The Mother Fault

by Kate Mildenhall

  ‘Mum?’ Sam’s voice is so small, his eyes dark and crushed.

  ‘No.’ Essie places her palms against each other, as if in a gesture of prayer. ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘Hey, hey,’ Mim soothes, encircling Sam with one arm, kneeling in front of Essie, bringing them both close. ‘It’s okay.’ She can feel them trembling under her hands. Heidi moves quietly around the lab.

  ‘What about school? And unlocking the front door? Everything! How are we gonna do all that? How do we put them back?’

  Please don’t be so clever, Mim thinks. Not now. ‘We’ll sort all that out when we get home, huh? No problems.’

  ‘When are we going home? Where’s Dad?’

  Mim speaks calmly. ‘Let’s get this done and then we can talk about it more. I’ll go first, okay? And you can see, and then we can decide.’

  They blink at her. Nod at her smile, her open face, the way she is fooling them, fooling herself, that everything is going to be all right.

  * * *

  ‘Okay, just a little sting.’ Heidi holds the needle steady as the tip enters the flesh of Mim’s palm. She pulls it back. ‘Just apply pressure there,’ she says, and Mim holds the wad of cotton down, feeling the cold of the anaesthetic already spreading through her hand.

  ‘That look okay, you two?’ Heidi smiles at Essie and Sam crowded in on either side of Mim.

  ‘Does it hurt, Mum?’ says Sam.

  ‘Nup. All good.’ She smiles at him and inclines her head. She feels sick. The stomach flip of nausea in her guts. She has overreacted. Surely they won’t take the kids away from her.

  But they will.

  They will.

  Heidi presses her short thumbnail into the skin of Mim’s palm. ‘Feel that?’

  ‘Just pressure, like pins and needles. Is that right?’

  ‘Good. We’ll give it a bit longer. Okay, kids, you’re going to have to go round the other side of the table now.’

  Essie pulls Sam with her, they are energised now, less scared, more curious.

  Heidi takes a blue pen, running her fingers over the thumb mound on Mim’s hand. ‘I’m going to mark the spot. Can you guys feel it on yourself?’

  Essie and Sam both begin to run their fingers over their palms.

  ‘Yep, got it!’ Sam says and holds his palm up, his index finger pressing and making an indent.

  ‘Let’s mark it right now, then,’ says Heidi. Mim wonders whether it is too late for Heidi to have kids now. Whether she wants them. She’d do a good job.

  The kids examine the marks on their hands, comparing, and Mim mouths thank you to Heidi as she comes in close, winks, the surgical blade flashing in her hand now.

  ‘All good?’ Heidi asks and Mim nods. ‘If you’re gonna faint, then you should look away.’

  ‘I’m good,’ she says and feels the acid burn in her throat. She swallows.

  ‘You gonna be sick?’

  She shakes her head. Breathes. Smiles at the kids. Essie’s eyes are wide, watching her, and Sam’s are flicking back and forward, looking from Mim to Heidi’s hand, gloved now, the blade innocuous, small and sharp.

  And then it is in. Mim can’t look away, the disconnect of seeing the tiny silver blade slice into her skin, the dark viscous blood that wells up, the feeling of pressure.

  ‘Mum? Does it hurt?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘There you are.’ Heidi leans in with a long pair of tweezers, poking at the incision she’s made in Mim’s hand. ‘It’s just like a big splinter, really,’ she says.

  Mim feels the weight of Heidi’s hand but not the texture. The limb is not her own. Not connected to who she is. She thinks of the obstetrician’s head between her knees, that same feeling, a disconnected rummaging in her insides – a self-protective mechanism, biological.

  Mim cranes her neck to see around Heidi’s elbow. She is using her thumb and forefinger to squeeze the fleshy part of Mim’s hand around the incision. In the other hand she holds the long tweezers steady.

  ‘Come on,’ she says, under her breath.

  Then there is a release; a tiny silver splinter, smooth and shiny, pops onto the surface of the skin.

  ‘Oh!’ Essie says, and Sam’s eyebrows shoot up.

  Heidi tweezers it off Mim’s hand and holds it up. ‘Doesn’t look like much, does it?’ she says with satisfaction and pings it into a small steel bowl on the table.

  ‘Urgh. It’s all bloody,’ says Sam.

  ‘It’s cool,’ says Essie.

