silas started the way all babies do: a divided cell, a spot of blood. Then, after all the work, the perils of miscarriage, the sickness and swelling, he was born too early, and I found that my precious boy had a bad heart. He needed blood and money and about a million years of good luck. You can’t predict this kind of thing; it’s the sort of perversity that makes a believer out of anyone, that focuses all those random thoughts into a single laser point of hope.
There are reports that scientists have tried to measure the weight of the soul. They measure a body just before the life goes, and again right after. The mathematical difference is the soul. Body weight plus soul equals life. Isn’t that something?
After all this, I donate blood like a maniac. I drive down to the Red Cross, hand them my donation card, and fill in the same questionnaire every time I come, a form with inquiries about risky behavior: hooker sex (no), drug habits (no), extended stays in England (for the apparent danger of mad-cow disease; I scribble “vegetarian” between the slots for yes and no). Then my turn comes, and I offer my arm to the nurse to swab and stick. Today, it’s Bette. I smile, but she is all business, tying the yellow rubber tourniquet above my elbow. I lie back and am conscious of the drip, drip, drip.
Imagine all that fluid rushing around under the skin. No one thinks about blood. You get married. You have the tubal ligation reversed, and then, dream of dreams, conception occurs, like that. And then your precious angel, your miracle, is born and weighs only two pounds. Two pounds! A couple of pounds is nothing. It’s a Happy Meal. A Stanley hammer. Two boxes of butter.
You don’t know what you are capable of until chaos calls your name, what reserves you might have. You have two degrees, important work, a fine marriage. But then the unexplainable happens, and you shoot through all the prayers you ever forgot and quickly move on to those you never learned. Supplications form out of unlikely words, shape themselves out of sky and crawling traffic and scrambled eggs.
When a baby is born broken, you learn to say please: Please guide the hands of the surgeons who will cut and scrape and make small sutures in the meaty tissue of his heart to repair it. Please make blood flow like rain from the clouds of angels, like streaming light from Christ’s wounds. Please becomes your mantra. Please please please, hinging on thank you, on if only.
You bargain, you cajole, you beg, and after a while you begin to wonder if God is listening or if he has turned down the volume on your case. After all, this is one little infant. Does he have his eye on every sparrow? There are so many. There are typhoons, giant earthquakes, famine. There are places where a thousand babies die under a blistering sun. Take me, you barter. I’ll do it, have a hole in my heart. They can put the Teflon patch on me, where the blood sucks through. I’ll do it, I will.
at the blood bank there is a man-boy in the next chair, a little challenged I think, a little not-quite-right. His hair is plastered to his scalp. He is excited about that big red naugahyde recliner, a needle in his skin, a tube dripping blood into a little sack. There is a poster on the wall behind him depicting a ruby-mouthed, arms-stretched-wide Red Cross battlefield nurse. I try to imagine him as someone’s baby.
“Why are you here?” I reach my free arm across the aisle between us, toward his tubing, the blood drip-dripping.
“I was in a accident,” he says. “I hurt my head. Bad.”
“I’m sorry.”
The man-boy shifts in his chair. “Do you know who Cal Ripken is?” His eyes are unnaturally bright, his skin flushed.
I nod encouragingly.
“I want to be the Cal Ripken of blood donors,” he confides. “I want to donate forty pints of blood before I’m forty.”
“Good for you,” I say. “Good for you.”
The fact that his brain was damaged as a result of an accident doesn’t seem to bother him. It is a detail that he has memorized, something he keeps, like a dime in his pocket.
It is now two years since Silas was born. His language development is delayed because he was intubated for so long, and he’s learning to sign words like more and cookie. Forty is a long shot I can’t even dream about.
“I got the whole collection of T-shirts for donating blood,” the man-boy continues. “Every one.”
“That’s nice.” My lips start to tingle the way they sometimes do when I’m reduced by a pint.
“I was riding my bike?” he says with wonder. “I got hit by a car?”
He hadn’t been wearing a helmet. There was impact and trajectory, chaos. There were the things that happen to a brain: Contusions. Swelling.
Suddenly, the man-boy smiles. “I was in a coma.”
silas was born into a frenzy of sudden light, of machines and science. The alarms on the monitors were terrifying, but also a comfort. I became addicted to that green, darting light, that urgent electronic beep. He was so small, floating in that hospital bassinet, taped up with tubes, I couldn’t assume that he wouldn’t vanish. I gathered myself into my own arms, peered into the doe-gaze of other mothers, realized that there were babies who were sicker than mine: other defective preemies, blue-eyed toddlers with cancer, curly-haired doll-babies whose blood contained cells that were misshapen, sharp, and that caused them to wince and cry. I knew that some of those tots would not leave Saint John’s, no matter how inventive the white coats got.
Blood has no meaning until you need some. It is made mostly of water and empty space. Then a slip of the Christmas carving knife opens the dam. You find out that blood is a big flipping deal, that sick babies need blood the way they need the touch.
