Chapter 2: The Hospital Hallway
The lights were too white. They hummed above me and washed everything out, the blanket, the wall, the baby's face when the nurse lifted her hat to check her head. I couldn't tell what time it was. The window in that room didn't show snow. It showed a parking lot and a brick wall and a sky that was already dark.
I was in the bed and I wasn't sure how I'd gotten there. I remembered the carpet against my legs. I remembered how cold the floor had been through my pajama pants. Now the air was warm and it made my skin sting. My hands were shaking and I tried to keep them still around the baby.
A nurse was talking to me low, like I might break. She had a clipboard and she kept looking at the numbers on the monitor next to my bed.
"Wendy, can you tell me how long you were in the cold?" she asked. She pressed the back of her hand to my cheek, then to the baby's forehead. "Have you been shivering? Any dizziness?"
I tried to answer. My throat was dry. "Most of the day," I said. "I don't know. Since morning."
My husband was standing by the window with his coat still on. The suitcase wasn't there. The phone was in his hand, screen dark now. He didn't look at the nurse. He looked at me, and then he looked down at the floor like he couldn't hold the look.
The nurse pulled the white blanket up higher around the baby and tucked it. She checked my blood pressure again and wrote something down. The cuff squeezed hard and then let go.
"You've got some mild hypothermia signs," she said. "Exhaustion on top of postpartum. We're going to keep you both overnight at least. For observation. The pediatrician wants to monitor her temp and feeding."
I nodded. The baby made a small sound under the blanket and I felt my eyes fill up before I could stop them.
He stepped closer then. He turned the phone over in his hand once, and the light came on. I saw the familiar grid, four little squares, all the same apartment, all the same me on the floor. He didn't hold it out for me to take. He just held it where I could see it and then let it go dark again.
"Wendy," he said, quiet. "How long was the heat off?"
I stared at him. I could hear the monitor beeping, steady and slow.
"I called you," I said. "I called your phone."
He breathed in through his nose. His shoulders went up a little under that dark coat. "I know. I was on the train." He glanced at the nurse, then back at me. "Did you turn it off?"
I shook my head. I didn't have more than that.
The nurse didn't write that down. She looked at him instead.
"Is your heat working at home?" she asked him directly.
He didn't answer right away. His jaw moved. "No," he said finally. "It was off when I got there. The apartment was... it was very cold."
She made a note. Her face didn't change much but something in it tightened.
"That's a problem for discharge," she said. She pulled the curtain a little more closed around the bed and lowered her voice. "We can't send a three-day-old home to a house with no heat. Not in this weather. That's an unsafe environment. Do you have family you can stay with? Someone who can help tonight if we get you stable?"
I felt the heat in my face go cold again. "We have the apartment," I said. "That's our place."
He didn't say anything. He looked at his phone again, like it would give him a different answer.
The nurse kept her eyes on me. "Is there someone at home who helps with the baby? Your mom, or his mom, or a friend?"
I thought about the bassinet by the window. The light carpet. The way the air had felt when I sat down because I was too tired to stand and then couldn't get up again.
"My mom was supposed to come," I said.
The nurse nodded and wrote that down too. "We'll have our social worker stop by before morning. It's standard when we see housing or heating issues with a newborn. She'll talk through options so you're not going back to a freezing apartment."
He shifted his weight. "Can I fix it tonight? Call the gas company?"
The nurse looked at him over her glasses. "You can try, but we need a confirmed warm place on record before we discharge." She turned back to me and put her hand gently on my arm. "For now, you rest. Keep her skin to skin if you can. Buzz if her breathing changes."
She didn't ask him anything about the money. She hadn't seen the banking app. She just saw a cold apartment and a tired mother and a baby who shouldn't have been on the floor.
She went to the door and paused. "Sir, I need to do a quick exam. Do you mind stepping out to the hallway for a few minutes? There's coffee at the nurses' station."
He hesitated. He looked at me like he wanted to say something else, to explain the screen he'd shown me. His hand tightened around the phone.
"I'll be right outside," he said. It was the first thing he'd said that sounded like a promise.
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He left the phone on the tray table when he went. The screen was dark, but I could see my reflection in it, and the white ceiling lights behind me.
The door clicked. The nurse pulled the curtain around the bed, and the room got smaller and quieter, just the two of us and the beeping and the question he hadn't answered about where every dollar had gone.
