Sable Monroe

The first time I sat alone in a room with a baby on oxygen, I was fourteen.

The machine hummed beside the crib while she slept.

I didn’t know yet that the baby wouldn’t live.

And I definitely didn’t know that someone would eventually decide her death was my fault.

My mother got pregnant with my sister while we were living with the man who would eventually become my stepfather.

At the time they weren’t married yet, even though they had been together for years. Marriage had been an argument between them for a long time.

My mother wanted it.

Not for romance.

For immigration papers.

She wanted a green card so she could stop working as a domestic worker and return to accounting, the career she had before coming to the United States from Jamaica.

He kept saying no.

For years.

Then she got pregnant.

Eventually they went down to the courthouse in Kew Gardens and got married.

Soon after that, my mother told me she was filing for her green card.

I got excited.

I asked the question that made the most sense to a fourteen-year-old.

Did that mean the rest of us would finally get ours too?

She said no.

There wasn’t enough money to file for everyone. She would do hers first.

That still sounded reasonable to me.

Children believe things happen in order.

First the parent.

Then the children.

Around that time my sister was born early and had to stay in the NICU.

She was tiny. Fragile. The kind of fragile that makes adults speak in quiet voices.

Eventually she came home, but it wasn’t the kind of homecoming people imagine.

She slept most of the time. The crib was in my mother and stepfather’s bedroom because that’s where the equipment was. An oxygen machine sat beside it, humming steadily.

The arguments in the apartment didn’t stop just because a baby was there.

One of the biggest arguments happened when my mother took time off from work to care for the baby. My stepfather said he couldn’t afford to support her and her children and that she needed to go back to work.

It was summer, and I was out of school.

So my mother asked me to watch the baby for a few hours while she worked.

My stepfather didn’t like that idea. He said I was too young.

My mother told him I used to watch my younger brother back in Jamaica when I was seven or eight.

In truth, there wasn’t much for me to do.

My sister mostly slept.

My mother handled the feeding and medical care before leaving for work. I just sat in the room and kept watch.

At the time we were living in the Bricktown apartment — the one where the roaches scattered if you flipped the kitchen light on too fast.

The funny thing was, they had manners.

They never came out when we had guests.

Most of the time the baby slept. The oxygen machine hummed beside the crib while I sat there doing the only thing a fourteen-year-old could do — watching.

I was fourteen.

A few weeks later she died.

My stepfather decided it was my fault.