Excerpt from Happiness by Heather Harpham, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When I had imagined threats to my future children, they'd been external. Strangers hovering at the edge of playgrounds in loose, gray sweatshirts; rotting rope swings fraying over jagged rocks; cars, everywhere, callous, steely-eyed killer-cars. These were possibilities I could conceive of. Illness had never slunk across the screen of my anxieties, with its curved spine and sallow cheeks. I probably wouldn't have recognized it even if it did. Serious illness, life-threatening illness, was outside the realm of my imagination. If pushed to consider the question, I might have responded that I was protected from the possibility by the mere fact that it had never occurred to me. I might have said, "If I can't imagine it, how can it happen?"

***

On my first date with the father of this five-pound girl we went to an intimate place on the corner of Jane Street in Greenwich Village. The kind of place where, to reach your table, you're obliged to wedge sideways and apologize to strangers whom you've brushed with your hips. Seated, we leaned over the small table to breathe the same air and figure each other out. He said he'd read recently that everyone has a personal "happiness quotient," that your happiness in life is essentially set, regardless of circumstances. He reckoned his was low, and guessed mine was high.

I'd never heard of a happiness quotient. I'd never stopped to consider happiness as anything other than an assumed default state, a place to return to after the occasional thick fog. If, as a kid, I had been asked to state the one thing I believed to be true about my future, I'd have said, "I'll have a happy life."

Not that I'd had a blindingly happy childhood. I hadn't. I'd had a childhood of being profoundly loved amid serial chaos. I grew up as the only child of a warmhearted, fleet-footed single mom who was always exploring her options, in men, jobs, lifestyles. It was California in the 1970s. For a while I attended school in a geodesic dome on a hilltop. A herd of goats grazed on long, golden grass outside the open door. Sometimes we ran among them without shirts, boys and girls alike. One of the male teachers enjoyed watching, too much. Everything in my world moved fast, and my job was to hang on. Still, I'd emerged with the idea that my own adult life would be happy and essentially free of adversity. The optimism of youth, which I'd somehow hung on to until thirty, thirty-one even.

A happy life, at the time of that Jane Street first date, did not include, from my point of view, being the mother of a child who required extensive neonatal medical care. Or spending a pregnancy alone, heartsick. Those possibilities weren't visible from the corner of Jane Street; all I saw was the man before me in a pressed blue dress shirt, delivering literary jokes with a shy, sly humor. The amused look in his eye when I chirped with surprise at the arrival of our salads. "Do you always greet your food so enthusiastically?" he asked. "Not always," I said. "Only sometimes." Only now.

***

The 4 a.m. doctor was short and bespectacled with a round, soft face. A pleasant-looking bearer of bad news; he seemed personally pained by what he was about to say. He started by explaining the baby had high levels of something I didn't catch, emphasizing the need to transfer "the patient" to a larger hospital. "Right," I said, trying to muster a little dignity in my flapping nightshirt. "But what is actually wrong with her?"

"Your baby is at risk of brain damage or"—he paused and glanced around the room as though looking for something he'd mislaid—"death."

I felt embarrassed for him; clearly he was in the wrong room. He'd confused my baby with another baby. I tried to break it gently, "This is the baby born at seven p.m., the five-pound, five-ounce girl, with a strawberry on the back of her neck."

Excerpted from Happiness by Heather Harpham. Copyright © 2017 by Heather Harpham. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.