on February 12, a day too late to catch my brother, and treated me like a criminal, did I know I’d been one. Aiding and abetting a fugitive. Accessory after the fact to the crime of first-degree murder. The detectives hauled me down to the station. Demanded that I produce an alibi for the night a convenience store had been robbed in Utah. Four black men had been involved. Three had been tentatively identified, which left one unaccounted for. I was black. My brother was a suspect. So perhaps I was the fourth perpetrator. No matter that I lived four hundred miles from the scene of the crime. No matter that I wrote books and taught literature and creative writing at the university. I was black. Robby was my brother. Those unalterable facts would always incriminate me.
Robby passed through Laramie briefly and continued on his way. That’s about it. I wished for more, then and now. Most of what I can recall makes the evening of his visit seem bland, uneventful, though an incident in Jamila’s room, beside her crib, is an exception. That and the moment I watched Robby’s shoulders disappear down the hallway stairs to the kids’ playroom, where a roll-away cot and some extra mattresses had been set out for sleeping. Those moments imprinted. I’ll carry the sounds and sights to my grave.
I’d been alone with my brother a few minutes in the kitchen, then in the hall outside Jamila’s room. I advised him to stay in Laramie a few days, catch his breath, unwind. Warned him about the shoot-em-up mentality of Western cops, the subtle and not-so-subtle racism of the region. How three black men in a car would arouse suspicion anytime, anywhere they stopped.
Little else to say. I started a thousand conversations inside my head. None was appropriate, none addressed Robby’s anguish, his raw nerves. He was running, he was afraid, and nothing anyone said could bring the dead man in Pittsburgh back to life. I needed to hear Robby’s version of what had happened. Had there been a robbery, a shooting? Why? Why?
In our first private moment since I’d picked him up at Laramie Lanes, as we stood outside the baby’s room, my questions never got asked. Too many whys. Why did I want to know? Why was I asking? Why had this moment been so long in coming? Why was there a murdered man between us, another life to account for, now when we had just a few moments alone together? Perhaps Robby did volunteer a version of the crime. Perhaps I listened and buried what I heard. What I remember is telling him about the new baby. In the hall, then in her room, when we peeked in and discovered her wide awake in her crib, I recounted the events surrounding her birth.
Jamila. Her name means “beautiful” in Arabic. Not so much outer good looks as inner peace, harmony. At least that’s what I’ve been told. Neither Judy nor I knew the significance of the name when we chose it. We just liked the sound. It turns out to fit perfectly.
Your new niece is something else. Beautiful inside and out. Hard to believe how friendly and calm she is after all she’s been through. You’re the first one from home to see her.
I didn’t tell my brother the entire story. We’d need more time. Anyway, Judy should fill in the gory details. In a way it’s her story. I’d almost lost them both, wife and daughter. Judy had earned the right to tell the story. Done the bleeding. She was the one who nearly died giving birth.
Besides, on that night eight years ago I wasn’t ready to say what I felt. The incidents were too close, too raw. The nightmare ride behind an ambulance, following it seventy miles from Fort Collins to Denver. Not knowing, the whole time, what was happening inside the box of flashing lights that held my wife. Judy’s water had broken just after a visit to a specialist in Fort Collins. Emergency procedures were necessary because she had developed placenta previa, a condition that could cause severe hemorrhaging in the mother and fatal prematurity for her baby. I had only half listened to the doctor’s technical explanation of the problem. Enough to know it could be life-threatening to mother and infant. Enough to picture the unborn child trapped in its watery cell. Enough to get tight-jawed at the irony of nature working against itself, the shell of flesh and blood my woman’s body had wrapped round our child to protect and feed it also blocking the exit from her womb. Placenta previa meant a child’s only chance for life was cesarian section, with all the usual attendant risks extremely heightened.
Were the technicians in the back of the ambulance giving blood, taking blood? Were they administering oxygen to my wife? To our child? Needles, tubes, a siren wailing, the crackle of static as the paramedics communicated with doctors in Denver. Had the fetus already been rushed into the world, flopping helpless as a fish because its lungs were still too much like gills to draw breath from the air?
A long, bloody birth in Denver. Judy on the table three and a half hours. Eight pints of blood fed into her body as eight pints seeped out into a calibrated glass container beside the operating table. I had watched it happening. Tough throughout the cutting, the suturing, the flurries of frantic activity, the appearance of the slick, red fetus, the snipping of the umbilical, the discarding of the wet, liverish-looking, offending bag, tough until near the end when the steady ping, ping, ping of blood dripping into the jar loosened the knot of my detachment and my stomach flip-flopped once uncontrollably, heaving up bile to the brim of my throat. Had to get up off the stool then, step back from the center of the operating room, gulp fresh air.
With Judy recovered and Jamila home, relatively safe after a two-month ordeal in the hospital, I still couldn’t talk about how I had felt during my first visit to the preemie ward at Colorado General. I was shocked by the room full of tiny, naked, wrinkled infants, each enclosed in a glass cage. Festooned with tubes and needles, they looked less like babies than like ancient, shrunken little men and women, prisoners gathered for some bizarre reason to die together under the sizzling lights.
Jamila’s arms and legs were thinner than my thinnest finger. Her threadlike veins were always breaking down from the pressure of I.V.’s. Since I.V.’s were keeping her alive, the nurses would have to search for new places to stick the needles. Each time she received an injection or had her veins probed for an I.V., Jamila would holler as if she’d received the final insult, as if after all the willpower she’d expended enduring the pain and discomfort of birth, no one had anything better to do than jab her one more time. What made her cries even harder to bear was their tininess. In my mind her cries rocked the foundations of the universe; they were bellows anything, anywhere with ears and a soul could hear. In fact, the high-pitched squeaks were barely audible a few feet from her glass cage. You could see them better than hear them because the effort of producing each cry wracked her body.
My reactions to the preemie ward had embarrassed me. I couldn’t help thinking of the newborns as diseased or unnatural, as creatures from another planet, miniature junkies feeding in transparent kennels. I had to get over the shame of acknowledging my daughter was one of them. Sooner than I expected, the shame, the sense of failure disintegrated and was replaced by fear, a fear I had yet to shake. Would probably never completely get over. The traumas attending her birth, the long trial in the premature ward, her continuous touch-and-go flirtation with death had enforced the reality of Jamila’s mortality. My fear had been morbid at first but gradually it turned around. Each breath she drew, each step she negotiated became cause for celebration. I loved all my children, but this girl child was precious in a special way that had brought me closer to all three. Life and death. Pain and joy. Having and losing. You couldn’t experience one without the other. Background and foreground. The presence of my daughter would always remind me that things didn’t have to be the way they were. We could have lost her. Could lose her today. And that was the way it would always be. Ebb and flow. Touch and go. Her arrival shattered complacency. When I looked in her eyes I was reminded to love her and treasure her and all the people I loved because nothing could be taken for granted.
I had solemnly introduced the new baby to my brother.
This is your Uncle Robby.
Robby’s first reaction had been to say, grinning from ear to ear, She looks just like Mommy. . . . My God, she’s a little picture of Mom.
As soon as Robby made the connection, its lightness, its uncontestability, its uncanny truth hit me. Of course. My mother’s face rose from the crib. I remembered a sepia, tattered-edged, oval portrait of Mom as a baby. And another snapshot of Bette French in Freeda French’s lap on the steps of the house on Cassina Way. The fifty-year-old images hovered, opaque, halfway between