JUNIPER

The girl who was

born too soon

Kelley and Thomas French

Little, Brown and Company

New York Boston London

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 Copyright © 2016 by Kelley Benham French and Thomas French
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Little, Brown and Company
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First Edition: September 2016

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call (866) ­376-­6591.
Photographs on pages v, 5, and 57 are courtesy of the authors. All others
are courtesy of Cherie Diez.
The lyrics on page 265 are from “Waitin’ On a Sunny Day” by Bruce
Springsteen.
The lyrics on page 285 are from “That’s the Way That the World Goes
’Round” by John Prine.

Kelley’s prayer for Juniper on page 214 is borrowed from Tina Fey’s
“Mother’s Prayer for Its Daughter” in Bossypants, © copyright 2011 by
Little Stranger, Inc.

ISBN 978‑0‑316-32442‑7
LCCN 2016933403

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

rrd‑c

Printed in the United States of America

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 For Junebug

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 Zero Zone

*  *  *
Finally I was waking to the reality of the dangers facing our
daughter. The disappearance of the baby in 695, the hole in
Juniper’s bowels, the possibility that her intestines were ­dying — ​
­all of it made it difficult to rationalize away death as theoretical.
I understood now that we were stuck inside a limbo where each
moment was suspended between life and no life, everything and
nothing.
I couldn’t just sit by the box and watch Junebug shudder and
twitch. So every morning at dawn, when the nurses popped the
top on her incubator and took her vitals and checked her color, I
tried to make myself useful. I learned how to tuck a ther-
mometer in her armpit without tearing the skin, even though
Junebug fought me every time. I learned how to brush her hair
without pressing her soft skull. How to swab the interior of her
mouth with a ­lollipop-­style sponge dipped in sterile water. Once
a day, the nurses needed someone to lift her while they changed
her blankets. The first time Tracy asked me to do it, I balked.
What if the baby came apart in my hands?
Tracy coached me through it as if she were teaching me to
defuse a bomb. I slipped my stubby fingers under my daughter
and gathered the wires and tubes, then cupped her head in one
hand and the rest of her body in the other, raising her a few
inches. In my hands, she seemed to disappear. I could feel her
bones shifting against my fingers.
“Good,” Tracy said. “Just hold her there.”
Tracy was around more and more. She never announced it,
but we realized she’d decided to be our primary nurse after all.
In her voice I heard a trace of a Hoosier accent. I had known
and admired girls like her in high s­ chool — ​­smart girls used to

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 Juniper

driving fast on back roads that cut through cornfields, armored

in an unwavering sense of right and wrong, afraid of nothing
and no one, with sharp tongues that could slice you in half if
you got fresh, and not a lick of patience for anyone who put on
airs. In my experience, these girls grew into women who quietly
ran the world.
She told me she had never wanted to be a nurse, but her dad
had pushed her into it. Years earlier, he had talked her mom out
of nursing school, and he still felt guilty. Tracy did enroll in
nursing school but quit for beauty college when she learned she
would have to dissect a cat. Her father talked sense into her, and
she dissected the cat.
“I’m glad he did that,” I told her.
I wanted to pump my fist for Tracy’s dad. It’s too easy for
fathers to feel wedged out of their children’s lives. From preg-
nancy onward, the mother exists at the center of the universe,
her body an ocean of safety, nourishment, comfort. Fathers can
rub the mother’s feet and make sure she eats and drive her to the
doctor, but we are marooned from the baby. We direct our
voice toward the mom’s swelling belly and hope that whoever
is inside will hear some garbled version of our words, mixing
with the sound track of the mother’s heartbeat and breath.
When the child is born, she still believes she and her mother are
one. The mother is a continent of completion. Her gravity is
unbreakable.
The father is a bit player. He watches the mother nursing the
baby and realizes he can never compete.
“You have two jobs now,” another dad told me when Nat
was born. “You’re the mule, and you’re the clown.”
Junebug’s early arrival, traumatic as it was, offered me a
chance to help my daughter in a way few other men are ever

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 Zero Zone

granted. She was more vulnerable than any child I had ever
known, but she was still a baby, and after a lifetime of practice,
I had a few ideas on how to help. There was no handbook on
how to bond with a ­micro-­preemie, so I made it up. When
someone from the lab came to draw more blood, I leaned
close and told Junebug how brave she was. When a tech
arrived to perform another echocardiogram, I sang “If I
Only Had a Heart,” the Tin Man’s song from The Wizard
of Oz. Her squinted eyes, on the verge now of prying open,
turned in my direction. Maybe she saw an outline, maybe a blur.
But I knew she could hear me, because whenever I read her
another chapter from The Sorcerer’s Stone, she grew quiet
and still.
One of the therapists who worked with Junebug reminded
me that the baby wouldn’t understand what I was reading.
“It would be better if you just told her that you loved her,”
the therapist said. “Just keep telling her.”
That was just it. Reading that book to my daughter was the
best way I knew to show her what I felt. I had nothing against
Goodnight Moon. When Nat and Sam were little, I had read it
to them so many times that I could still recite many pages from
memory, twenty years later. I wanted something I could read to
Junebug for weeks, maybe months. The night I first opened
Harry Potter, I knew she wasn’t going to follow a word. But she
wouldn’t have understood Goodnight Moon either. She had
never seen the moon, had no idea what a cow was, or a kitten or
a brush or a bowl full of mush. All Juniper knew was the long
night into which she had been born. That darkness was the
entirety of her world, and it would have been easy for her to
believe there was nothing beyond it.
I could not understand what it was inside this child,

