Darling Rose Gold(16)

She stops scrolling, pausing on a film I’ve never heard of.

“What’s The Hunger Games?” I ask.

Rose Gold stares at me like I’m from another planet. “It’s a dystopian universe where a boy and a girl from each of twelve nations are recruited once a year to fight to the death in a televised competition.”

My hand flies to my mouth. “That sounds horrifying.”

She shrugs and keeps scrolling. I’m surprised when she chooses Titanic. The themes of the movie are awfully adult, but I keep quiet. I steal a glance at the other recliner.

“Why don’t I take Adam for a little while?” I offer. “You’re exhausted.”

Rose Gold gives the baby a once-over, hugs him close, then hands him to me.

I tuck him into my baby-cradling-sized arms. I hold a bright green rattle in front of him, and he bats at it with his hand, excited. He babbles at me when I tickle his feet. I stick my tongue out and wink at him. I do not say aloud I was born to be a mother.

I want to ask my daughter so many questions: how difficult labor was, how she’s handling the new baby, whether she’s happy at her job. I want to know everything Rose Gold is willing to tell me, but right now, she looks like Wile E. Coyote post–boulder crush. I keep quiet and focus on the bundle in my arms.

After a minute or two, I realize I’m counting his breaths. No, I’m counting the seconds between his breaths. Old habits die hard.

When I brought Rose Gold home that first night, I was captivated. Give me another kid to watch sleep, and I’ll tell you I’d rather watch a couple of geezers golf eighteen holes. But when it’s your own kid? Ask any mother. They know.

She was breathing until she wasn’t. Time loitered. Every second lasted four. My eyes bored a hole in her little skull. I gulped air, willing her to do the same. My hand shot out and grabbed the phone. I’d dialed “9” when the breath came. A quiet purr amplified to an ocean wave. It could have been thirty minutes, maybe an hour, when all I did was stare at her, frozen, listening to the bundled body produce roar after roar of inhalations.

I didn’t sleep that night. Instead I thought about our time at the hospital, when there was always someone who knew what to do, people who watched over my baby like she was their own.

I moved the rocking chair next to her crib and counted the seconds between breaths. One-Mississippi.

I forced myself to say the state slowly in my mind, to let all four syllables have their due. The brain is a tricky organ: it can condense words into a single sound, squish them like an accordion or a car crash. Two-Mississippi.

How many “Mississippis” before I’d call someone? Most of us didn’t have the Internet in those days. I dared not leave the room for my copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, a book with more pages dog-eared than not by then. Mom and Dad were dead. So were David and Grant. You’re alone, I reminded myself. You are ready. Three-Mississippi.

You’re never ready for your baby to stop breathing. I decided five was an appropriate number. Reasoning my Mississippis were coming out slower than a second each, I figured I could tell the doctor eight to ten seconds had passed between each breath. Four-Mississippi.

You don’t want to be that mom. The overreactor. The nonstop caller. The one who makes the nurses roll their eyes. Then again, Rose Gold’s immune system was barely functioning. She had a speck of a liver. Didn’t that require some dispensation? Five-Mississippi.

I picked up the phone.

The pediatrician told me Rose Gold had to cease breathing for twenty seconds for apnea to be considered. Anything shorter was “something to keep an eye on.” As if my eyes could go anywhere else while I counted the moments my daughter was not breathing. As if there were a way I could unload the dishwasher or do a load of laundry when I was obsessing over five seconds becoming twenty becoming a minute becoming death.

Over the next few days, I did nothing but count the “Mississippis” between Rose Gold’s breaths. The longest was fifteen. I put my hand on the phone after nine. I punched one digit to the doctor’s office per second from ten-Mississippi on. The phone would ring by the time I reached twenty.

A week after I’d brought her home, I got to eighteen and dialed anyway. “It’s been twenty seconds,” I said. “I want to bring her in for a checkup.” The next day I left the pediatrician armed with a CPAP, medication, and a plan. That was how it started.

“Mom?” Rose Gold says, interrupting my reverie. “What are you thinking about? You have this look on your face.”

I glance at Adam. He’s fallen asleep again. I keep rocking my chair. “Just remembering,” I say.

Rose Gold considers me, but doesn’t say anything. We turn back to the TV, where Jack and Rose are dancing a jig belowdecks in third class.

“How did you and Grant meet again?” Rose Gold asks.

I whirl around in my chair, almost forgetting the infant in my arms. “Where did that come from?”

She gestures at her sleeping son. “I have a baby of my own now. Someday I want to be able to tell him where he comes from.”

He comes from a mother whose head was up her derriere and a father who was worse, I want to say.

Rose Gold has asked this question before, but I’ve always managed to put her off. I decide to be honest this time.

“I was visiting GCC, where I got my CNA certificate way back when. I was looking at CNA-to-RN bridge programs to become a nurse. I met him in the cafeteria.”