I stand in the doorway while you writhe on the couch—puke and piss make a pallet on your sheets. I remember how you looked in your incubator at St. Elizabeth’s twenty years ago. Jaundiced and yellow. A tiny straw fed air through your nose that your lungs couldn’t take. I pressed my hand to the warm glass cage.

“Don’t die,” I said to you. “I’ll be good. Just please don’t die.”

The surgery to save your life was optional, the doctor said through a mask, while your mother lay unconscious in the OR. Your chance of life was so low that insurance wouldn’t cover it. In the game of numbers you came up short. A ball bounced around a roulette table in my mind. They would understand if I said no. I signed the form so hard the tip of the pen ripped through the stack of sheets.

Out the window, the dawn sky is a pale gray where the sun is yet to rise. You sob and shudder on the couch as if you are allergic to the air around you—to the blood in your veins. You murmur words to yourself that I can’t conceive. It sounds like “don’t,” or “Dad,” or neither of those things. I saved the pen I used to sign those forms even after it ran out of ink. The pillow at the end of the couch is a blood-soaked marshmallow. I pick it up and hold it like a baby, testing its weight. I feel the hemmed edges and grip them tight.

 

When I asked if the pain medication from your surgery would affect your life, they said they wouldn’t know for years. The doctor removed his mask and smiled as he pat my shoulder. It was a miracle that you were alive.

Now, you curl and writhe and cocoon in your sheets on the couch like a baby swallowed by its diaper. I inch toward you across the white rug, stained pink with your puke. I tuck the pillow under my arm and place a hand on your shoulder. You twist away from me, as if my touch were a hot coal dropped down the back of your shirt. I recoil and examine the crease in my palm. A scar from slicing an apple interrupts the longest line.

I squeeze my eyes closed and see that baby in the glass—button nosed, yellowed skin, with a surgical scar wrapped around its chicken-bone ribs. You pressed a foot to the glass ceiling. Your pink flesh turned white, but you couldn’t touch my skin. You looked up at me and cried before the medicine put you to sleep. 

I open my eyes and see your shell is different now. You writhe and squirm, but this isn’t glass, and you can’t escape your skin. I hold the pillow above your face, and it muffles the sound of your frantic breath. The morning sun arrives and the cushion casts a shadow across your face. Robins announce dawn from the winter’s naked trees.

But the sun persists past the pillow and blankets you with yellow-jaundiced light. You burp and fart and shudder and lay still. The breath slows and sweat rests on your upper lip in tiny droplets like morning dew. I step back and feel the sharp corner of the coffee table against my leg. I clutch the cushion to my chest with shaky hands. The windowpane lays a crisscross shadow on your chest. The room smells like sweat and piss, and dust particles float in light.

You yawn and open your eyes and reach a hand up towards me. I stand there with trembling hands, holding the pillow. My body shakes while the robins sing. On your seventh day alive, the glass case opened, and I held your yellow body to my naked skin. Now I rip off my shirt and pull you into my chest, and let the pillow fall by my feet.