Free His Bundle of Love / the Color of Courage by Patricia Davids Page A

the elevator rose, but she straightened at Mick’s touch and managed to answer, “Sure.”
    If she admitted to anything different, showed any sign of weakness, she knew he’d take her back to her room, and she wouldn’t see her baby. Her head alternated between piercing pain and reeling dizziness. If she had tried to walk she never would have made it.
    He rattled on about the NICU, but she couldn’t listen. It was all she could do to keep from falling out of the wheelchair.
    The bell chimed for their floor and the doors parted. “This is it,” Mick announced.
    Anticipation lent Caitlin added strength. Her baby was here.
    Mick maneuvered her through a set of wide doors. A young couple stood washing their hands at a large sink. Mick waited until they were finished, then he pushed Caitlin up to the sink. He patted a sign on the wall beside her.
    “The directions for working the sinks and for washing your hands are right here. You have to do this every time you visit. I’ll let them know you’re here.” He stepped over to a sliding glass window and spoke with a woman seated at a desk behind it.
    Caitlin stared at the gibberish on the wall. Now what? She searched for a way around her problem. There was always a way. Leaning back, she turned her friendliest smile on the nurse waiting beside her and held out her arm with its IV board. “I can’t get this wet, can I?”
    “It says to use the germicidal foam. Let me help you.”
    “Thanks.” Caitlin waited while the woman applied a white foam that looked like whipping cream and smelled like alcohol.
    Mick came back at that moment. “Let me get scrubbed, then we can go in.”
    Caitlin watched closely. She could remember how to do just about anything if she saw it done once. He pulled a small package from a holder on the wall. Opening it, he used a funny little stick to clean under his nails, then he scrubbed up to his elbows with a brush. He kept glancing at a clock over the sink. After three minutes, he rinsed and dried off with paper towels. She could remember that.
    Betty held the door open as Mick pushed Caitlin through and said, “I’ll wait downstairs until you’re done. Give me a call when she’s ready to come back.”
    He agreed then maneuvered Caitlin’s wheelchair into a large room, and her heart began to race. At last, she was going to see her baby. But in the room lined with babies in beds and incubators, Caitlin suddenly realized she didn’t know which baby was hers.
    She had no idea what her daughter looked like. She wouldn’t know her own child! They could show her anyone’s baby, and she would have to believe them.
    A nurse came across the room and stopped beside Mick. “Is this Beth’s mother?”
    “Yes,” Mick said, “Caitlin, this is Sandra, Beth’s primary nurse.”
    Bewildered, Caitlin glanced from one to the other. “Who’s Beth?”
    The nurse frowned slightly and looked at Mick. He knelt beside Caitlin. “Beth is your baby’s name.”
    “You named her? Who gave you that right? Where is she?”
    “She’s down here.” The nurse led the way, and Mick pushed Caitlin’s wheelchair down the length of the room.
    Caitlin stared at the infants in the beds as she passed them. Some were tiny, smaller than any babies she’d ever seen. Black, white, crying, sleeping, there had to be thirty of them here, at least. A mother seated in a rocker was smiling at the child she held. A couple waited as a nurse opened the front of an incubator and carefully lifted their baby out, trailing a tangle of cords. Monitors lined the walls above the beds. An alarm sounded somewhere, then another and a nurse hurried past them to a bed at the far end of the unit.
    Mick stopped beside a flat bed with clear plastic sides and a warming lamp glowing overhead.
    “This is your daughter,” the nurse said, opening the side of the bed. Mick edged the wheelchair closer.
    Shock, disbelief and confusion swirled through Caitlin as she stared at the tiny infant on the