The hospital buildings and corridors and bridges that connect buildings have names and corresponding color-coded pictograms, mnemonic devices, the wife calls them, designed to better ground the sick in a place where their families can easily locate them. Floor Six of the Lowenstein Building, where the NICU is, is a cranberry-red rhino. The wife, having worked all her adult life developing sales promotional packages for regional malls, including Eastgate in Durham and Crabtree Valley in Raleigh, is impressed by the comprehensiveness of the graphic design, and has even wondered if there is some thoughtful connection between hospital department and animal and color. Roaming around the corridors she often feels utterly lost but is never actually lost.

*

The husband exits the large, ever-revolving door and emerges into the heat of day. He follows the hospital’s perimeter, passing some of its uniformed along the way, a lab-coated woman, a man in scrubs, then by the parking tower, to the ambulance port, past the loading docks and beyond, where a plane of hot asphalt is covered in employee-only parking. There, he spots an outcropping of dumpsters glimmering in sunlight, behind which he feels hopeful he will find a small, thriving community of smokers hiding out.

*

Sometimes the couple remains on the outside, staring into the glass, leaning into one another, holding hands, an unpleasant lightness lifting the chest away from the heart, producing a stirring hollowness. The glass is a thick and protective barrier. To cross it means sterilized uniforms, shower caps, gloves, booties. The reward is being closer, a hand through the hole in the incubator, a finger stroking her tiny arm.

*

The fine hair covering her body is to keep her warm. Micro-preemies have not yet developed brown fat, the couple has been informed by Shallendorf. The hair is called lanugo. The wife is grateful for these hairs, despite their foreign-soundingness. The baby has eyelashes and eyebrows and fingernails. There are lines coming in and out of her, needles in all the limbs and the abdomen.

*

There is a section of the walk between the NICU and Shallendorf’s office where the hospital smell intensifies. The husband claims not to notice. Some corridors are more manageable; cerulean octopus and goldenrod giraffe are the least unpleasant, filled with antiseptic flavors—ammonia, Listerine, chlorine. On their way through the third floor, periwinkle owl, to the glass-paneled connector to the McNeil Annex, there is always a traffic jam of the roller-bedded, the wheel-chaired, the intravenously fed clogging the corridor. The worst hospital odor peaks here, speeding their pace through the crowd.

*

The NICU waiting room is filled with campers. The staff gently pushes them to go home, regroup, take showers. The wife is most stalwart, enduring the stiff necks, poor circulation, turgid limbs, on top of the post-partem indignities, the cramps, discharges, sweating, sore breasts. Nurse Jean in a duck-printed blouse and blue scrub pants ushers the campers in rotation into vacant private rooms and draws the block-out shades.

*

Before their later-in-life marriage, the husband built his social career on his expansive personality and untamed tongue, which, until the crash and recovery, had been fueled by cocaine and vodka, mostly. He lifts himself off a cranberry-red armchair, stands, looks to the wife for permission. She appears distracted by a pain in her side. She never knew the old him, never will, or the stable of jokes that were probably not as funny as his on-demand impulse to retell them. The job of being the sober guy isn’t ideal, but the alternative is worse. Suddenly, she looks up. He lifts two horizontal fingers to his mouth. Her eyes give consent. He turns, exits the waiting room and heads toward the dumpsters.

*

Twenty-three and seventeen are the number of weeks of gestation and the number of ounces at birth, respectively. Both are odd numbers, prime numbers, the wife thinks, numbers that up until very recently held no particular sway over her life. She has long seen herself as a numbers girl, sales numbers, on-target earnings, commissions, quarterly quotas. She had been openly wistful but privately relieved to retire, at least for a time, the work-work-work self.

*

The door is opened a crack which the couple takes as an indication that the doctor will see them now. Shallendorf is standing, tall and lean, a sad-faced man. They sit on three chairs in the center of the small office. Shallendorf with his professional sympathy, the husband thinks. Shallendorf with the brown shoes, the wife thinks. Why he doesn’t sit behind the desk to separate his physical self from the inflamed space of the parents, neither understands. They hold a powwow instead, knees inches from other knees, Shallendorf’s desk at his back, barely room to swing a foot around to cross a leg. Palms on knees. The news is never good news.

*

From the haggard looks, the wife has made the assumption the woman is a drug addict. Dee Dee is her name. She lives curled up on the longest cranberry red couch. Maybe she is homeless, the wife has considered. There is a gaunt man in a tweed coat, bearded, who appears occasionally at her side in a blanket of stale cigarette smoke. You been to the Chinese place across the street? Dee Dee says to the wife, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Better than this gar-bage, she says. And not so hard on the system either, she adds, patting her stomach. The wife nods in agreement, pitying her, judging her. Dee Dee’s baby is a drug addict, too.