  ‘So who wants to be next?’

  They both say, ‘Me!’, then recoil, and Mim and Heidi laugh.

  ‘Nah, you go,’ says Sam.

  Essie straightens herself up. ‘Yeah, fine, I want to,’ she says.

  ‘Let me clean this up for your mum first.’ Heidi wipes away the blood. ‘Probably could have got away with a smaller cut for you, wasn’t that hard to get out. Reckon I’ll just use the glue on this one.’ She swabs again with a wipe, then runs the nozzle of a small tube against the cut. ‘So we leave it like this for a bit, then I’ll wrap it at the end. Shouldn’t even be a scar eventually.’

  It’s always pleased her friend, Mim thinks, a job well done.

  ‘Okay, Essie, your turn.’

  ‘Cool,’ she says, and puts her arm up on the table, but Mim can see the set in her jaw.

  ‘Now, you reckon you might faint, Essie? Cos I could lie you down, you’re not too big, and we could do it on the table.’

  ‘Nup, I can do it like Mum,’ she says, and Mim feels a collision in her chest.

  ‘Keep your hand up,’ Heidi instructs Mim, ‘and sit here next to Essie, just in case.’

  Just in case what? Hers all went so smoothly. Easier than she could have imagined. She wonders why more people don’t just take them out.

  She watches Essie settle on the chair and lean in close to the bench to give Heidi room to work on her hand, the tiny blue biro mark on her skin. The prick of the anaesthetic.

  This is new territory. Essie fractured her wrist once. And they had a panicked visit to emergency after Sam bumped his head on the edge of the coffee table, but it wasn’t anything major. She knows she is lucky, they are lucky. She has imagined sickness and injury often enough. Imagined it until she has made herself ill. There is a fear at the core of it, right down deep, unutterable, that on bad days she might find pleasure in their hurt. Mim hears her own blood pumping in her ears, a slight milkiness at the edge of her vision, and Heidi makes the cut into Essie’s hand.

  Sam gasps and Essie looks stricken at the sight of the blade in her flesh. Mim reaches and grips Essie’s other shoulder. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ she whispers, a nothing refrain that is comforting and meaningless at once. Heidi peers closely at the cut she has made.

  ‘Can you see it?’ Mim asks.

  Heidi grunts. ‘In deeper, like I thought.’ She touches the blade to the wound again. ‘You’re doing good, Essie. You feel anything?’

  ‘Nup,’ says Essie in a small voice that is pretending to be big.

  It takes longer. Heidi has to dig. It is not warm in the lab, cold really, but Mim watches sweat bead on the skin of Heidi’s temple. It is hard to look, and impossible not to look, at the flap of skin Heidi has cut back on Essie’s hand. The vivid red of it, the inside of skin, the messiness of it – she thinks of the soft flesh of not quite ripe mango that clings stubbornly to the underside of the skin when you try and peel it back.

  ‘Can’t pull it out. Grown over, need to cut,’ Heidi says to herself, lips only moving slightly.

  Essie clears her throat. ‘Can I have some water, Mum?’

  ‘You okay?’ She peers at her daughter’s face, pale now, her pupils fat and dark. She is trying to be so brave, Mim thinks, and wants to cry.

  Sam is reluctant to bring the water but Mim is too worried to move away while Heidi digs in her daughter’s flesh. No one will do this again, she thinks. I will not let them.

  She concentrates on her daughter’s face,
holds the bottle to her lips so she can sip, asks her if she would like something special for dessert, she can have anything, what treat will it be? She babbles, flinches when Essie flinches.

  ‘Can you feel something, does it hurt?’

  ‘Not hurt, but just, I can feel it.’

  ‘You are so brave.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ Heidi says, and Essie breaks Mim’s gaze to look at her hand. Heidi flicks the tip of the blade and it emerges from the bloodied flesh with the silvered chip. Essie leans in to look and the movement catches Heidi off balance, her hand moves slightly and the chip flicks off the blade, makes an almost imperceptible clink as it hits the metal bench and then bounces away.

  ‘Shit,’ says Heidi, biting off the word.

  Sam bobs down. ‘Where’d it go?’

  Essie’s voice is panicked. ‘Is it out? Sorry! Sorry!’

  ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’

  Heidi is on her knees, hands spanning gently across the tiled floor. Mim moves to get down and help.

