The Dreamers

8.

Rebecca: still sleeping, five days deep, one arm strung with an IV of saline.

If her eyes were to blink open on this particular day, she would find a heart monitor beside her and four white walls, and two baskets of flowers and one Mylar balloon, and the crosses, so many crosses, brought here by her parents, along with the Bible. In the chair beside the bed, she would find her mother, her mouth covered by a paper mask, her eyes tired, forehead wrinkled. She might hear the faint clicking of knitting needles as her mother busies her hands, or else the soft sound of her voice, so weary, on the phone: “No, not yet, they still don’t know what it is.”

But on this day, like the others, Rebecca’s eyes stay shut.

For days, her blood has been leaving her veins in vials, drawn again and again by the nurses—more tests. Doctors come and go with no news, while in other rooms, a few other mothers huddle over their own sleeping children, just watching them breathe, as if they are newborns again with lungs still new to the task. They look so healthy, these kids, their young bodies so sturdy in their beds, pink color in their cheeks, their chests rising and falling, as steady as metronomes.

Five now lie sick.

For now, they are alive, but the future is receding farther from them every second, time itself rushing forward without them.

On this afternoon, a minister arrives in Rebecca’s room. He and her family hold her hands in theirs, while the sound of prayer floats through the room. A laying on of hands.

Does she feel it in a dream, the pressure of their palms on her shoulders, her forehead? Can she sense their hopes in that touch? Who can say? She sleeps right through it all.

No one knows then that something else, too, more ordinary, is also brewing in Rebecca’s body, an invader of a different sort. Only later will anyone discover that a secret cluster of cells is already floating free inside her—too small yet to be called an embryo, but multiplying quickly—as it prepares to anchor in her womb.