*

Standing, looking through the transparent partition, recriminations have a way of naturally surfacing, something about the reflective nature of glass, the wife thinks. Why did it take her the extra decade to marry? Ten years of uterine elasticity wasted. She did have one prior proposal. She could have married him. Jerry Solmanz. Despite the low energy and all those difficult-to-watch private habits he seemed intent on sharing. But who was she to judge him? she thinks, remembering the endless stream of evenings alone in front of the TV, molded by solitude on dented couch pillows, vacantly picking at this or that. Shallendorf insists there is no correlation between age and weight and placental abruption.

*

The strip mall opposite the hospital has a thick cement overhang where the stores’ names are broadcast in blocky, red all-caps: HAIR SALON, PHARMACY, QWIK MARKET, CHINESE RESTAURANT. The strip mall is a world without CONFUSION or DOUBT, the wife thinks. Things are not only what they are, they are labelled as such. Across PARKING LOT, they walk at a diagonal, looking back once together at the multi-leveled cubes of bricked-in and glassed-in spaces that make up HOSPITAL. A wavering heat rises from the asphalt. Neither can pinpoint the precise spot where BABY is in the conglomeration. HUSBAND reaches for WIFE’s hand. She feels sluggish and never more mammalian, a forearm under her heavy breasts for a moment of extra support. They make it to the shade of the colonnade. They are seated at a table in CHINESE RESTAURANT along the windowed storefront, protected from the sun by the vast overhang. Cell phones out, air-conditioning frigid. At three in the afternoon, the place is empty.

*

Flashes of the husband’s old self spark when the couple is around his old friends. He has noticed that these friends, those still around, a forgiving lot, appear to enjoy pointing out these moments to the wife. It all seems much less funny now. Maybe he was never that funny to begin with. People did laugh. There were costs, an endless calculus still accumulating. Does long-term, chronic drug abuse defect sperm? Infiltrate the ball sac, the testes, attacking the chromosomal structure of the spermatozoa? he wonders, staring into the glass, a poor reflection of himself angling back. The wife is leaning into him. If he shifts his point of focus, his face is suddenly transposed over the daughter’s tiny body ten feet away.

*

Neither the husband nor the wife says the name of the baby. The baby has a name. Her name is the one they had decided they would call her, but neither of them can say the name out loud yet, although in their minds they refer to her by this name that is never uttered.

*

The waiter at the Chinese restaurant is always the same youngish man with impossible English. The husband speaks to him in increased volume. Point, the wife suggests, just point. The waiter has the kind of face only a mother could love, the wife thinks. Words exit from his misshapen mouth in sharp slices of sound, whereas, in contrast, the husband’s voice is a foghorn of loud-mouthed demands. The wife finally intervenes, lifting the menu toward the waiter and pointing.

*

If only Shallendorf flinched, the wife thinks. Always the same penetrating stare. It is easier to look at his forehead, across the wide brow, or at the blurred diploma over his shoulder on the other side of the room, or at his shoes.

*

Staring at the baby, sensing she is drifting out of her shoes, the wife grips the frame of the window. A moment later, she is joined at the glass by the drug addict. Colliding lives, the wife thinks as she senses the woman’s body inching towards her. She is repelled by Dee Dee but relieved how the disgust calms her, grounding her to earth and pettiness. Dee Dee’s baby is a long, skinny, dried-out-looking thing named Rebel. The wife focuses her stare firmly in front of her. She does not want to be touched. Every life deserves a chance, Dee Dee says, not for the first time. The woman’s hand scrapes the wife’s hand. Who is she to judge her? the wife thinks. She was desperate herself to have a baby, willing to take risks. Yes, the wife says, yes, every life deserves a chance, as she grabs for Dee Dee’s hand and squeezes it once and for all.

*

At home alone on break from their vigil, walking across the living room to return a plate to the kitchen, the husband trips and falls. On what, he is not sure. Or maybe he collapsed, his body faltering at its ankles or knees. Embarrassed, he works to re-stand, but halfway up, locked in a sprinter’s crouch, he drops back to the floor, rolls to his side, then onto his back and stares up at the ceiling which has not for decades seemed so far away.