  ‘No, stay there, don’t put your feet down. Sammy, you too. Just hold for a bit.’ Heidi keeps her head down.

  ‘Should I do something to her hand? Is it okay?’ asks Mim.

  ‘It’s fine.’ Heidi’s voice is short, flaring with frustration. ‘Just wait.’

  ‘There! Over there!’ Sam yelps.

  Heidi freezes.

  ‘Where, Sam?’

  ‘Across from your hand.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Um, your…’ Sam holds his hands up in front of himself, ‘your left, your left!’

  Mim can’t see it. She glances at her own chip lying in the little bowl. It is so tiny. How can he possibly see it?

  ‘This way?’ Heidi asks, moving her hand slowly to the side, her head moving as she looks.

  ‘It’s got the light on it, I can see it!’

  Essie turns to Mim. ‘What happens if we can’t find it?’

  Mim shakes her head reassuringly.

  ‘There!’

  Heidi grunts in frustration. ‘Where, Sammy, I can’t –’ and then she whispers, ‘fuck, yes.’ She presses her fingers into the line of grout between the wide grey tiles, pushes back up to her knees. ‘Sam, you have bionic eyes.’

  ‘Yesss,’ Sam says and his grin is wide.

  ‘You’ve got it?’ Essie asks, and Heidi stands up, one hand cupped beneath the other, and deposits the chip in the bowl. They all peer at the two tiny metallic slivers nestled together.

  ‘We’ll have to be more careful with yours, Sam.’

  He nods.

  ‘How do you tell them apart?’ Essie asks.

  ‘You can’t by looking at them,’ Heidi says and moves her body to block Essie’s view as she begins to clean the fleshy mess she’s made of her hand.

  Once Essie is cleaned up, Sam is eager to jump in the chair.

  ‘I’m gonna get you to lie down on the table actually, Sam,’ Heidi says, ‘my back’s getting a bit sore.’

  ‘You okay?’ Mim asks, concerned. ‘You need water, should you take a break?’

  ‘Let’s just get this done, hey?’

  ‘Mum?’ Essie is sitting on the floor, leaning back against the wall. ‘Mum, I don’t feel good.’

  Mim turns from Sam to watch as Essie vomits into the space between her knees. ‘Mum,’ she says again, holding her cut hand away from her face, and bringing up a projectile of yellow bile, heaving again so her whole body rocks forward.

  ‘Shit.’ Mim leaves Sam and goes to Essie, holds back her hair, uses the back of her cut hand to gently rub against her daughter’s back.

  ‘Oh my darling,’ she croons.

  ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  ‘No, no, it’s okay. I’ll clean it up.’ The smell of it catches in her own throat.

  ‘You okay, Essie?’ Sam says.

  Essie coughs, nods.

  ‘Yep, Sam,’ Mim says, ‘she’s good. You just lie still for Heidi.’

  Mim helps Essie shuffle along the floor and gets her to lie down. She finds paper towels under the bench and cleans the vomit one-handed, careful not to let anything touch her wound. The whole time she can hear Heidi talking to Sam about ninjas. She feels torn, like she should witness the cutting of her son’s flesh, but she is also needed here. With Essie.

  By the time Mim throws the last paper towel in the bin and kisses Essie’s forehead, the flush has returned to her cheeks, Sam’s implant is out and Heidi is gluing her son’s hand back together.

  ‘That was easy!’ Sam crows, sitting up and looking at his hand. ‘You superglued my hand back together, cool!’

  Heidi smiles, pulls off her gloves. ‘It is cool, huh?’

  Mim puts her arm around Sam’s shoulders, helps him shuffle to the edge of the table and slide down.

  ‘Can we have pizza now?’

  Heidi pulls the bowl with the chips towards herself. ‘Got to look after these first,’ she says. She takes a small specimen jar from the bench, unscrews the lid, and tips the bowl so the three silver implants clink into the bottom.

  ‘A family of implants,’ she says.

  ‘Except Ben,’ Mim says.

  ‘Yeah, except Dad.’

  Heidi closes her mouth, nods, screws the lid on the jar.

  ‘How about I get these back to the farm, yeah, while you guys get the pizza? Save me some for when I get back.’

  Mim frowns. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Reckon it’ll be easier like this.’

