I am not prepared for this. I walk in thinking that I will perform the mandatory coo and then walk out, serenely immutable. Life has other plans for me, as it usually does.
I’m an obvious baby-greeter: card, flowers for Mom; wrapped gift for Big Sis, and an unwrapped teddy bear for Baby are all somehow balanced in my arms as I ask for Maternity. I’m pointed down the hall: fourth floor.
And I open the door and there they are: my beautiful sister, alone again in her body, exhausted, holding something that is far too small to be a person. I’m surprised by how little she is, as I always am. She’s a good pound bigger than her sister was at 15 hours old, and that’s a lot when you weigh seven pounds. But she’s simply too tiny.
“Hey! Come meet Lucy,” my sister says in the slanted afternoon light.
I dump everything everywhere, descarf, unjacket, fling sunglasses and clamber onto the half-raised hospital bed. Lucy, meet Lizzy. My sister hands her over.
She weighs less than my cat by a long shot. She doesn’t frown, really, just barely squirms or adjusts for a second as she settles into my smaller arms. My sister doesn’t think she looks like anyone, but instantly I’m thinking that she reminds me of baby pictures of my sister that I’ve memorized. Her lips are like her sister’s. Her eyelashes, tucked up tight in her swollen newborn lids, are pale. Her eyebrows barely make a shadow on her forehead. One hand is peeking out the top of her cocooned blanket, the nails long and square and soft, never touched by anything. Each finger slowly curls around my pinky if I touch it to her palm, as though it’s automatic. Affection is easy, instinctive.
I was expecting to draw every analogy between Lucy’s arrival and the rest of ours, but sitting there on the bed, I don’t. I smell her, sweet, and it takes me about an hour to rack up the courage to kiss that flower-petal skin. I’m afraid I’ll break her.
Why are babies the easiest things in the world to love? I love her. She’s never spoken to me, or at this point even looked at me – I don’t even know what color her eyes are. She won’t know my name for months, maybe a year, maybe more if I go far away to school – and I love her. I forget myself with Lucy in my arms, and find myself thanking God after I hand her back to her mother that I don’t have kids yet.
She has a feel, which is more than the newborn feel, and I’ve either forgotten about this or I’m clueless because she’s really only the second baby I’ve ever met still in-hospital. Adalee was a showgirl even then; she was full of faces, smiles, she stared at us like she didn’t like how much we were staring at her. Lucy feels…calm, steady, and I realize that there’s a soul in this body, that she’s already a person with a fate and talents and interests. A person I don’t know yet. She’s so quiet and good-natured, so easy, so unassumingly accepting of all the caresses we are offering, so uncomplaining, that I imagine she will become the shy sister, the bookish one. At some point she opens her eyes and we all race to catch a glimpse, but she blinks quickly, as though the dim inside of the maternity ward is too much to take in, as though the world is overwhelming.
I am engulfed by a desire to take her and tuck her somewhere safe, where the world is slow and dark, and brightness can be negotiated in stages. Why? She has parents. She’s not my kid. There is a whole family, so many people we have here, to love her and cuddle her and make her feel like the specialest center of the world there ever was. It’s not my job. I don’t know why I feel so in love with her. Is it some parahormonal function of being a woman? Is this what I felt last time? I don’t think so; but memory is a funny thing. It moves to conform to the present.
And this child, this Lucyloo, in my arms, with almost-my name, she feels like tranquility in a blanket. I was once told that the reason we bond so swiftly and lovingly to some and just never feel as enthralled by others is that some souls were created nearer to each other. Souls that were close to each other in the beginning retain some cosmic affinity – they find each other here on earth and click, they are bonded to each other, they love each other unreasonably, they long for each other’s company. And others, they may be perfectly amiable or charming, perfectly beautiful or moral or interesting, but it’s like silk on silk – you just touch and slip off one another, taken by some other breeze. The Near Souls, you stick to them like velcro. One touch, and you’re going to have to rip yourself off. It doesn’t happen on its own.
I wonder how we tell this. Sometimes it becomes apparent later…short friendships that were too comfortable to explain, the only people we ever let hold our hands indefinitely, people who let us be ourselves before we even knew who that was. We look back on these marvels later, or those around us look in and say: bizarre. Sometimes, and this is hard, you realize it as it’s happening, a steeping of your heart in this new color that you know is going to stain. The moments are intoxicating, they are vibrant, you feel like something special is happening to you, that you’ve been selected for some extraordinary sensation that the rest of humanity cannot know or understand. It feels unreal, dizzying. This is what it’s like to hold this child, my niece. She feels like home.
What life lies in wait for her, this quiet one? Will life be kind to her, gentle, because hers is an embered glow? Prayers are pouring out of me as I watch her in the space between sleeping and waking. May this life be to you, Lucyloo, as extraordinary and pleasant as it was for me to meet you. Let me deposit you back in your tired mother’s arms. Visiting hours ended an hour ago. I have work tomorrow.
I’m unnecessarily worried, agitated, for the drive home. The city suddenly feels insignificant; 93 is in freefall. The apartment is quiet, the doors are shut, the kitchen light out.
