Little Pea

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And I have muscle memory of her: the medicine-ball weight of her head in the crook of my left arm, the sweet hint of her body lying across me as I rocked her. Half of her irises were sunk below the rim of her lower lids, forced down by the pressure in her head. There was no way to tell for sure what lay behind the gray half-moons of her eyes, what thought or absence of thought. She cried with infrequent, weird bursts that trailed off, like the clatter from a windup toy. I know now, from scores of babies who came after her, that it was a neurogenic cry, an emblem of brain malformation or damage. When I hear something like it now, 27 years later, I know right away how much is wrong that no one can fix.

But she was able to take comfort, my little pea. Her eyelashes were red and sparse, like her hair, and she blinked faster, more ostentatiously it seemed, when she was happy. When I held her, she settled in, turned toward my warmth with hers. Her own heat was so slight, like her hold on the earth.

By CT scan, her brain was grossly abnormal. I remember that her family stopped visiting after her first few days of life, expecting her to die, and that there were plans for institutionalization as the weeks went on. And institutions conjured the image of some Dickensian orphanage, even as late as 1979. I remember wishing, in my unformed, 21-year-old way, that I could adopt her. Someone, I thought, should be able to save a brand-new baby from becoming a forgotten cog in an institutional wheel. Wasn't that a given? I was fresh from the nursing homes I had worked in during my undergraduate days, where spirits in an unknown state of grace or damnation were frozen in hellish, twisted bodies. That setting seemed all wrong for someone with the clean slate of a newborn, someone so recently arrived in this life.

I remember the day I came to work and her incubator was empty, like a lung that has just exhaled.

But that isn't the whole story.

I know that the more experienced nurses on the unit didn't share my soft spot for her. They cared for her with economical movements, the casual grace of expertise, but they turned their inner gaze from her, females of a herd refusing to feed an orphaned runt.

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