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    Sean filled the doorway just as Amelia climbed onto the bed, into Piper’s lap, to pass judgment. “She’s too small to skate with me,” Amelia said. “And how come she’s dressed like a mummy?”
    “Those are ribbons,” I said. “Gift wrapping.”
    It was the first time I lied to protect you, and as if you knew, you chose that moment to wake up. You didn’t cry, you didn’t squirm. “What happened to her eyes?” Amelia gasped, as we all looked at the calling card for your disease: the whites of your sclera, which instead flashed a brilliant, electric blue.
     
    In the middle of the night, the graveyard shift of nurses came on duty. You and I were fast asleep when the woman came into the room. I swam into consciousness, focusing on her uniform, her ID tag, her frizzy red hair. “Wait,” I said, as she reached for your swaddled blanket. “Be careful.”
    She smiled indulgently. “Relax, Mom. I’ve only checked a diaper ten thousand times.”
    But this was before I had learned to be your voice, and as she un-tucked the fold of the swaddling, she pulled too fast. You rolled to your side and started to shriek—not the whimper you’d made earlier, when you were hungry, but the shrill whistle I’d heard when you were born. “You hurt her!”
    “She just doesn’t like getting up in the middle of the night—”
    I could not imagine anything worse than your cries, but then your
skin turned as blue as your eyes, and your breath became a string of gasps. The nurse leaned over with her stethoscope. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong with her?” I demanded.
    She frowned as she listened to your chest, and then suddenly you went limp. The nurse pressed a button behind my bed. “Code Blue,” I heard, and the tiny room was suddenly packed with people, even though it was still the middle of the night. Words flew like missiles: hypoxemic…arterial blood gas…SO2
of forty-six percent…administering FIO
2
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    “I’m starting chest compressions,” someone said.
    “This one’s got OI.”
    “Better to live with some fractures than die without them.”
    “We need a portable chest film stat—”
    “There were no breath sounds on the left side when this started—”
    “No point waiting for the X-ray. There could be a tension pneumothorax—”
    Between the shifting columns of their bodies, I saw the wink of a needle sinking between your ribs, and then moments later a scalpel cutting below it, the bead of blood, the clamp, the length of tubing that was fed into your chest. I watched them sew the tube into place, where it snaked out of your side.
    By the time Sean arrived, wild-eyed and frantic, you had been moved to the NICU. “They cut her,” I sobbed, the only words I could manage to find, and when he pulled me into his arms, I finally let go of all the tears I’d been too terrified to cry.
    “Mr. and Mrs. O’Keefe? I’m Dr. Rhodes.” A man who looked young enough to be in high school poked his head into the room, and Sean’s hand grabbed mine tightly.
    “Is Willow all right?” Sean asked.
    “Can we see her?”
    “Soon,” the doctor said, and the knot inside me dissolved. “A chest X-ray confirmed a broken rib. She was hypoxemic for several minutes, which resulted in an expanding pneumothorax, a resultant mediastinal shift, and cardiopulmonary arrest.”
    “English,” Sean roared. “For God’s sake.”
    “She was without oxygen for a few minutes, Mr. O’Keefe. Her heart, trachea, and major vessels shifted to the opposite side of her body as a result of the air that filled her chest cavity. The chest tube will allow them to go back where they belong.”
    “No oxygen,” Sean said, the words sticking in his throat. “You’re talking about brain damage.”
    “It’s possible. We won’t know for a while.”
    Sean leaned forward, his hands clasped so tight that the knuckles stood out in bright white relief. “But her heart…”
    “She’s stable now—although there’s a