Henry's released from the NICU at two weeks old, three days before Emma's nineteenth birthday.
She thinks it's a terrific present. She's so sick of the hospital by then that she can't see herself ever willingly setting foot there again.
Amy, who's been Henry's primary nurse during his stay, is less enthusiastic.
"Now that Henry's at 35 weeks, we can classify him as 'full term' and the hospital discharges them as early as possible to save on costs"
She gazes at Emma and Neal sadly. She's barely thirty, but already has the air of being done with her world. Emma feels like she sees that a lot. Neal's holding Henry a little too tight, even after being admonished by Amy that he could loosen up, "He won't jump out, he's not a football".
"I hate to say it, but since you two aren't insured, they're probably pushing even harder. 35 weekers can be completely fine one minute, and then be a disaster the next. I'm going to prepare you a packet of discharge instructions that will tell you everything you need to keep an eye out for, and I'll talk to Dr. Hyland about giving you an apnea monitor to take home".
Emma was discharged two days after Henry's birth. Despite this, she still spends every minute she can at the hospital. It had taken one frustrating day at the store and on the phone to start her maternity leave early.
One of the doctors had left her a bunch of paperwork on WIC and Medicaid too, since he told her she had signs of chronic malnourishment.
I used to live in a car and be lucky to get a sandwich and a stolen candy bar for the day, she wants to say, no fucking wonder I'm so skinny.
And so the day comes and they fit Henry into his carseat. Amy shows them how to hook up the apnea monitor, and tells them to use it when he's sleeping, and when they can't be close to him.
Emma hates it. The leads look like something out of the hospital and they're bringing it straight into their home.
But she listens dutifully still.
When they're outside, Neal's on the passenger side, seat pushed forward, figuring out how to strap him in. Henry's sleeping, in his little blue blanket sleeper.
"Why does he have to face the back?"
"I don't know, but Amy said it's supposed to be like that til he's six months old".
She gets into the driver's seat and glances over her shoulder. The seat is in place, but Neal is still struggling with the seat belt straps.
The seat takes up almost half the backseat.
"...I never noticed how small this car is...how did we both used to fit back there?"
"Creativity and the flexibility of youth".
"I don't think even I could sleep there now...it feels like I've lived a thousand years".
"It's a good thing we could stand each other right off the bat, or the whole arrangement would have been a lot more unpleasant".
Emma snorts "Please, if I couldn't stand you, I would have kicked you out then and there. Left you in that alley".
It's gallows humor, she knows. Laughing at their past, pretending their present isn't so scary.
She carries Henry up the stairs to the apartment in his carrier. Neal brings up the rear carrying the hospital bags.
"You didn't have to carry all of them, I could have managed one or two".
"You shoved him out two weeks ago, the least I can do is carry his stuff".
And even though it irritates her, Emma lets it slide.
Neal set the crib up next to the couch. The wall the two rooms share is right next to their beds, so they can hear him. They did get a baby moniter, but they both felt better with as little physical distance as possible. Their room isn't large enough to fit the crib practically. Emma hates that wall.
Neal pulls a dish of pasta out of the refrigerator and heats it up. Emma goes down to the basement and does a load of laundry. Susan and the boys stop by to say hello.
Susan gives them a bag of hand me down baby clothes, some in sizes he won't need for over a year.
"They grow so fast you'll be happy for anything".
Susan looks completely at ease holding Henry. Emma's more than a little jealous. Noah had taken a close look, proclaimed that "I thought he'd be bigger" and joined his brother watching TV.
By the end of the night, Emma's exhausted, but her and Neal are trading turns on the couch holding Henry, neither really willing to go to bed yet.
It's a simple night, a good one.
And it's a good thing, because the next months are full of some of the worst nights Emma could imagine.
Intellectually, Emma knew that babies cried. Often a lot. She had been around enough young children in care to know this.
But she had never known how absolutely bone deep the anguish those cries could bring.
Henry's wailing in her arms one night waiting for Neal to finish getting the stuff so they can change him, when she finally asks with tears in her own eyes.
"How on earth do you always know what's wrong with him when I never do?"
Neal takes Henry and lays him down on the pad.
"Babies only really cry for a handful of reasons. They're hungry, they're wet, they're too cold or two hot or tired, or something's hurting them."
He finishes, and throws the diaper in the trash.
"Some of those are easier to figure out than the others. They have no other way to tell us. They haven't seen enough of the world to cry because they're sad yet."
Neal is almost shockingly good with Henry. He still hasn't lost that sense that he's going to break him when he holds him, but he's good at making him smile, finds it easy to talk to him, to make him stop crying or fussing.
Emma's finally got a good hold of holding him, but she can't beat the sense that even if she doesn't completely break the person in her arms, that he's still going to grow up to hate her.
The apnea monitor doesn't make anything better. Every time she has to hook Henry up to it, she feels like she's leaving him back at the hospital alone even though her and Neal are just a wall away.
The worst night is about a month in. Emma had been slightly awake, already sort of used to the rhythm of middle of the night feedings, and Neal sound asleep when the shrill screech of the monitor jolts them both awake, through the speaker of the baby monitor and clear through the wall.
The leads have slipped off Henry's chest, He's awake and screaming at the noise. Emma fixes it back on, and the monitor stops. She cuddles him to her chest in hopes of reassuring him, and when he finally quiets, she slumps down against the wall by his crib.
