These Precious Days by Ann Patchett

Author:Ann Patchett [Patchett, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

My husband is not having a heart attack. By the time I arrive (minutes later) this fact has been established. The tests have all turned out perfectly. Karl sleeps off the Versed while I sit beside his bed in the tiny cardiac observation room. While watching him I think about a flight we were on years before. We were leaving Russia, and while we were going through all the various lines in the airport in Moscow, we noticed that nearly everyone had a baby. There was no overlooking it. We struck up a conversation with an American couple ahead of us in line. They were going home to Atlanta with a beautiful little girl they’d just adopted. We congratulated them and said that we were on that flight to Atlanta as well. They were radiant in their happiness, this couple and their Russian baby.

The closer we got to our gate, the more babies we saw: tiny infants, just-walking toddlers. When the announcement came that it was time to board our flight, everyone who had a child gathered up their strollers and diaper bags and got into line. One direct flight from Moscow to Atlanta, and everyone who had come to Russia from the States to adopt a baby was on it. We were a little nervous at first, more than a hundred babies on a twelve-hour flight, but as it turned out they were all happy—happy parents, happy babies. None of them were anywhere near being tired of each other. The couple we’d met in line sat right across the aisle from us, their sweet girl in their arms. How random it all was, who got which baby, where they would all go later on connecting flights.

Once we were airborne, the parents began to walk up and down the aisles, talking to one another, bouncing their infants in their arms. There was almost no crying until several hours into the flight when the woman across the aisle from us came back to her seat. She was crying. Her husband was asleep.

Karl asked her what was wrong. She waved him off, but he persisted. Karl persists.

“A woman in the back told me something was wrong with her.” She was looking at her baby. “Can you see it? The woman said she wasn’t holding her head up enough. She said I should take her to see a neurologist as soon as we get home.”

“Give me that baby,” Karl said. He told her he was a doctor, that he had delivered hundreds of babies. He held out his hands and she passed the infant over.

Karl studied the baby carefully. He looked in her eyes, sat her upright, let the baby grab his finger. He did whatever he could think of to appear as medical as possible. “I’ve looked at all these babies,” he said to the woman. “This is the best baby on the plane.”

She leaned over, touched her daughter’s head. “Do you think so?”

“I’ll give you twenty thousand for this baby.”

The woman and I both looked at him.

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