Lift - Kelly Corrigan [8]
I wandered back to our room and slumped in the recliner. I was so tired, things were kind of gauzy. An infection in your membrane. How thin is a membrane? I stretched a white sheet from my shoulders to my knees, like I was on a cross-country red-eye, and then put my head back down. TO LOWER BAR, LIFT THEN SQUEEZE, that’s what the plaque on your crib said. It seemed so simple, but only the nurses were able to do it without a struggle.
On day three, you sucked a bottle dry. The sound of that milk being pulled through that nipple, I can hear it now. Right after Dad showed up, Dr. Benjamin strode in beaming and announced that the culture was in and you had viral meningitis, “the good kind.” Dad jumped up to shake his hand.
We thanked Dr. Benjamin as a nurse came in to unhook you. I hovered as she unwrapped the splint, pulled the tape off your hand, slipped out the needle, and put a tiny band-aid on, all in a single motion.
“She’s all yours,” the nurse said, as I picked you up.
The relief was physical, like cold water on a burn.
I signed forms with my free hand and cleared our things out of the room and waited with you by the exit. You held my finger and I rotated my attention from you to the driveway to the wall across from me—it was a mural, a landscape photograph that obeyed the rule of thirds, a principle of composition I’d learned in that one-night seminar at Elmwood Camera. The bottom third was the city of Oakland, the middle third was clouds, and the top third was blue sky. Someone, whoever was in charge of lobby decorations, I guess, had glued a small wire-and-mesh butterfly to the image, above the clouds. Could something that small really survive at that altitude?
Dad pulled up out front. He jumped out to open the back door and kissed you before he snapped you into the car seat. I leaned in the other side to tuck a blanket around your chin so the straps wouldn’t rub against you. We drove away, into Berkeley, past the people walking with their coffee and cell phones, their shopping bags and strollers, their backpacks and school books and skateboards.
But the smell of the hospital, the sting of those overhead lights in the night, the snippets of conversation I’d overheard stayed with me and marked the beginning of how I came to know what a bold and dangerous thing parenthood is. Risk was not an event we’d survived but the place where we now lived.
I’ve done a few daring things—scuba diving, sky-diving, bungee jumping—but after I had you guys, that kind of thing lost its appeal. There are parents who still chase the double-black-diamond high—rock climbing, motorcycling, white-water kayaking. My friend Tracy’s husband, Tom, is into hang gliding, loves it beyond all reason. Sometimes, he’s up there for four or five hours. I visited Tracy and Tom last spring on the way home from my college reunion, and over a Costco hamburger and a stiff mojito on the back deck, I battered Tom with hang-gliding questions. Don’t you get tired? How do you know where you’re going? If there’s no motor, what keeps you up?
“Basically,” he said, “you fly from thermal to thermal, looking for lift.”
I loved the way that sounded—flying from thermal to thermal, looking for lift. Something about it made instant sense to me and I wanted to say, “Don’t we all?” Instead I said, “What’s a thermal?” and he explained that a thermal is a column of hot air surrounded by turbulence.
“I assume you want to avoid turbulence?”
“No,” he said. “Well—some turbulence is really dangerous. I