*

The waiter at the Chinese restaurant is very thin. A man-child, the wife thinks, fourteen or thirty years of age with a spattering of hairs that emerge from the tip of his chin. Where Do You Come From? the husband asks. The waiter answers, exposing his oddly spaced teeth set in a high bank of gum. The couple nods approvingly at the name of a town or province in China, presumably. The waiter then ventures a question in English. You like Chinese food? he says, they think. Come lot, he says. They nod. Yes, we are visiting the hospital, the husband says. HOS-PI-TAL, he repeats as the wife points vaguely beyond the glass. Hos-pi-tar, the waiter says. Yes, yes, they say, good, good, very good.

*

Dee Dee enters the waiting room, weaving erratically, exploding, something the wife has not witnessed within these four walls with their cranberry-red accents where the lid is always kept on tight. A nurse meets her at the edge of the room, guiding her away, calming her. The wife can see them down the funnel of the corridor. By some mathematical formula, the wife deduces that the soothing being administered is not the kind one would provide to a woman whose child has just died. Rebel is still alive. The wife can only turn this news on herself, working to calculate what effect this will have on the survival of her own baby.

*

Shallendorf suggests the couple make a visit home together. They agree a moment in a familiar setting together outside the walls of the hospital would be good. As the husband is inserting the ticket into the meter of the parking tower, the wife wonders if this is intended as a dress rehearsal for a day in the not-so-far future when they may be leaving the hospital for the last time, just the two of them. She is in the passenger’s seat, strapped in, a freshly ingested diazepam beginning to distance her body from her face. She turns to the husband. We forgot to say goodbye to the baby, she tells him. There is another moment that follows as his head languidly turns to meet hers before the acceleration begins, the car backing up, a rear wheel on the curb, the two jumping out, someone yelling, doors open. They reach the ever-revolving door, dash through the viridian sailfish corridor to the bank of elevators, to the sixth floor, to the glass where they stand in panting reverie at the sight of her.

*

The smokers have the casual intimacy of old friends. Disjointed conversations. The husband bums another cigarette, forcing a dollar into the hand of an orderly in white clogs. People present as types, the American spectrum. No questions are asked. He tries to see himself through their eyes: a recovering addict attached to an illness inside? Yet there is no reason for them to assume the addict part, except that he thinks of it as a scar, something he wears plainly, permanently. They are all addicts, of course, puffing at their nicotine. No one says anything of significance. A chuckle here and there. He could live in the dumpster shade, an interrogation-free smoking zone.

*

That was delicious, the wife says. Yes, the husband agrees. The waiter refills their waters as they pause to smile up at him. Thank you, she says, as she watches her dish slip away under her nose, a mound of uneaten bamboo shoots, baby corns, eggplant in a purple gray syrup collected on an edge of the plate.

*

Shortly after the birth, against reason, they looked at one another, and gripping hands, told the other that things were going to be fine. The thought took hold with reinforcing nods and smiles, and it felt so good. Things are going to be fine. What they meant was not the historical rounding of painful edges that comes with perspective, the knowledge that all things in time become in their own way ‘fine.’ They meant the baby was going to be fine. Her condition wasn’t going to get in the way of the healthy and productive dreams they had for her.

*

The next time the husband is alone in the house, he returns to the floor, to the spot where he tripped. On hands and knees, then cheek to carpet, he breathes in, registering the faint scent of dog. Rolling his face into the nap of the carpet, he hypothesizes that he didn’t trip after all, that the spot pulled him down, to smell the dog smell, evidence that life goes on, a lesson from an animal he loved dearly whose memory has largely faded. The dog was for years an anchor. A prop, too, for greeting people in the neighborhood, convincing them his life was normal. Look at me I have a dog. The wife never knew the dog, a restless border collie with one blue eye, the other brown, named Kip. The dog’s life was the life of a dog of a middle-aged bachelor with a drug habit and lapsing attention. Flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling, under the full embrace of gravity, the husband thinks about the dog and its panting forgiving unwavering love.

*

All-you-can-eat Thursday and the Chinese restaurant is thronging with lunch guests milling around the buffet island’s steaming chrome chafing dishes. Who are all these people? the husband asks, and where do they come from? The wife shrugs. There are some men in shirtsleeves and ties, some in polos and khakis, but most of the customers are middle-aged women in flowing layers, uniforms of casual business attire. She has a closet full of gauzy apparel; tent dresses in oatmeal, steel, rum raisin; rayon floral smocks; sheer scarfs, clunky jewelry. A moment later, she recognizes herself walking across the room with a plate piled high with something glowing orange. Her eyes are soon distracted by the sight of another her, standing at the entrance, wearing a beige linen blazer, hugging a friend. Around the room, she sees herself multiplied tens of times. How many client lunches has she had in the greater Triangle area over the last twenty years? How many deals sealed over chicken Caesar salads? Now she is looking in, at the light chatter, the fawning hand gestures, napkins on crossed-legged laps, polite asides, sweet teas.

