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translate to this place. The neonatal nursery doesn’t want a program coordinator to set up crafts, exercise classes, book displays for two-pound babies the size of a hunk of cheese. It doesn’t want parents who stick their noses in the doctors’ business. I pass through the quarantine room, sidestep a large basket of soiled gowns. The mothers’ job here in Foothills Neonatal is to stand around in yellow gowns like a hospital choir. If nothing else we are clean. What would the nurses do if we broke into song?
    I’m so lonesome for you, baby
    I’m so lonesome all the time …
    The smell of camphor salve, digoxin, formaldehyde, wet diapers, fear.
    You’re my dream come true
    I cry through empty nights withou-ou-out you…
    I fight my way this morning among the babies and equipment to find Kalila, awake and waiting, left hand ballooned and purple.
    What happened?
    Her intravenous went interstitial.
    Interstitial: occupying the place between.
    Nothing serious, nurses cry over their shoulders, bagging, resuscitating, administering physiotherapy and drugs.
    I look through glass at my child. #524010 with the swollen hand.
    You’ll have to leave now, Mrs. Solantz.
    A bird, long-beaked and blue, soars by the high window and wheels away. I have a sudden image of my flock of sisters: Marigold, Iris, Rose, June, crowding, chattering, interrupting, talking while they chew, their language tumbling, intimate, inclusive. Someone has opened the door to the hall, but still, the bleach-tinged air. The closed-up smell of things unsaid. The doctors here navigate the crowded aisles in a choreographed line dance to avoid questions. They bend over procedures, backs turned, faces guarded. Where dancers open their bodies, the doctors shut theirs off, their movements exclusive, circling inward. It is always high noon here, always glaring light. When forced, the doctors speak in codes of graphs and charts, prescriptions, lab results.
    Your daughter has multiple problems, Mrs. Solantz, many undiagnosed at present.
    There is a swallowing disturbance (a disturbance? like a fucking cold front?) and abnormal electroencephalogram.
    How do you spell that?
    A startled doctor spells.
    At this time, your daughter appears to have pulmonary dysplasia and so is in danger of potential sepsis.
    I scribble.
    She has intermittent cyanosis. We hear rhonchi and rales in her chest.
    Her presence reminds them they are failing.
    I want to see her.
    I’m sorry, Mrs. Solantz, you’ll have to leave this morning.
    I long for emotion from them; what they want from me is none. This is a research hospital. My baby is useful.
    Ma’am, the doctors have their rounds to do. All case information is confidential.
    I imagine myself one day fading toward the exit, melting out the sliding doors, vanishing to nothing. I feel it coming, my body, dissolving into light.
    Pretend you’re not here, I tell myself. They do.
    Before I can grab my purse, say my goodbyes, the march of the white coats begins. Bona fide doctors in long coats lead trailing residents in short. They swing from isolette to isolette, their cryptic voices. They stare at the babies, comment, prod, confer. Move to Baby Hargreaves, the size of two blocks of butter, sparrow legs dry, the tendons showing, to Baby Mueller, a fourteen-pound elephant, brain damaged as he ploughed his way through his diabetic mother’s birth canal, to Baby Leung, born without an anus.
    I take a last look at their white backs and file out with the other parents, passive as babies. Two go home, one walks the halls, I look up words in my dictionary in an empty waiting room.
    Electroencephalogram, EEG: records the minute electrical impulses produced by the activity of the brain. Indicates the alertness of the subject.
    Pulmonary dysplasia: any abnormality of growth. She has abnormal lungs, then. No one’s said.
    I wait. That’s all. I wait. Day after week. Emigrant turned immigrant, yoked to