Ally felt her own breath kicked out of her. She moved back so the nurse could adjust Hope's tubes and change her diaper and draw her blood—once an hour they drew her blood, to make sure Hope was getting enough oxygen from the machine that was delivering it to her. Ally couldn't watch. She went back to her room, got her manuscript. Came back and put on fresh booties, a fresh hairnet. Lathered her hands and arms with more antiseptic soap than was necessary, and returned to her daughter's side. When she was seated again, she began reading through the mask over her nose and mouth, not caring what any of the others in the neonatal intensive care unit—the doctors, the nurses, the technicians—thought of her story, her voice even more gentle than usual against the beeping monitors, the hard, sterile surfaces, the glaring hospital lights.
She would ask Jim to read, too, wanting her baby to hear her father's melodic Indian accent, her words sounding in his music, which was Ally's music, too, no matter what her own parents might think. Day and night, they read to exhaustion, trying not to think this might be the only chance they would have to read to their little girl.
Hope's first awful week in intensive care—making no progress toward breathing on her own—settled into the beginning of a second week, day eight. Ally did not want to be discharged from the hospital herself; she couldn't imagine leaving her baby there all by herself. She could hardly speak, but it was there in the cut of her cheekbone against her skin, in her stooped posture, in the strands of her long dark hair falling out in clumps.
Jim finally convinced her she had to come home, to get a good night's sleep in her own bed, to keep up her strength. “You can't do anything the doctors and nurses aren't already doing,” he said. “Hope needs you to be strong for her. She needs you to get some rest.”
Ally relented, finally, and Jim checked her out of the hospital, eased her into the passenger seat of her white Chevy Nova, and brought her home. He helped her up the stairs and tucked her into bed, climbing in next to her. He woke at 3 A.M., though, to find Ally's side of the bed empty. She had pulled her clothes back on quietly in the darkened bedroom, climbed into her Nova, and returned to the hospital. She'd bought a stale cup of coffee from a machine in the waiting room and drunk it on the way down the hall, tossing what she hadn't finished into the trash outside the neonatal intensive care unit. She'd donned the scrubs and booties and hairnet again, and washed to the elbow, working the foot pedals easily, used to anything by then.
“I just couldn't bear to leave her all alone in the cold, bright lights of this awful room,” she told Jim when he found her there. Leave her alone to die, that's what she was thinking, or what she was not allowing herself to think. If she left the hospital, went home to sleep for even a few hours, Hope might die there, all alone, with no one to hold her tiny hand.
THAT WAS THE WEEK Arlene Peets announced she was moving to one of the big New York publishers. Kath was devastated, of course. She loved that job, loved working with Arlene, who'd moved her from copy editor to assistant, which hadn't sounded like much of a move in the right direction to us, but Kath said if it got any better, she'd have to hire someone to help her enjoy it. “I'm busier than a moth in a brand-new wool mitten,” she said. Instead of finding typos and double-checking facts, she was reading through manuscripts, making the first cut, sitting down with Arlene over lunch to recommend which manuscripts she ought to read herself.
“I just can't believe she's up and moving to New York without so much as a how-do-you-do,” Kath told us.
It wasn't as if there were a million publishing jobs to be had in San Francisco back then, either. But Kath put together a résumé, then knocked on Arlene's door, and went in and sat down, gathered her courage, and asked for a letter of recommendation.
“A recommendation?” Arlene asked.
Kath, sure she sounded ridiculous, said, “So I can apply for a new job.”
“To work for the competition?” Arlene said. “I can't let you do that, Kath.”
Kath looked to the piles of stacked manuscripts—manuscripts she'd spent hours on, often taking them home, reading late into the night, working her butt off for Arlene. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, she reminded herself. But all of a sudden she didn't much care about leaving the whole world blind if it came to that. She'd like to start with that little bitch of a medical student.
“Well, that really cocks my pistol, Arlene,” she said. “Here I am working my wide rear off for you and thinking you like my work, and . . .” She stood up. She didn't even realize it. She towered over Arlene at her desk. “You do like my work, you can't tell me now you don't! You're just being ugly here, for not a reason in the whole damned world. You're walking away from this place yourself, but you're going to leave me in the lurch, with no recommendation to—”