Part Seven: The Waiting

The rest of the pregnancy was hard on my body, harder than the others. I was thirty-four, and five babies in eight years had taken their toll. I had high blood pressure in the third trimester and had to go on modified bed rest at thirty-four weeks. Aaron took over everything at home: school drop-offs, soccer practices, dinners, baths, bedtime stories.

He was wonderful. He really was. But he talked about the baby constantly. He’d lie in bed with his hand on my belly and talk to him. Hey, buddy. It’s Dad. We’re gonna go fishing at the cabin. We’re gonna watch the Lions lose every Sunday. I’m gonna teach you to swing a hammer.

The girls listened. They always listened.

One night in my eighth month, I came downstairs for a glass of water at eleven o’clock and found Hazel sitting at the top of the stairs in her nightgown, hugging her knees. Below us, in the living room, Aaron was on the phone with his father, and his voice carried up the stairwell clear as a bell.

“I know, Dad,” he was saying. “I can’t wait either. Finally, right? After four tries.” He laughed. “I’ll bring him to the cabin the first weekend he can travel. You and me and him, Dad. Three Bowman men.”

I sat down on the step next to Hazel. She was crying silently, the way Aaron cries.

“What’s wrong, baby?” I whispered.

She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Four tries,” she whispered. “That’s us. We’re the tries.”

I didn’t know what to say to her. I held her on the stairs until she fell asleep against me, and then I carried her back to bed, all fifty-two pounds of her, my enormous belly bumping the doorframe. Then I lay awake until three in the morning, trying to figure out how to tell my husband that our oldest daughter thought she was a failed attempt.

I never found the right words. I kept meaning to. Then the baby came early.

Part Eight: The Delivery

My water broke at thirty-seven weeks, on a Tuesday morning in late October, while I was standing in the kitchen packing four lunch boxes. Labor was long and exhausting, sixteen hours at Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids, the same hospital where I work, in a delivery room on the fourth floor with a window that looked out on the gray Grand River and the trees along the bank going red and orange.

Aaron’s mother took the girls. Gerald came to the hospital and sat in the waiting room with a cup of coffee and a newspaper he never opened. I’d never seen him at a single one of my deliveries before.

At 9:41 that night, after sixteen hours, the doctor announced that we’d welcomed a perfectly healthy baby boy. Seven pounds, eleven ounces. Twenty and a half inches long. A full head of black hair.

He came out crying, loud and angry, his little fists balled up, his face bright red.

I’ve never seen Aaron look so happy. He was practically glowing. He’d been holding my hand through the whole delivery, and when the doctor held up the baby, Aaron let go of my hand and put both of his over his mouth. His eyes filled. He laughed and cried at the same time.

“A boy,” he said. “Mer. Look at him. Look at him.”

The nurse wiped the baby down and checked him over quickly, and his Apgar scores were good, an eight and a nine. She wrapped him in a striped hospital blanket and put a little blue knit hat on his head. Then she turned around and carefully placed our newborn son in Aaron’s arms.

I watched them together. Aaron, six-foot-one, in his wrinkled flannel shirt with his reading glasses pushed up on his head. Our son, tiny and red-faced, swaddled in the striped blanket, his little mouth working as he settled down and stopped crying.

I expected Aaron to cry or laugh or say something about finally getting his wish. I expected him to say, Hi, buddy. I’m your dad. I expected him to say the name we’d picked out. I even expected him to turn toward the door and shout down the hall to his father in the waiting room.

But he didn’t.

Part Nine: The Words

Instead, he stared at our baby’s tiny face, and his smile slowly faded.

I saw it happen. One moment he was glowing. The next, something passed over his face like a shadow crossing a field. His eyes narrowed. He leaned closer. He tilted the baby toward the light from the window.

He went very still. His jaw tightened. His hands, holding our son, started to shake.

He didn’t look happy at all.

Then he looked at me. His face was white, completely white.

He opened his mouth, and the words that came out made my stomach drop.

“Meredith,” he said. “He looks like Danny.”

For one horrible second, I didn’t understand. I thought he meant the black hair, the Bowman nose. I thought it was sentimental, a man seeing his lost brother in his new son. I started to say something soft, something like Oh, honey.

Then Aaron said the rest.

“His lips,” he said. His voice was cracking. “Mer, look at his lips. They’re blue.”

Part Ten: Blue

I pushed myself up on the hospital bed, sixteen hours of labor and every muscle screaming, and I looked.

At first I didn’t see it. The room was bright, and the baby was red from crying, and he was wearing that little blue knit hat that made everything look bluish around his face. I almost said Aaron, it’s just the hat.

Then the baby yawned. His mouth opened and closed, and I saw it.

His lips weren’t pink. They were a dusky, grayish color, faintly blue at the edges. The skin around his mouth was pale. And his little fingernails, peeking out of the striped blanket, had a faint purplish tinge.

I’m a hospital pharmacist. I’ve been one for eleven years. I’ve worked in the NICU. I’ve mixed medications for babies the size of my hand. I know what that color means.

It’s called cyanosis. It means the baby isn’t getting enough oxygen in his blood.

“Nurse,” I said. My voice came out strange and flat. “Can you check his oxygen saturation, please? Now?”

The nurse was a young woman named Kayla, maybe twenty-five, and she’d been cleaning up the delivery tray. She looked up, surprised. Then she looked at the baby’s face, and I watched her expression change.

She didn’t argue. She took the baby out of Aaron’s arms and laid him on the warmer. She clipped a tiny pulse oximeter sensor around his right hand and another around his foot.

The number came up on the monitor.

SpO2: 79%.

A healthy newborn should be in the high nineties. Kayla pressed the call button on the wall, and her voice was calm and fast at the same time.

“I need a NICU team to Delivery Four,” she said. “Newborn, cyanotic, sats seventy-nine on room air.”

Aaron was standing in the middle of the room with his empty arms still curved the way they’d been when he was holding his son. He was staring at the warmer. He was shaking. I reached out from the bed and grabbed his hand.

“Aaron,” I said. “Look at me. This isn’t Danny. We’re in a hospital. You noticed. You noticed right away.”

He didn’t answer. He just held on to my hand like it was the only thing keeping him from falling through the floor.