“What did he say?”
Kendra frowned, remembering. “Not this time. That’s what it sounded like. Not this time.”
I lay back on the stretcher and stared at the ceiling of the ambulance.
I didn’t know what it meant. But I couldn’t stop hearing it.
My daughter weighed four pounds, eleven ounces.
They put her in the neonatal intensive care unit at Bayview Memorial with a tiny knit hat and a feeding tube and wires taped to her chest. The neonatologist said she was strong. Her lungs were better than expected for thirty-four weeks and five days.
“Whoever delivered her knew exactly what he was doing,” the doctor said. “Clearing her airway like that, keeping her warm, the way he timed everything. That’s experience.”
I didn’t sleep that night. I sat by her incubator in a wheelchair and watched her breathe.
You have your mother’s eyes.
What did that mean? He couldn’t have known my mother. My mother died thirty-one years ago.
