He’ll catch on.”

At night at home she sat by the window. She could not sleep. She had never felt so separated from anything in her life. Grey, to distract himself, was stenciling the wall under the molding in William’s room. He had found an early American design of wheat and cornflowers. He stood on a ladder in his blue jeans carefully applying the stencil in pale blue paint.

One night Billy went to the door of the baby’s room to watch him, but Grey was not on the ladder. He was sitting in the rocking chair with his head in his hands. His shoulders were shaking slightly. He had the radio on, and he did not hear her.

He had been so brave and cheerful. He had held her hand while William was born. He had told her it was like watching a magician sawing his wife in half. He had taken photos of William in his isolette and sent them to their parents and all their friends. He had read up on growth curves and had bought Billy a book on breast-feeding. He had also purloined his hospital greens to wear each year on William’s birthday. Now he had broken down.

She made a noise coming into the room and then bent down and stroked his hair. He smelled of soap and paint thinner. She put her arms around him, and she did not let go for a long time.

Three times a day, Billy tried to nurse William behind a screen and each time she ended up giving him his formula.

Finally she asked a nurse, “Is there some room I could sit in alone with this child?”

“We’re not set up for it,” the nurse said. “But I could put you in the utility closet.”

There amidst used isolettes and cardboard boxes of sterile water, on the second try William nursed for the first time. She touched his cheek. He turned to her, just as it said in the book. Then her eyes crossed.

“Oh, my God!” she said.

A nurse walked in.

“Hurts, right?” she said. “Good for him. That means he’s got it. It won’t hurt for long.”

At his evening feeding he howled again.

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” said Grey. He and Billy walked slowly past the park on their way home. It was a cold, wet night.

“I am a childless mother,” Billy said.

Two days later William was taken out of his isolette and put into a plastic bin. He had no temperature or heart probes, and Billy could pick him up without having to disconnect anything. At his evening feeding when the unit was quiet, she took him out in the hallway and walked up and down with him.

The next day she was greeted by Dr. Edmunds.

“I’ve just had a chat with your pediatrician,” he said. “How would you like to take your boring baby home with you?”

“When?” said Billy.

“Right now, if you have his clothes,” Dr. Edmunds said. “Dr. Jacobson will be up in a few minutes and can officially release him.”

She ran down the hall and called Grey.

“Go home and get William’s things,” she said. “They’re springing him. Come and get us.”

“You mean we can just walk out of there with him?” Grey said. “I mean, just take him under our arm? He barely knows us.”

“Just get here. And don’t forget the blankets.”

A nurse helped Billy dress William. He was wrapped in a green and white receiving blanket and covered in a white wool shawl. On his head was a blue and green knitted cap. It slipped slightly sideways, giving him a raffish look.

They were accompanied in the elevator by a nurse. It was hospital policy that a nurse hold the baby, and hand it over at the door.

It made Billy feel light-headed to be standing out of doors with her child. She felt she had just robbed a bank and got away with it.

In the taxi, Grey gave the driver their address.

“Not door to door,” Billy said. “Can we get out at the avenue and walk down the street just like everyone else?”

When the taxi stopped, they got out carefully. The sky was full of silver clouds and the air was blustery and cold. William squinted at the light and wrinkled his nose.

Then, with William tight in Billy’s arms, the three of them walked down the street just like everyone else.