The first time two nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit place her weightless body on my chest so I can hold her skin to skin, she sticks to me like a hand kneading dough that begs for flour.

I sit in a rocking chair but brace against movement, against breathing, although the nurses claim my breath and my heartbeat have the power to regulate hers.

She is nothing like I thought my baby would be. She is not supple plump rolls that bounce back. She is skin translucent red-purple and molting, ribs like curved toothpicks, respiration forced by plastic tubing. She is hourly pencil ticks of blood gasses, her every internal enzymatic process reflected on a chart. She is monitors dinging cruelly, saying do something now before her heart stops or she stops breathing or her temperature climbs too high or infection causes her thin skin to burn, layers shedding like sheets of phyllo.

Until now, she is watched her through the plexiglass hood of her isolette, the microclimate for thermoregulation, for shielding against contagion. The womb that sustains her because mine couldn’t.

But receiving her from the nurses’ hands and letting her rest against my body feels like something a mother might do, and I try to remind myself that even when the sac that had held her twin brother for twenty weeks broke and filled my shoes with water, still I had wanted to be a mother. In fact, even more then. So when they place her on my chest, I cradle her like a boule in the rain.

When her smell comes up strong, yeasty like a raw pastry, it is not how I thought my baby would smell. Her smell is of a body at the brink, a body metabolizing milk from my body, mixing it with medicines and magic to tip the scale: live.

For the first time since her birth three weeks before, I allow myself to think, She just might make it. Beyond the less than five percent chance they gave her when she came seventeen weeks early. Beyond a pound and a half. Beyond the ghost of her twin brother. Beyond the molecular hope that I dare to let rise.

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Erin Wood’s recent work has appeared in The Sun, The Citron Review, HuffPost Personal, and The Brevity Blog, and has been listed as notable in The Best American Essays. She is author of Women Make Arkansas: Conversations with 50 Creatives and editor of Scars: An Anthology (which features 40 multi-genre contributions on scars) and is working on an essay collection. She owns and runs Et Alia Press.

Photograph by Sherry Shahan