"You sure will," Ivy piped in. "I'll send you the tab." She snorted and laughed, then she started crying. Her father glanced her way, then looked at Peter. He shook his head in disappointment and went to his daughter's side.
"I'm so sorry," Peter said to Mrs. Green.
"To say the least," she said, joining her husband and daughter.
Peter exited the room carrying the knapsack. From the hallway he took one last look at Ivy and her parents before the door closed, shutting out the image huddled behind it. He was dazed by the events of the last forty-eight hours. He slowly made his way down the corridor, turning once to look back at the closed door to her room. The first thought to surface through his haze of emotions was of the baby. He had promised these people that he would care for her.
He paused before the nurses' station and asked how to reach the neonatal care unit. He tramped down the corridor, rounded the corner, and pushed through a set of swinging double doors. To the nurse sitting at a small desk, he said, "Pardon me, which baby is the Jones-Green baby? I'm her father."
The nurse led him into a clean room and instructed him to put on a sterile gown and a face mask. He followed her orders in silence. Dressed in the sanitary outfit, he followed the nurse into a room containing a row of clear plastic bubble-like incubators, one of which held his baby's fragile baby. It was a strange setting, surreal, like something out of a science fiction film.
"Here she is," the nurse said.
Encased in the hygienic shell lay his baby girl. She was tiny, and he could see thin, pulsing veins through her skin and bruises all over her body. Her head! It looked so huge and unnatural, he thought with alarm. He leaned closer, panicked.
The nurse saw his aghast expression and touched a gloved hand to his arm. "Oh, don't worry. That's normal," she said. "All the rest of her will catch up in the next couple of weeks. The head develops a little faster at this stage. It's perfectly ordinary."
"What is all this?" he asked, studying the clear tubes entering her nostrils and poking into her arms and belly, the wires and probes taped to her impossible little body.