Breakable You by Brian Morton

Within a year of their marriage, Leila had given birth to a girl.
    In the cab, on the way to the hospital, Leila had said, "It's like stepping into eternity." He knew what she meant. He felt as if they were taking their place in an endless procession, a procession extending from the darkness of the past to the darkness of the future.
    At the hospital, Leila in her labor was out of her mind with pain, but she refused to take anything to make it easier. Standing next to her, holding her hand, he cried uncontrollably without knowing why.
    After Zahra emerged, and the midwife brought her to Leila's breast, Leila lifted up her head, smiled with beatified exhaustion, and said, "She's perfect."
    But it turned out that she wasn't perfect. On her second day of life, their doctor, concerned by Zahra's yellow appearance, took a blood sample. An hour later he came back to tell them that there seemed to be some irregularity with her red blood cells. An hour after that, he came back again and said that Zahra would have to be transferred to the pediatric ICU for a blood transfusion.
    He would never forget the sight of her, sixteen inches long, with an intravenous tube piercing her heel and a bag of blood suspended over her bed. Leila nursed her while she received the blood, and Zahra was able to sleep through most of the transfusion. Samir felt stunned, stupid, and useless. He kept going down the hall to the vending machine and bringing back snacks that Leila didn't want.
    Zahra was unable to make healthy red blood cells. The doctors told them that a diagnosis could take months; in the meantime, she needed transfusions to keep her alive. Every two weeks Samir and Leila took her to the hospital, where she would scream as nurses pierced her skin with needles, and then she would collapse into a kind of frightened sleep as the blood dripped into her slowly over a period of many hours. Although the volume of blood she needed was very small, it had to be administered very slowly, so as not to overtax her tiny heart.
    In her first year, Zahra endured more physical suffering than he himself had endured in his life. Samir and Leila took her to the hospital once a week to have her blood count checked, hoping every time that it had finally stabilized. Zahra would sit in Leila's lap as the technician prepared the syringe and the tube. Even at six or seven months, she loved nothing more than to joke around, and she would play peekaboo with the technician, smiling at the woman with an expression that seemed to say, "You look nice. Who are you?" She would submit with a smiling curiosity as the technician took hold of her arm, and only when the rubber tourniquet went on would she start to struggle, and then, when she found that her mother was holding her firmly in place, she would finally realize that something bad was happening, and she would start to cry, and when the technician inserted the needle, she would howl, giving out drawn-out cries of anguish and disbelief that Samir would never be able to forget.
    He and Leila wondered what it was like for her to be taken by her parents, the people who played with her and fed her and sang to her and loved her, and handed over to strangers who tortured her. The books on child development said nothing about anything like this; and they didn't go in search of books on the psychological development of children with diseases, either because they were so preoccupied by her purely medical problems that they didn't have the strength, or else because they couldn't yet admit to themselves that she was a child with a disease.
    Her infant veins were so small at first that the doctors and nurses always had trouble inserting the thick IV needle. They usually had to plunge the needle into her again and again before they succeeded in entering a vein. On one occasion, when she was a little less than a year old, they couldn't find a usable vein in any of the usual sites—not in her heels, not between her toes, not on her legs,