  Sam is talking in his sister’s ear. ‘Essie, what are we gonna get? Should we get Hawaiian? It’s only fake ham anyway isn’t it? Do you still like that one?’

  ‘You sure?’ she says again to Heidi.

  ‘Yep. You guys go back to mine. Have a rest. Watch something. I want to check those cuts when I get back.’

  * * *

  The three of them eat pizza and take painkillers together when the anaesthetic starts to wear off, and Sam falls asleep in the crook of Mim’s armpit. Essie is quiet, touching the bandage on her hand. She hasn’t said anything yet, about Ben, about all of it. Mim is bristling in readiness, feels like she has been skinned.

  She starts at the sound of the door opening, hears Heidi’s voice before she can panic. ‘You guys okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mim replies, keeping her voice low so Sam doesn’t wake.

  Heidi sticks her head through the door from the kitchen. ‘Coffee?’

  Mim inches out from under Sam, checks if Essie wants anything, leaves the kids nestled in together.

  ‘What took you so long?’ Mim asks.

  ‘Had to do some quick surgery.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Inserted the chips into a couple of rats from the lab and liberated them on the edge of your property. Figure it’s close enough if they’re tracking you specifically.’

  Mim shakes her head, trying to make sense of it. ‘Rats?’

  ‘Thought about doing the dogs but it was going to get complicated.’ Heidi turns away from the kettle now, puts both hands on the kitchen table and eyes Mim steadily. ‘There’s no going back now. You get that, right?’

  Mim nods, but she’s not sure what Heidi is trying to say.

  * * *

  Later, when the kids are asleep, whiskey warms the darkness, draws them in close across the kitchen table. Mim’s hand throbs.

  ‘I’ve been shit at being around for you.’ Heidi can hold her liquor but her voice is tinged with something else now, regret perhaps, nostalgia.

  ‘God, no, I’ve been shit,’ Mim says, grabbing Heidi’s wrist across the table. ‘What happened with Yvette?’

  ‘What always happens, I suppose.’ Heidi sits back in her chair, pulling her hand away. ‘A mismatch. Cross purposes. Timing not quite right.’

  ‘You or her?’ The whiskey talking now. Mim would not normally be so bold.

  ‘Me, this time. Told her to go. She didn’t want kids. I’d said it was a deal breaker. Then I had to follow through.’

  Mim clenches her jaw at the grief in Hei
di’s face now. She was nearly forty herself when she had Sam. Time has slipped from them.

  ‘But –’ she leaves an uncertain gap, not sure how far Heidi wants to go.

  ‘But,’ says Heidi, ‘it didn’t work out that way for me either. Towns like this one aren’t awash with eligible women in their forties who are excited about having babies.’ She cracks a smile, that taut face Mim remembers from high school – Let me laugh at myself before you laugh at me, or worse, before you pity me.

  ‘Heidi –’

  ‘It’s all good,’ she says, standing up and moving to the sink, rinsing her glass. ‘You’ve got to get as far as fuck away from here. Find somewhere to hide.’

  The change in Heidi’s tone is sudden and hard. Mim shakes her head to try and clear it, to try and understand what her friend is telling her. ‘And then what?’

  ‘They’ll come looking.’

  Mim cannot make the pieces come together. A small sound escapes her throat.

  ‘Have you told your mum anything?’

  ‘No, I mean she asked about Ben, but –’

  Heidi puts her hand up. ‘I don’t want to know either.’

  It is like tiles clinking into position. She is beginning to understand, and she doesn’t want to.

  ‘Take my car. It’s old. Not networked. I’ll use the work one and leave yours parked in town.’

  Mim nods. Heidi knows what she is doing, what she is saying.

  ‘You can leave here in the morning. You know you’ve still got problems, right? Even with these gone.’ She takes Mim’s hand in her own. ‘Anywhere OMNI is, and the cameras, there’s biometrics, data harvest, if they really want to find you they’ll scan the servos, the main streets, everywhere. Leave your phone, the kids’ screens. Get something cheap from a servo. You’ve just got to disappear.’

  ‘The screens aren’t networked.’ Jesus, trying to deal with the kids minus their screens would push her right over the fucking edge. ‘I can’t leave the phone,’ she says. ‘How will Ben find me?’

  Heidi shakes her head. ‘Just think about you and the kids for now.’

  ‘But he might just call tomorrow, and all this will be over, we can go back to normal.’