The Sum of Our Days Read Online Free PDF Page A

along the way explained that his granddaughter was very ill. Jennifer, lost in her own purgatory, could not take care of herself, say nothing of take charge of her daughter. She lived with a man twice her age who had been arrested more than once. “I’m sure he’s exploiting Jennifer and getting her drugs,” was my first thought, but Willie, who is much nobler than I, was grateful that the man at least provided a roof over Jennifer’s head.
    We ran down the corridors of the hospital to the nursery for the premature babies. The nurse already knew Willie, and took us to a little cradle back in one corner. I first took Sabrina in my arms one warm day in May; she was wrapped in a cotton blanket, like a little package. I opened the bundle fold by fold, and in its depths found a little curled-up snail in a diaper that enveloped her from her ankles to her neck. Two tiny wrinkled feet, arms like toothpicks, and a perfect head covered in a knit cap stuck out of the diaper; she had fine features and large, dark, almond-shaped eyes that stared at me with the determination of a warrior’s. She weighed nothing at all. Her skin was dry and smelled of medications; she was soft, pure foam. “She was born with her eyes open,” the nurse told us. Sabrina and I observed each other for a long time, getting acquainted. They say that at that age babies are nearly blind, but she had the same intense expression that characterizes her today. I held out a finger to stroke her cheek and her tiny fist grabbed on to it. I could feel her shivering, and I wrapped her back in her little blanket and held her tight against my breast.
    â€œHow are you related to the baby?” asked a young woman who had introduced herself as the hospital’s pediatrician.
    â€œHe’s her grandfather,” I replied, nodding toward my husband, who was over by the door, timid, or too emotional to speak.
    â€œOur tests reveal the presence of various toxic substances in the baby’s system. She is also premature; by my calculations she must be barely thirty-two weeks; she weighs three and a half pounds and her digestive system is not totally developed.”
    â€œShouldn’t she be in an incubator?” Willie inquired.
    â€œWe took her out of the incubator today because her respiration is normal. But don’t get your hopes up. I’m afraid the prognosis is not very good—”
    â€œShe’s going to live!” the nurse interrupted emphatically as she took Sabrina from me. She was a majestic African-American woman with a tower of tiny braids atop her head and plump arms into which Sabrina promptly disappeared.
    â€œOdilia, please!” exclaimed the pediatrician, incredulous at this totally unprofessional eruption.
    â€œThat’s all right, Doctor, we understand,” I told her with a weary sigh.
    I HADN ’ T HAD TIME to change the dress I’d been wearing for weeks on my tour. I had visited fifteen cities in twenty-one days, carrying a small tote that contained the essentials, which in my experience is very little. I would take a plane at the first light of day, reach the appropriate city, where an escort—nearly always a woman as exhausted as I—was waiting to take me to appointments with the press. I would eat a sandwich at noon, have a couple of interviews more, and go to the hotel to shower before the night’s program, in which I faced the public with swollen feet and a forced smile and read a few pages of my novel in English. I carried a framed photograph of you so you would be with me in the hotels. I wanted to remember you that way, with your splendid smile, your long hair, and your green blouse, but when I thought about you the images that assaulted me were other: your stiff body, your empty eyes, your absolute silence. In those publicity marathons, which would pulverize the bones of an Amazon, I traveled out of body, as if on an astral journey, and fulfilled the stages