During class on a gray-blue day my mom texted me a picture.
Usually I was a good student, and kept my phone off and put away like I was supposed to. But somehow, the week after baby Cecilia’s heart surgery, that didn’t seem to really matter.
The picture mattered.
It was a picture of Nonny, and she was holding the baby.
For the first time.
When I got to the hospital after school that day, she was still holding her. She was sitting in a chair by the window, the tiny little body pressed up against her shoulder, head resting against her neck. Exactly like the picture. Like she hadn’t moved.
I came into the room, and everyone was talking softly and moving slowly, like we were at church. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the baby.
It was stunning how different she looked outside of that glass box.
We sat there for a second, all of us looking down at that tiny person. She really was so tiny. Her fingers made tiny fists, and she kept scraping her nails along Nonny’s shoulder, but Nonny didn’t flinch. Normally baby Cecilia had little mittens over her hands so she wouldn’t scratch herself inside that box, but at the moment she was wrapped in a blanket, pressed close against her mom.
Nonny looked at me, and said, “Would you like to hold her?”
For a second I couldn’t answer. Should I hold her? I’d messed things up already. Who was to say I wouldn’t mess them up again, and even worse?
Then I thought about what Ms. Trepky had said about courage. Nothing bad was going to happen. The whole room was full of adults who would make sure of that.
So I gulped, nodded, and sat down in the chair by the window.
And Nonny slowly, gently, settled baby Cecilia in my arms, like she was handing me the most important thing in the world. Which she was.
There was so much perfect in this tiny person I had to take it in bits at a time. She was awake and looking up at me. She had wide brown eyes like her dad, flecked with gold. And she had Nonny’s delicate, perfectly arched lips. Those lips made a small pucker while she stared up into my face.
“This is your aunt,” Nonny said, stroking the baby’s thick, curly hair. “The best aunt in the world.”
Very slowly, I unwrapped the blanket from around baby Cecilia’s left side. There was the scar, wrapping under her arm. The skin was still swollen and pink. A tiny slash across the patched-up heart. The people who’d fixed her were heroes. They were scientists. They were magic.
I remembered right then about one of my favorite words. It’s not a Hard Reading Word, but something I learned about on my own, in one of the documentaries I’d watched. It’s a Japanese word: kintsugi. In ancient Japan, the expert craftsmen and artists didn’t throw away their beautiful bowls and teapots when they got cracked. Instead, they melted down gold and filled in all the cracks, no matter how big. Filled in the cracks until the ceramic was traced and lined with shining gold, shimmering and even more beautiful than it had been before. The most beautiful thing they’d ever made. That’s kintsugi.
And here was our new baby—filled and sealed and traced with the purest gold. I touched the scar.
I realized that Cecilia Payne had given me just what I’d asked for.
Baby Cecilia was here, breathing, alive in my arms.
That’s what the scar meant.
And the scar made her perfect.