One morning, as we ate sandwiches—mine had apples on it—a hawk appeared outside the hospital cafeteria window. Or no, it was not a cafeteria, it was a cafe. Which was meant, perhaps, to conjure a sense of normalcy. You could order paninis and mochas and bowls of soup. My husband and I sat there talking over our sandwiches, about what I can’t recall. The words are lost to me now, and yet it feels like only yesterday.

When my mother arrived for her visit she immediately burst into tears. “There’s a hawk out there,” she managed to explain, “and it’s taken one of their babies.” She was referring to the chicks of a nesting cardinal. Through the window, we saw a small group of people gathered outside watching, the parking attendants standing in their red coats with arms crossed, examining the sky. I could not see the cardinals, but they were, my mother reported, hurling themselves after the hawk, dustily red, pityingly brave.

Something deep inside of me wilted before I remembered that I could not let this additional sadness into my life. There was no room in my heart for such a thing. I would not see this as an omen. Nature would be better to me, would not dare touch our baby, four days old, on the NICU floor above. Such a vulnerable thing, a baby bird. Such a vulnerable thing, a baby.

I took in baby birds as a child. Apparently you are not supposed to do this, but I didn’t know that then. When I found them, translucent, pink, eyes still closed and bulging like unhatched eggs, their feathers like the gray teeth of a comb ragged against their skin, I felt a deep and stirring distress. Fallen from their nests, set upon by prey, their mothers missing or dead, I knew these little dinosaur beings needed me.

As a child, I was in love with my own tenderness. I guarded it, picking up the just-hatched robins, snuggling them into a box. What did I feed them? I did not chop up a worm nor feed them berries. I remember something about the orange-colored syringes that come with liquid Tylenol or Amoxicillin. But what in the world did I feed them?

I think the reason I do not remember is because they died quickly. Most did not survive the night. Even the little finches (and who knows if I had correctly identified them) who lasted days and looked so very perfect and even had feathers, all died in the end. I had named one of them Winston, a terrible mistake. The baby squirrels I rescued died too, one of them killed in front of my eyes by our cat who had snuck into the room. I have never hated another creature so much. How many headless baby bunnies, how many mice and voles and birds laid out on the back deck by our cat. Grisly offerings brought to us out of love.

These are not good memories to revisit when your own baby is in the NICU. Unable to eat except for through a tube and yet so alert, looking around at us as if he knows. What he knows I cannot say, perhaps the meaning of the world, perhaps nothing. At twenty-four hours old he already attempts to lift up his head, and yet I know how baby animals can trick you. They make you think they are doing so well, about to turn a corner. But you never know what is around that corner, whether another world of wind and light or this one, full of green trees and cardinals and hospital parking lots where now, outside the cafe window, the hawk sits sentinel on the flag pole, surveying us, satiated and grim.

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Heather Kindree Thomas‘s work has been published in Image Journal and the New York Times Modern Love Section, among others. She’s currently working on a series of essays exploring birth, the body, and the postpartum period. She lives with her family in Boston.

Artwork by Shelley Lennox Whitehead