I drove straight to the hospital, praying I was wrong and terrified that I wasn’t.
The drive should have taken twelve minutes. I know that because I had done it enough times over the years—when my husband had chest pains that turned out to be acid reflux, when my mother slipped in the shower and broke her wrist, when Daniel split his chin open at eleven trying to jump his bike over our garbage cans because he’d seen someone do it on television and assumed stupidity became skill if you admired it hard enough.
That day it felt endless.
Noah’s cries filled the car in sharp, ragged bursts, each one a little knife sawing at the center of my chest. He was strapped into his rear-facing car seat behind me, too small to understand what pain was happening to him and too helpless to do anything about it except scream. Every sound he made was wrong. Not a hungry cry. Not the wet, offended cry of a baby who needs changing. Not the thin, sleepy grumble he made when he wanted rocking and shushing and the soft edge of a blanket tucked under his chin.