She turns and realizes Neal's slumped beside her. It takes her a minute before she recognizes the lines on his face as tear tracks.
She's never seen him cry before.
He's gazing straight, in her direction, but completely fixed, for a moment before saying,
"If we lose him, that's it. We'll both be lost".
Emma's nineteenth birthday comes and goes unmentioned.
In the middle of December, they all get sick.
Henry's hit first, with a runny nose and general fussiness. The visit to the clinic goes easily, and Emma is reassured, told to keep an eye on him and come back if he gets worse. It passes in a few days, and he's back to his usual happy self.
A few days later, it hits Emma like a ton of bricks.
She never really got sick as a child, and she definitely doesn't ever remember being so sick that all she could bear to do was lay in bed staring at the ceiling and had to be helped to sit up and eat before collapsing back down into the mattress in a pile of sweat soaked miserable limbs.
Her head feels stuffed with cotton, her mind in a bizarre, cloudy version of the world. Her muscles ache like she's just run a marathon.
She's sick enough that it leaves Neal to take care of Henry. She apparently was still able to sit up and feed him, but she hardly remembers.
It's not until the fog in her head starts to lift that she starts to notice the dark circles forming under Neal's eyes, and stumble in his gait.
A few days after she's back on her feet, she wakes up and can't get him to move or speak anything other than gibberish.
She calls 911, the waves of panic rushing up her chest like the rising tide.
Cowered in the back of the ambulance cradling Henry, while the EMT, a young woman with a dark ponytail secures Neal to the stretcher, checks and marks things down and asks her questions.
She sounds embarassingly near tears when she asks "Will he be OK?"
"It just sounds like the flu to me, from the looks of him probably coupled with dehydration and exhaustion. They can give him fluids and antivirals at the hospital and give him time to recover. He's young, he should come back fine. Has he been around anyone other than you two?".
Emma shakes her head. "We were both sick last week, he had to take care of everything. I should have realized he would get sick too, I could never convince him to get his fucking flu shot-"
"If you got it and he didn't, it probably wouldn't have helped if you both got the same strain. There's no real way to tell who will .
Emma stares down at Henry. There was never anything they predict. And it always seemed like the worst just had it's way of finding them.
The hospital is as awful as it was before. The ER and adult wards are almost worse. There's no attempts to soften the sterile facility. Neal's bed is behind a curtain next to an elderly man who sounds as though he must be attempting to cough up a lung.
Once he's hooked up and rehydrated, he jerks awake slowly and tries to talk.
"Sleep" Emma tells him.
When he wakes the next morning, fully aware, she lays into him.
"What the hell is wrong with you? Why the fuck didn't you say anything?"
He's still pretty pale, and sweaty, hooked up to lines and and a plastic tube in his nose. He looks completely pathetic.
"Nothing you could do, someone had to take care of you guys. It wasn't so bad, I didn't want you to worry".
If possible, she snaps even more.
"Didn't want me to worry? What the fuck did you think was going to happen when I realized? And there was something we could do! I could have called Susan or Judy and asked if they could take Henry for a little while! The rest of the chores could wait while we both got better!"
She steels her voice, makes it quieter.
"Do you know what the doctor told me last night? The one with the big hands who looks like that bartender who threw us out that one time? He said that people always seem to forget that people do still die of the flu, even today. Take a guess to how that made me feel".
Neal looks like she's kicked him in the face. Good.
She doesn't speak to him for three days after they get back home.
Christmas comes and goes unnoticed.
Emma's due to go back to work in January. She calls the store's office.
Yolanda, the HR manager, tells her "So very sorry, but during hte course of your leave, the position has been eliminated to save costs. If you would like to reapply, please contact..."
Emma's blood goes cold.
She tries to tell herself that there's a million other unskilled and low paid service jobs out there. She tries to tell herself that she's worth more than them.
But all she can see as she sits at the kitchen table with her face in her hands, is the pile of unpaid bills, and the mounting feeling in her gut, that she wasn't ready to go back to work at all.
Neal comes home after a day spent helping an old lady clean her garage, and finds her still at the table, rocking Henry's carrier on the chair next to her.
All he can do is hold her hand. It doesn't help.
The medical bills start coming in the next week. Emma ignores them. The other bills are harder to ignore.
The power shuts off first. They break out the jar where Neal has been keeping his pay. It's never going to be enough.
A phone call consisting entirely of begging keeps their water on another month. A trip to the pawn shop follows. Emma loads up the car with anything they can spare. It breaks her heart a little, but she still pawns the last watch her and Neal had stashed.
It covers February's rent, but isn't enough for the next month.
They get evicted the last week of March.
Emma's silent as they load everything back into the car.
When Neal shuts the trunk lid, he looks at her.
Emma's clothes still hang off of her, despite the remaining baby weight. Her hair is stringy, her feet shoved into five dollar flip flops. Neal's shirt is torn on one arm, and his jeans have grass stains on the legs.
He finally speaks.
"Was it worth it? To try, even if we ended up right back where we started?"
Henry is sleeping soundly on Emma's shoulder. He's growing into a remarkably easy, happy child. He jerks in his sleep, and his fingers grasp onto her hand.
"Yeah, yeah it was".
She straps Henry into his car seat.
Her and Neal flip the coin. She wins.
And so, Emma gets into the driver's seat. They take the car and drive back into the night.