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 Juniper

this notion of a girl, that made her keep going. I wanted

her to hear the joy and expectation in my voice, and the
rhythms of J. K. Rowling’s sentences, and the sense of some-
thing unfolding, something that hinted at all that waited outside
the pod.
In our family, this copy of Harry Potter held special power.
Nat and Sam and I had devoured it so many times we had lost
the jacket. The purple and red of the cover was fading. The spine
was warping. If I read these pages to Juniper, maybe she would
sense our love for the story burning underneath the words.
Maybe she would feel her brothers with her, even though they
were a thousand miles away. I certainly felt the boys’ presence
every time I opened the book. Harry and Hermione had their
spells. I needed to cast my own.
The day after the surgery I plowed through chapter 2 and
was deep into chapter 3 when I paused to take a break. Junebug’s
nurse begged me to keep going.
“I’m into the story,” she said. “I want to hear what happens
next.”
Exactly.
Whatever came next in the story, I wanted Juniper to long
for more.

One morning we discovered that a new baby had arrived in 695,

where the previous patient had vanished so ominously. The
birth card identified the baby as a boy, but from where we sat,
we couldn’t make out his name. Even from a distance, though,
we could see his intestines piled in a clear bag on top of his
stomach.
His mother sat beside the incubator, alone in a wheelchair,

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 Zero Zone

holding her gown closed in back with her hand. She was so
young, maybe nineteen. Where was the little boy’s father?
Where were her parents? It made us ache to see her holding
vigil all by herself. We wanted to talk to her, take her to the
­hospital cafeteria for a milk shake. But the invisible barriers
restrained us.
That night, another baby was wheeled into 696. This
incubator was closer, and I could read the card announcing
that Baby Girl C. weighed 650 grams, slightly more than Juni-
per. I overheard the nurses saying that the baby’s mother was
still recovering from her C‑section and that she spoke broken
English. In the nurses’ faces, I saw something that gave me
­pause — ​­a flatness, as though they were trying to bury their
thoughts.
Baby Girl C. had arrived from the operating room on a
ventilator, but the next afternoon, the staff put her on a
hi‑fi vent, just like the one that was sending the ­ rapid-­
fi re
puffs into Juniper’s chest. As Kelley and I sat there, we could
hear Baby Girl C.’s hi‑fi machine rattling along with our
­daughter’s.
Junebug was struggling through another bad day. The
­doctors had sedated her so she wouldn’t dislodge the vent. Green
stuff was draining from the tube in her belly, making it hard to
balance her electrolytes. Her creatinine was up, which meant
her kidneys were faltering, possibly because the doctors had her
on four different antibiotics to fight the bacteria that had seeped
into her torso through the hole in her bowels. The smallest
infection, the doctors had warned us, could kill her. Now the
team was debating how to ward off the bacteria without shut-
ting down her kidneys.

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 Juniper

Scott, our nurse that day, grimaced at the latest b ­ lood-­gas

report.
“Okay,” he said, “so we’re going to do a little baby
makeover.”
He repositioned the tape around her mouth, suctioned her
endotracheal tube, straightened all the wires. He cupped her
head in one hand and held her hand with the other, all the while
watching the monitor. She gripped her ventilator tube with her
right pinkie.
“Do you have any questions?” he asked.
Kelley looked at him.
“Would you agree she’s the cutest baby you’ve ever
worked on?”
“By far.”
We were so focused on Junebug that we barely noticed when
more nurses showed up to gather around Baby Girl C. in 696. A
nurse practitioner hurried forward, and then several doctors.
Then the mother arrived, still in her hospital gown, propped up
by family members. Kelley and I tried not to stare, but the dread
was so thick it crept toward us like a fog across water. Someone
rolled a privacy screen in front of the incubator, and the nurses
sent us out into the hall.
When we returned, the family was gone, and inside the
incubator, underneath the blankets, was a shape, not moving.
The blankets were expertly tucked and smoothed. On the
floor were an empty alcohol packet and two crumpled tis-
sues. The dead baby stayed there for hours. Scott and the other
nurses did not speak of these things, did not look in the
direction of the lump under the blanket, but their mouths grew
tight.

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 Zero Zone

I didn’t want to imagine how many other babies had died in

all of the incubators around us, or how many had died in the
incubator where my daughter was sleeping now, or how many
parents had sat exactly where we were sitting, holding a child
gone cold and still.

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