When Silas was transfused, he turned from shadowy blue to pink. Pink! It was astonishing. Not fuchsia, or oleander, or sunset, but a dewy, delicious pink, like the inside of your mouth. He hovered in a tangle of lines and tubes and monitors, and they transfused him through the top of his head because it was the biggest vein they could find, and he was a work of art. The ocean slipped through my eyes when that blushing color began to creep up his face, over his lips, up to the feathery eyebrows, like bird-commas on his forehead. How can they shrink medicine down like that? To the size of a whisper? What kind of bargain do the researchers make with God?
When he was five weeks old, I brought him home; then I carried him back at eight weeks, for the operation. They sliced his chest open, fixed the broken part. It took twenty pints of blood to save Silas: five to prime the machine that kept him alive, fifteen to stop the leak.
bette appears at my chair, rests her warm hand on my cool arm. “You’re done, sweetie.” She winks. She pulls the needle out, clamps off the tube, puts a piece of cotton on the insertion site. I raise my arm over my head, above a heart that pumps strong, no matter what.
Bette turns from me and begins to fuss with the man-boy’s bag of blood, hefting it in her hand, jiggling it, measuring the weight. He’s a slow bleeder. The man-boy cranes his neck around the curve of her hip. His smile is big, crooked. “I’ll see you in two months,” he whispers.
I observe the olive of his skin, the way the veins rise up beneath the surface. I glance at the bag he fills with blood, and I wonder, Was he one of the donors? The odds are against it, but it could happen. I do that now. I look at people donating blood and wonder if their blood got pumped into my baby’s heart. That square-necked construction worker? That dark-skinned man? That Japanese college student with the blue-black hair? I study them and think, My son is alive by the grace of you and you and you.
An infant’s heart pumps cups of blood through its tiny body at ninety counts a minute. If there’s a leak, you learn, the mathematics falter, and you overcome your squeamishness about bodily fluids in a hurry. There is no time for contemplation. There is a breach that must be fixed.
The man across the aisle from me presses his lips tight as a nurse pushes a needle against his arm until the skin yields to the point like fabric. He is wearing a pastel shirt and khaki pants, as if he’s just come off the golf course.
Another man has a suit jacket slung over the back of his chair, a starched shirt rolled up to expose hairy arms. His suit pants are a fine gray flannel. His blond hair is clipped short, precise.
On the way out, I stop by his chair, touch his shoe. We are a family, we donors. “Why are you here?”
“The knee,” he says, pointing to his leg. “Surgery.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t want strange blood,” he tells me and juts his chin toward the exit, meaning, from out there. “You never know.”
He’s donating for himself. If they don’t need the blood for his operation, it will be discarded. They won’t be able to use it.
“It’s safe,” I tell him. “They test it.”
He turns his head away from me, from Bette, who comes to check the bag, to see how fast it’s filling. She picks the bag up, squishes the middle, shakes it to mix up the anticoagulant, but something goes wrong, and a seam in the bag opens, a defect. Blood spills through her fingers, splashes down her leg, onto her white shoe, over the floor. The man whose blood it is gapes as if he’s been stabbed.
“Oh, my Lord, get back,” Bette hisses. “Stand away.” She shoves me hard with her free hand, but I am not afraid. In emergency mode, she clamps the tube, makes the man raise his arm over his head to staunch the flow.
“Gina!” she yells to the other nurse. “Come quick! Help!”
Gina hurries over holding a box with the biohazard symbol on the side and begins to sop up the wasted blood. There is the stink of bleach and of rubbing alcohol.
My head feels light and I want to cry, but I can’t. There are six of us in the donation center, performing a ritual that I know by heart, but which has been shattered by something unforeseen: an accident, despite precautions. Blue veins, red blood, arms and legs and hearts. A leak, a leak.
Bette looks at me. “You OK? Did any get on you?”
I shake my head. I’m fine, relieved, touched by the awareness that it can all change in a minute. Everything. I hold a hand over my arm, over the bandage that covers the needle mark, and move across the room.
The girl at the snack counter is new. The blood bank is a clearinghouse for community-service volunteers from the group home around the corner. She is newly minted and capable of great responsibility, of wearing a smock with Loretta stitched in red letters over the heart.
“All finished now,” she says, pushing a packet of Chips Ahoy across the counter at me. Her hands are large, and her eyes are like chips of blue glass. “How do you feel?”
“Fine,” I tell her. “And lucky. I feel lucky and fine.”
“I know what you mean,” she says. “Blood is the gift of life.” It’s a donor-recruiting slogan, but she says it with conviction.
I recover a little, tell Loretta that my son used to have transfusions, but that he doesn’t need them anymore. I tell her that everyone I know donates blood now.
“That’s nice,” she says. “You have a little boy.”
“Silas — he was a miracle baby.”
“He used to need blood.”
“Yes.”
“But not anymore.”
“No.”
“You can never have too much blood.”
The matter is settled, and Loretta hands me apple juice, her job. I peer into her narrow eyes and understand that she was a miracle also, a genetic slip, possibly created from too-old eggs or a defective sperm, born before the technology of amniotic testing — or born, perhaps, in spite of it.
This story originally appeared in Red Rock Review.
