Free Devotion by Dani Shapiro Page B

heart was a stone in my chest. The water below was gray, churning. The cars surrounding us were filled with lucky people going about their daily business. They were thinking about what to pick up for dinner, or an annoying thing a colleague said at work. They had no idea how good they had it. And we—we had crossed over to a place where only one thing mattered. Seven out of a million . My consciousness, the whole way I saw the world, had been changed in an instant.
    I saw Jacob in the face of every child in the step-down unit. I saw Michael and myself in the stooped shoulders of each parent pacing the halls. We had come so close to devastation. We had been dangled by our feet over an abyss—and then brought back. Our veil had lifted—but I knew the truth, which was that the veil hovers, always. It can descend on anyone, at any time. The trick—if it is a trick—is to know this but not let it stop you.
    The nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital were the most exhausted nurses I had ever seen. Their patients didn’t just come and go, as they would in any other intensive care unit. They came and stayed , these children, with their malformed hearts and kidneys and livers. They stayed and—through the daily act of care, the cleaning and disinfecting and flushing of bedpans and stents and intravenous lines—the nurses came to love them. Those nurses knew the odds: at least half of those children wouldn’t make it. The clock was always ticking. Donor organs wouldn’t arrive in time. A delicate apparatus would falter, then fail. Butstill—knowing what they knew—they didn’t hold back. They opened themselves up to the probability that their hearts would be broken again and again.
     
    One morning, a few weeks into the reporting, I commuted from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side, as I had every other morning. I walked uptown on Fifth Avenue and into the Mount Sinai lobby. The guard knew me by now, and waved me through. But I couldn’t get into the elevator, couldn’t press the button for the sixth floor. I sat in a plastic chair and waited to feel stronger. I felt like I might come apart—my skin dissolving, with nothing to protect me. I waited in the lobby for a while—that same lobby that I had walked through as a woman in labor, and walked through again with my healthy infant bundled into a car seat. But the feeling didn’t pass. I turned around and went home.
    I called my editor at the Times and told her that I couldn’t do the story—I just couldn’t do it. These were families who had it so much worse than we ever did, even in our darkest hour. But I had no journalistic distance. Even with my volunteer badge on, striding in from the outside, I wasn’t an outsider. I couldn’t simply come and go. Each time I left the step-down unit and reentered the land of the lucky, my inner voice screamed: Why them and not us? Why such terrible maladies? Why should children suffer? Why have we been spared? Why, why, why?
    Months later, I called one of the nurses in the step-down unit to ask about the heart transplant girls. The eleven-year-old had received a heart, and died during surgery. The nine-year-old, alone in the hospital without her friend, was still waiting.
    And so I continued to cook. I bought heavy cast-iron casseroles in bright, cheery colors: canary yellow, royal blue. Stews bubbled on the stovetop. Braised beef, lamb shanks, chicken with hot spicy sausage. Handmade pasta stuffed with a mixture of cheese and black trumpet mushrooms. Michael and I gained ten pounds between us. I clipped recipes, shopped at farmers markets, tracked down rare ingredients. Small terra-cotta pots of herbs lined my kitchen windowsill like toy soldiers. Music played. The back door flung open to the garden below. Jacob toddled around the kitchen, banging wooden spoons. The wafting scent of sizzling garlic, sauteed onions, lured Michael from his third-floor study. Daddy! Family hug! Jacob had learned to say. Family hug! his high sweet voice