And asleep in the recliner beside the isolette, with a hospital blanket over her knees and a cold cup of coffee on the floor, was my sister-in-law.
Roslyn Dressler. Grant's older sister. Forty-six years old. Aunt Roz.
Who is a neonatal transport nurse. At St. Mira's. And has been for eleven years.
Who came to my room at Ardenholt at about seven that night, before it all went wrong, and sat on my bed and told me a story about her own labor to make me laugh, and squeezed my foot through the blanket on her way out.
Who Elias knows better than almost anyone in the world.
She woke up because Elias said "Aunt Roz" out loud.
And I watched her face go from sleep, to recognition, to delight — genuine, wide-open delight — and then, in about a second and a half, to horror.
Because she looked at my face.
She stood up so fast the blanket went on the floor and she said, "Naomi. Naomi, what — how long have you—"
And I said, "Since yesterday afternoon. My son told me."
Roslyn Dressler put both hands over her mouth and said, into them, "That absolute coward."
Here is the truth, which took the rest of that day, two more conversations, a hospital social worker named Wendeline Marsh, and eventually a lawyer to fully assemble.
Orla was born alive at 8:52 p.m. on the fifteenth of May, at thirty-five weeks, weighing three pounds eleven ounces, in respiratory distress.
Ardenholt Memorial has a Level I nursery. That means they can look after a healthy baby. That is all it means.
She needed to be somewhere else and she needed to be there fast, and I was hemorrhaging in the next room and about to lose an organ, and Grant was standing in a corridor between two doors.
The regional transport team was called at 9:20. Their rig was already out on a run in the other direction and there was weather. The dispatcher's estimate was two and a half to three hours.
Roslyn was in the building. She had come to visit me. She was off shift, in her own clothes, standing in a hallway watching her brother lose the ability to speak.
So she made calls. She got her own unit at St. Mira's to authorize it, she got a transport isolette out of the bay at Ardenholt, and she took my daughter herself, in a hospital vehicle, with a respiratory therapist who lives in Colvert and who agreed to ride along.
They left the ambulance bay at 2:14 in the morning.
At about ten past one, in the corridor by the elevators on the second floor, my husband handed his sister a padded envelope with four thousand dollars in it.
Not for the baby.
For the deposit.
Because Grant let our health insurance lapse.
The plan through Tallow Ridge ended on the thirtieth of April. The individual plan he arranged — cheaper, because we were living on severance — did not begin until the first of June.
May was a hole. He knew it was a hole. He'd told himself the baby was due on the nineteenth of June and that we'd be inside the new plan by two and a half weeks.
She came five weeks early.
So my husband stood at three cash machines at eleven o'clock at night, in a hospital, while his wife was on a table, and emptied our account, and gave it to his sister in an envelope, and Roslyn took it because she was in a hurry and because there is in fact an admissions process and she knew exactly how much friction four thousand dollars removes at two in the morning.
