A Song for the Road by Kathleen Basi (classic literature books txt) 📕

things I wish I’d resolved when I had the chance. Questions I’ll never know the answers to.”

It would be so easy to give in. To wallow. But right now, what mattered was Dicey, her baby, and the impossibly strong woman standing beside her.

She touched Dayana’s elbow. “Thank you for sharing your daughter with me. She’s been a gift to me. Every moment.”

Dayana looked at her and swallowed three times in quick succession. She nodded with a small smile.

The women stood in silence, looking in the nursery window like fellow warriors in a battle no one wanted to fight anymore. At length, Dayana turned to her with a hand outstretched. “I’m gonna need your help, Miriam. I got two of them here. I can’t have Baby Girl’s godmother running away. I want your word.”

Miriam grasped the proffered hand. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

 44

Tuesday, May 10

Albuquerque, New Mexico

TIME MOVED DIFFERENTLY IN a hospital. Everything took longer than it should. The ebb and flow of crises and the erratic appearances of the doctors stood in contrast to the maddening predictability of nurse check-ins and meds administered at precise intervals. Every moment dragged, yet the clock swallowed two whole days without the passage of time really registering—because nothing in Dicey’s condition changed. She lay sedated, inert, except when a coughing fit took her and the room filled with alarms and ICU staff. No amount of staring at the numbers on the monitor could force them to move upward.

Miriam and Dayana traded off sitting with Baby Girl and Dicey, catching snatches of sleep in the vinyl chair in the corner of the ICU, sending updates by text message and phoning the other in whenever the doctors visited. Dayana embarked on a campaign to have the baby brought to Dicey for skin-to-skin time. Miriam was certain she had zero chance of winning that battle, and she was astonished at the older woman’s nerve. But after watching a couple of interactions, she found herself more astonished the staff hadn’t capitulated on the spot.

“That’s not my call to make,” said the resident on duty the third time she asked.

“Well, whose call is it? Your attending? The unit manager? How about you stop stalling and call him in here? I know you’re all hoping if you just put me off, I’ll go away. But let me tell you, I’m an ICU nurse and the mother of a woman with cystic fibrosis. I’ve spent more time inside an ICU than all of you put together. I’m not going anywhere.”

When the resident retreated, stumbling over his apologies, Dayana turned to Miriam, her eyes crinkling above the paper mask. “Time to talk to the ones with the real power,” she said.

Miriam began to see where the strength of Dicey’s personality had come from. “The unit manager?” she asked.

“Uh-uh. The nurses.”

Tuesday morning, Dicey’s brothers began arriving, one by one, to boisterous claps on the back and loud greetings cloaked in laughter. The family set up camp in the lounge outside the ICU and began rotating in and out, ordering pizza and sandwiches and Danishes, depending on the time of day. It was clearly a well-rehearsed maneuver.

Miriam laughed until she cried to hear the family’s stories—like Dicey, age three, riding the meanest dog in the neighborhood as if it were a horse.

“No change overnight,” said the doctor who came Wednesday morning to deliver the update. “She’s holding steady, but we’d hoped to see more improvement.”

“Maybe you should listen to me, then,” said Dayana. “My baby needs her baby.”

“We’re still working on that permission, Ms. Porter.”

“Well, work harder.”

“You’ve got to understand, it’s hospital policy. Babies in the NICU—”

“Can travel with a NICU team.”

The doctor blew out a breath and put his hands up. “I’ll check.”

“Thank you.”

The team left. The last one out of the room was the social worker who had been their liaison all week. She whispered to Dayana and hurried off after the team.

The lounge felt oppressive, as if all the air had been sucked out of it. Miriam chewed on her lip. The family was uncharacteristically silent.

Then Dicey’s oldest brother, Derrick, leaned over the arm of his chair toward Miriam. “She’s gonna pull through this, you know,” he said softly.

Miriam looked up, surprised. She didn’t see how he could speak with such certainty.

Derrick smiled at her confusion. “I know it all sounds terrible, but Dicey’s been through worse, believe me. We’ve had the funeral home on standby a couple times. And she’s got that baby to live for now.”

Miriam opened her eyes, staring at him with a question on her lips she dared not speak.

“I know,” he said. “It’s gonna get her eventually. But I know my sister, and I’m telling you, she’s not going anywhere when she just had a baby.”

The silence felt a little less oppressive now. Miriam glanced around the room, seeing the way the rest of the family had begun to relax and crack jokes again. He hadn’t delivered that speech for her benefit, but for his siblings’, she realized. She looked up and caught his eye. He winked, and she smiled.

“Speaking of the baby, nobody’s talking about a name,” said Dwight—brother number three, Miriam recalled. “What are we gonna name her?”

Miriam waited for Dayana to take the lead—surely Dicey had shared her thoughts with her mother—but no one answered him. “Deandra,” Miriam said at last.

Everyone looked at her.

“That’s what she was thinking when I asked her. Something strong, she said. It means ‘divine protector.’ And it … you know. It keeps the D’s going.”

They regarded her with surprise. “You got her to answer that question without ripping a new hole in your ass?” said Devon, the youngest of the boys.

Everyone laughed. Then silence fell again as the social worker walked back into the lounge.

She was smiling. “They’ve signed off,” she said. “They’re working on a plan to bring the baby up.”

The whole room burst into cheers and a round of backslapping and soft-drink toasts.

“See?” Derrick said, nudging Miriam with his elbow before knocking back his Dr.