It had been one hour since they’d taken the baby away.

Ten minutes ago, a nurse told us they’d started surgery.

Sometimes you don’t need an X-ray or stethoscope to see a hole in a wall. Sometimes it’s right there in front of you, gaping. Sometimes you look at people in a room with you, and it’s not only a hole in a wall, but a sunken roof, a shattered window, crumbling bricks, and a foundation with a crack right down the middle.

We will both have scars along our ribs, the baby and me. We will both have patched-up hearts.

When I was thinking of things I wanted Nonny’s baby and me to have in common, this was not what I had in mind.

Waiting Again

I only got to see baby Cecilia for a few seconds, behind a glass window.

Surgery on a tiny baby also takes a long, long time.

A Glass Box

Sometimes if you’re a brand-new baby who had to have heart surgery, you stay in a glass box for a few days.

Sometimes if that brand-new baby is your new niece, and you have to go back to school anyway, there’s a kind of glass box around you, too.

We weren’t allowed to hold baby Cecilia. Even Nonny couldn’t hold her yet. Every day that week when I came back to the hospital after school, Nonny’s hand was stretched through one of the arm-size circles into the glass box where her baby lay, and she was stroking the baby’s head and back. She never stopped stroking. Thomas stayed for as many days as he could, sitting with Nonny and their baby until he had to fly back to Florida.

The baby’s glass box was called an incubator. It was actually made of a special kind of plastic, not really glass. (I looked up incubators on the internet.) It seemed terrible that she had to be boxed up inside it all the time, but actually it helped keep her extra safe while she was getting better from the heart surgery. It kept the germs away, and kept her nice and cozy warm, too.

But it still looked terrible.

I’m not sure what my glass box was made of. Whatever it was, it made the words my teachers said reach a few inches from my face and then bounce off again. It made everything in my head and everything I tried to say feel echoey and far away. It was like my private glass box had its own weather, its own ecosystem, and not a particularly sunny one.

I sat in Ms. Trepky’s class trying to listen. One day she even played a song called “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and then we went through each person and event mentioned in the song and she told us about them and normally that would have been the Best Class Ever but not that week.

Talia passed me a note in class. It said: I heard what’s going on. I’m really sorry.