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

"Yes," he said. "I know."

Still, I refused to apply these words—death or brain damage—to my swaddled and fabulous-smelling daughter. Death was ludicrous. And brain damage was out of the question. Way, way, way out of the question. In fact, the question and brain damage didn't even know each other. The question was: when can I take her home? Still, the doctor was in earnest. I decided to play along. "OK," I said. "OK, right. OK. Then what do we do?"

He explained that her red cells lacked stability and were breaking apart in the bloodstream. The iron inside each cell was spilling into the blood and floating freely throughout her body, at risk of lodging into the soft tissue of her brain. "So you are saying what, exactly?" I said. "She's at risk for rust head?" He looked at me, appraising. A long silent moment went by. "That's humor," he said finally, "common coping mechanism."

At the door he added, "We need to clean her blood immediately. We're transferring you to UCSF Med Center. The ambulance is waiting." University of California San Francisco Medical Center, the place I'd elected not to give birth. The big-city hospital. The tall, silver fortress on top of the hill, across the Golden Gate. The last place on earth a brand-new baby wants to go.

***

On our second date, we ate at a bright, loud diner along Seventh Avenue. If harshly lit Formica can feel romantic, I told myself, then this is foreordained. He asked me to list my "diner worries," those anxieties so slight they could be jotted onto the waxy parchment of a placemat. I have no idea what I said. I likely made things up, things to make me seem Frenchly philosophical or politically courageous or, failing all this, mysterious. I was young, I owned an apartment in New York City, had a good university job, and was on the cusp of what might be a relationship with a serious, kind man. Diner worries were in short supply.

But I loved that he asked, that he wanted to etch a record of my preoccupations onto a placemat. Later I would learn that he often took notes about things his students said, their goals, their literary heroes—to keep them straight, to accumulate an understanding of what they hoped for. At first this seemed excessive. But later it struck me as intrinsic to his way of being. He wanted to know, understand, remember who people were. How they were. And the best, truest way he knew to burrow toward the truth was to write things down. On the page he could add up a girl's diner worries and see what they amounted to.

***

The ambulance driver told me to ride up front.

"What about the baby?" I asked.

"She'll ride in back, with the paramedics," he said.

"The paramedics are great," I said, "but they don't really know her."

"We're just going over the bridge," the driver said, "she'll be fine."

At this point I became what was probably noted in the trip log as combative mom. Logically, I knew the driver was not responsible for my girl's precipitous need to be transferred, at less than twenty hours old, to a neonatal intensive care unit—but neither did he grasp how my entire world was encased in the plastic box that was her incubator. My job was to stick with the plastic box, no matter what.

"Actually, I'm going to ride with her," I said, trying to make it sound as if, after weighing his various options, I'd settled on this. Somehow, that worked.

In the back of the ambulance were four people: two paramedics, me, and her. It was just beginning to get light as we crossed the Golden Gate, leaving Marin County and entering San Francisco. In between the black mass of the bay and a gray bank of clouds, a pale, thin line of pink wavered. Daylight. I relaxed a little. Surely nothing catastrophic could happen during business hours.

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.