In the Dark

At bedtime, my grandson’s breath rasps in and out of fragile lungs. Holding the nebulizer mask over his nose and mouth, I rock him on my lap and hum a lullaby to comfort him. The nebulizer hisses as steroids stream into his struggling chest, and suddenly he also starts to hum, his infant voice rising and falling on the same few notes—some hymn he must have learned while in the womb or carried here from where he was before— a kind of plainsong, holy and hypnotic in the dark.