Baby's Chasm by Sarah Young
“The nurses wheel his spectral body on a sweeping ghost gurney”
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The scene of violence rips my breath, punches my eyes. My baby looks brutalized, not healed. The nurses wheel his spectral body on a sweeping ghost gurney from the O.R. to the children’s ward. The four-hour cleft palate surgery – the operation to close the fissure that divides the roof of his mouth – is over.
I bolt. In the empty hall my chest heaves, my throat convulses. I may faint or vomit. No words in this body, no voice I know. I breathe deep, rush back to my baby. This time I don’t turn my eyes away. His face, swollen, bruised blue, purple, crimson. Elfin lips caked with blood, saliva. His infant gown grisly with stains. Moppet arms splayed upright, wrapped in padded splints. Splints to protect his arms from bending to touch the mouth. His mouth, a raw fight scene.
The cranio-facial surgeon enters and peers above the red-rimmed glasses perched at the end of his nose. He says, we made two hundred stitches in his mouth, seven suture packs, layers of stitches, some will be removed next week, some will dissolve over time, others will remain for life, the nurse will remove the tongue stitch-and-wrap tomorrow, you’ll feed him with a long skinny nipple that won’t touch his palate while it heals, when he sleeps you’ll place him in a chest restraint and tie it to his crib slats so he won’t roll over and damage the palate repair, do you have any questions? I shake my head, wipe my eyes, look into the surgeon’s face. Doesn’t he know? I just want to hold my baby.
Seven months earlier in northern China, my son had been abandoned under a town bridge soon after birth. Born with a deep cleft lip and palate, he was “canfei" meaning, in Chinese, "handicapped, useless." The canfei are commonly derided, disgraced, and shunned. I remember the life my baby left behind and the mother’s promise I made to love and protect him forever.
Four weeks later. Morning sun blazes through a canopy of Douglas Fir into clerestory windows to the oak floor. Baby and I sit on a fleece blanket. Today his arm splints, quilted in pastel blue and yellow elephants, come off. Our laughter ricochets between prisms of sunlight. It feels like a birthday party. I peel back the velcro straps, as if bright ribbons. Under layers of batting and gauze, I unwrap one shrouded arm, then the other. Like late winter twigs, smooth, pale, on the cusp of budding. Like fine bone china, translucent with light and shadow, thin, strong.
Baby’s bare arms waver, stall, then lift and flit across his face. Fledgling fists hone to his ears, nuzzle and probe like hummingbirds to flowers. Like pulling skeins of sweet taffy. He hungrily kneads his ears. The minutes pass. I marvel at the pure intention in this small body. His fingers dance, rapt, over his face. He stretches his arms, looks quizzically at one palm, then the other. He beams, lifts his deep sable eyes, flecked with gold, to look at me, shrieks with delight, then returns his hands to ambrosial ears.
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Header image courtesy of Ariana Page Russell. To view more of her art, go here.
Before retreating to the Pacific Northwest seaside, Sarah schooled, loved, worked and became a mother overseas. She’s lived in San Francisco, Paris, England, and rural Japan. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in A Passage to the Heart: Writings from Families with Children from China, Tidepools, and Clover, A Literary Rag. She is finishing a memoir and is growing her poetry fins. She loves to write because it blooms, it swings, and sometimes it throws you into the air.