the long line of vehicles trooping through evening rush hour. The drive home, he thought. I have to find some way of driving home, of turning back into the person I used to be. I need to find new interests, I need to get a little cheerfulness back into my heart. I want to feel like laughing. Actually, I’m fine with just feeling like smiling. I want to feel those emotions I can’t even remember now, like having fun, a sense of joy. Tenderness.
Memory is a strange thing. It was his hands that responded, when the idea of tenderness came to mind. The hands that had held that baby girl, if only for a few fleeting instants. It had all happened that same morning, and yet now it felt as if a century had passed since then. He had carried her, and he could still feel how light, delicate, soft, and warm she’d been through the onesie that she wore. The memory of his hands transmitted the reverberation of a sentiment he’d never felt before, and the sense of what he now realized he was missing.
As if by chance, he found himself standing in front of the pediatric hospital where the little one was being cared for. He shot a glance at his watch and realized it was pretty late: he’d driven around aimlessly, with no destination whatsoever, for almost two hours, accompanied by the music from the car radio in the background, enchanted by the lights of the city that reflected off the wet asphalt.
It was almost eleven o’clock at night. Who knows how a pediatric hospital operates at that hour.
Just as he was driving past the gate, he saw a car leave the parking lot, opening up an empty slot directly in front of him. On impulse, he swung the steering wheel and parked, switching off the engine.
He got out of the car, without any specific plan. He headed toward the entrance and went in, nodding distractedly toward the guard, who responded to his greeting, perhaps mistaking him for a doctor. He climbed the steps and headed for the neonatal intensive therapy unit: he certainly knew the way. At the end of the hallway was a partition wall with a door and a buzzer next to an intercom. He stopped, baffled, and feeling like an idiot; if anyone asked him who he was and what he was doing there, he wouldn’t have known how to respond.
Suddenly, the door swung open with a click, allowing a couple to emerge. The man looked bone-weary, his hair disheveled and his collar unbuttoned, with a tie hanging loose around his neck; in one hand he was carrying a leather bag and an umbrella. The woman had the marks of recent tears on her face, her eyes were red and puffy; she was leaning her weight on her companion’s arm, and he was whispering something in her ear. They walked past him, utterly indifferent to his presence, except for a distracted glance from the man. As he promptly caught the door before it could swing shut, Romano made out a few murmured words: He looked better to me . . . I’m sure of it . . . you’ll see, he’ll get better, it will all be okay.
The hallway, once he’d stepped through the partition wall, changed. On the walls, thumbtacked to large cork bulletin boards, were photographs of children of every age and color, playing, smiling, and blowing out candles. And then there were letters, drawings, and colorful cards in which little patients expressed their gratitude that they were still alive; and who could even say if they still were? Romano let his gaze run over the pictures, hypnotized by eyes, mouths, and hands. Suddenly he felt a lump of emotion form in his throat, as if he had come to know those tiny creatures personally, one by one, and had spent the night watching over them, as if the man supporting his heartbroken, grief-stricken wife was him, each time, many times over.
“They’re alive, you know,” whispered a voice behind him. “They’re all alive. As for the ones that, for whatever reason, are no longer with us? You’ll never see them up on those walls. We don’t think it would be right to show them to everyone who comes here.”
Romano turned around with a start and found himself face to face with Dr. Penna’s big blue eyes.
“Excuse me, I . . . The door was open, two people were leaving, and . . . ”
Doctor Susy shot a glance behind her and a sad smile appeared on her face.
“Yes. Fabio’s Mamma and Papà. Fabio is just two months old; he seemed completely normal, but then he fell asleep and never woke up. He’s been here for four weeks, we’ve operated on him three times, but he just won’t regain consciousness. They’re wearing themselves out, we explained to them that there’s no need for them to stay here every day until late at night, but they can’t seem to stay away. It happens frequently, you know. It’s as if the children, even though they’re unconscious, are asking those who love them for help.”
Romano ran the back of his hand over his mouth and said: “I wasn’t thinking of coming by here at all. Furthest thing from my mind. Then, I don’t know how it happened, I just found myself parking downstairs. And I came in.”
The doctor shot him a sly grin.
“Well, if you really found a parking spot downstairs, then there can be no doubt, this was a sign of destiny. Come with me.”
She headed down the hallway lined with corkboards, spangled with colorful smiles and salutations.
“So, do you always work the night shift?” Romano asked her.
Dr. Penna replied as they went on walking.
“No, no, heavens, no. I just happened to switch shifts with a colleague, I wanted to keep an eye on Giorgia, follow her case.”
Hearing his wife’s name uttered like that, the name that he’d impulsively given to the baby girl, produced a strange effect in Francesco. He felt even closer to and more responsible for the newborn baby girl, and he also felt a vague sense of guilt, as if he’d stolen something that didn’t belong to him. When and if they ever found the mother, he’d ask her right away what she had planned to name her daughter, and he would straighten things out.
The doctor came to a halt outside a room drenched in a gentle luminescence; on the other side of a large pane of glass stood a line of cribs, one next to the other.
“These babies are all in prerelease. Luckily, the patients here are all on the mend, soon they’ll be going home. Naturally, we can’t lower our guard, but at least we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
In the next room, which was slightly smaller, there were now both cribs and incubators. Dr. Penna greeted a nurse with an absentminded gesture as the other woman clogged along from crib to crib, incubator to incubator, attentively studying the sleeping babies.
“This is neonatal pathology. This is where we keep the patients who seem to be improving, on the path to health, with therapies that are working effectively and conditions we hope to resolve quickly.”
He took a few more steps and then slowed to a halt. Two large plate-glass windows looked out onto a brightly lit room where two women in lab coats were busying themselves around work stations, equipped with incubators, gurneys, pumps, and monitors. The doctor didn’t need to make it clear to him that this was the intensive care unit for babies at imminent risk of death, and that those women and the babies they were caring for were fighting the ultimate, decisive battle.
Romano suddenly realized that from that room, unlike the others, there came no sounds whatsoever. Not a whimper, not a sob, not a wail. Here the battle was being waged in complete, chilling silence.
The doctor pointed to one of the incubators and Romano focused his gaze. He made out a card upon which Giorgia was written in red block print. Again, Romano felt a pang in his heart.
The baby girl was naked, wearing only a diaper. She had electrodes on her chest and tummy, and a probe clipped to her foot connected her to a monitor upon which appeared a series of jagged lines and incomprehensible data readouts. Her eyes were shut, and a tube ran out of her mouth.
“Now she’s normothermic, almost 98 degrees,” Dr. Penna whispered almost too softly to be heard. “As you can see, she’s gotten a little color back, and her heartbeat has stabilized. But she still can’t breathe on her own, and she doesn’t respond to external stimuli.”
Something strange was happening to Romano, something he’d never experienced before. A lump was rising in his throat and he was feeling a powerful tingling in