The following day the baby comes down with something. They all used the antibacterial gel that Dan squirted into their palms, but nevertheless the baby has woken with a stuffy nose, and soon he is running a fever. Shlomi, who is against worrying, insists it is only a cold. But the fever climbs, and when the hitherto peaceful baby starts to scream and has trouble breathing while he feeds, Dan calls a doctor. It is three in the morning by then, but his old friend Yuli, a pediatrician, drives over in her car. When she sees the baby’s labored breathing and listens to the congestion in his chest, she tells them he has a bronchial infection and insists on driving them to the hospital. There the baby is given a chest X-ray, admitted to the pediatric ICU, placed in a metal crib under an oxygen tent, hooked to an IV and cardiac monitor, and fitted with a tiny clamp on his finger that sends rays of light through it, so that the doctors can keep track of the oxygen level in his blood. He has a respiratory virus that, while common enough in adults, can take a five-week-old’s life. By the time Tamar, Ilana, and the kids get to the Children’s Center at Ichilov, Shlomi is frightened. He stares at the baby’s vital signs rising and falling on the monitor, or slouches next to the crib, stroking his child with a hand slipped under the plastic tent. A nurse comes and sticks a long tube far down the baby’s throat to suction out the mucus, while Shlomi looks on in horror, crossing and recrossing his arms over his chest. It is a procedure that will have to be done every few hours in the days that follow. The baby doesn’t have enough energy left to scream, but tears run down from the corners of his gray eyes. Remy starts to sob, and Tamar takes him downstairs with the excuse of buying her brother and Dan a coffee.

Is Tom going to be okay? Remy asks, pushing his forehead into her stomach.

Yes, she says, though she has no authority to declare as much. Tom will be just fine.

But from then on, the baby has a name. A name that pins him to life, that stands in opposition to the nothing and nowhere that hovers like a shadow just outside the hospital room door. A name both of his fathers can cry out on the second day, when the Code Red sounds and the emergency team comes flying into the room, ready to intubate the baby, a procedure that will no longer leave him to breathe on his own. A name that the Code Red team, gathered around the crib, can refer to in his chart once the numbers on the monitor begin slowly to drift up again, and for the time being the emergency has passed, and his fragile life holds.