*

The wife avoids Shallendorf’s stare. His shoes are always the same brown shoes. A doctor with one pair of shoes. How can it be that the director of the largest neonatology department in the state of North Carolina doesn’t have a wife who will threaten to leave him if he doesn’t buy himself a new pair of shoes? There is never good news. It is the degree of bad that is in the wager. Shallendorf seems fortified by the time he spends with them. She means this not in a craven sense. Some people are just better equipped to meet suffering head-on. This is Shallendorf.

*

Go home, Nurse Jean insists, go home together, and not long after the couple is pulling into their driveway. Home is home, unchanged by circumstance, they think. Walking through the front door without the baby, the tears are not for the baby, the wife declares. When she goes to the bathroom, there are plenty more tears. The husband, alone in the living room, looks suggestively at the spot on the floor before bringing pillows off the couch and setting them down. Neither of them has the fortitude to care for a child with exceptional needs, they fear as they rest their heads on the pillows, spread their bodies heavy to the ground and look up at the ceiling.

*

Rebel is suddenly gone. The wife moves away from the glass toward the waiting room to find Dee Dee who, she realizes, is gone, too, then to find a nurse who informs her they have graduated to some lower level of care. The wife walks away, panic receding from the tips of her fingers, and returns to the glass, stands alone at the glass, an orbit of silent space around her keeping others at bay. Beyond the glass, there are beeping sounds, compressed air sounds, new newborns, new parents in the flush of disaster, Nurse Jean in her duck-printed blouse.

*

Shallendorf stands and moves toward the door, opening it. The wife avoids his warm, compassionate stare that must be avoided at all costs. There are no right answers and no good outcomes, they have established. The couple turns and walks down the color-coded corridor.

*

The kindness of strangers is the only kind of kindness the wife can bear, she says to the husband. Yes, he nods, thinking of his dumpster friends, the Chinese waiter. No one she knows well has said anything that has not left her feeling kicked. She doesn’t blame them. It is not their fault their words implicate her. She has stopped talking to her sister. They now trade coded messages, texted words, and even in them, the wife finds judgement, disapproval.

*

Nurse Jean takes her by the hand and guides her, helping her into a sterilized smock, latex gloves, the husband following closely behind. Look at this beautiful baby, the nurse says, touch this most beautiful thing, and they stick hands through the cut-out holes in the incubator.

*

It is the suffering that the daughter will endure if she survives that offers the couple a path to letting her go. The path is bisected by the baby’s fierce will to live. Her living feels dependent on her own will and their will combined. When their will is shaky, they abandon her and leave her vulnerable. The fierceness of the daughter’s will, the power of the shallow scream at birth, is what gave them permission to take extraordinary measures.

*

The wife wants awkwardness. Or better yet, a profound stuttering uncomfortableness, a crippling inability to utter a single word. Not Shallendorf. He is a man of perfectly measured responses and charitable stares. His shoes are old things, dusty, scuffed, creased in wrinkly patterns across the vamp. Doesn’t he have a wife who can whisk these terrible things away in the middle of the night to a bin in a parking lot with a pull-down lever? The aglets have long peeled away leaving fraying ends. The slacks are brown, too, dripping heavily onto the shoes, especially dripping when he stands, folds of polyester cascading onto the shoes, the brown shoes, coated in sadness and hospital filth.

*

There is vibrancy in the open air. They stand waiting to cross the street as cars dart by. It is lunchtime, and they will go to the Chinese restaurant because the good habit circumvents the need to think. They step off the curb into the sunshine. The blare of a horn halts their next step; they back up, return to the curb where a moment is offered to reconsider the plan. Wordlessly, they make an about-face, reenter the hospital, return to the glass. They could don the sterilized robes, booties, gloves, but instead they remain standing on the outside, looking in on her, the familiar lightness filling their chests. She was never theirs, they think. And just as they would have eventually come to know in the course of their lives with her, they learn now, with swift acuity, an accelerated wisdom: She was never theirs. She has her own life, and it is a life as good as anyone’s, rich with meaning and beauty and hardship. It is her life, not theirs. They think of their own lives that are separate from hers and separate from one another’s. The panorama of glass has infinite edges. The lightness spreads out from their chests to their arms, fingers, the legs, threatening to whisk them away. Their toes, concealed in shoes, grip at the floor below them. It is her pain, and she must bear it.