…supposed to come home at all.”
I stared at him.
“Patricia was the NICU nurse,” my husband, Tom, said. “The night Emma was born.”
I remembered very little about that night. Emma came six weeks early. There were complications. I lost a lot of blood. I was in the ICU for four days. When I woke up, Tom was beside me, holding my hand, saying everything was fine. Emma was “a little small” and “being watched.” Ten days later, I brought her home.
That was the story I’d believed for thirty years.
“She wasn’t a little small,” Tom said, crying now. “She was born with a heart defect. A bad one. The doctors told me she probably wouldn’t survive the first night. You were in the ICU. They told me you might not survive the night either. I had to sign the consent for her emergency surgery alone, at 3 a.m., while you were unconscious.”
He’d sat in the NICU hallway for six hours during the surgery. Patricia Williams was the nurse assigned to Emma. When the surgeon came out and said it had gone well, but the next forty-eight hours would decide everything, Patricia didn’t go home. She stayed past her shift. She sat with Emma all night, and the night after that. When Tom fell asleep in the chair, she covered him with a blanket.
“That photo,” he said. “It was taken the morning they told me she’d make it. Patricia took my phone and said, ‘You’ll want this someday.'”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” I asked.
“Because you almost died too,” he said. “When you woke up, you were so weak. The doctors said stress could set you back. So I decided you’d never have to carry that night. Emma had a scar on her chest, but she was perfect. And then years went by, and it felt like too much to say.”
Emma, it turned out, had known for five years. She’d asked about the scar when she was twenty-five, and her father told her. She’d found Patricia, now retired, through the hospital. They’d had coffee. Patricia had cried and said Emma was the baby she thought about most, out of thirty-one years of nursing.
Emma invited her to the wedding. She didn’t tell me why, because her father asked her not to.
I didn’t sleep that night. I was angry for a while. Angry that I’d been the only person in my own family who didn’t know how close I came to losing my daughter. Then, slowly, I wasn’t angry. I was just grateful.
At the wedding, Patricia sat at table three, in a navy dress, near the front. During the reception, I walked over and sat down next to her.
“I’m Emma’s mom,” I said. “I was in the ICU. I never got to say thank you.”
She took my hand. “You were busy surviving,” she said. “That was your job. Mine was her.”
During the father-daughter dance, Tom and Emma stopped halfway through the song. Emma walked over to table three, took Patricia’s hand and brought her onto the dance floor. The three of them finished the song together. Nobody in that room had dry eyes. Least of all me.
