Mine

by Susi Fox

  The lift jolts to a stop. As I’m wheeled out, the hollow inside of the lift reminds me of a receding womb. We move down the corridor and I see a plastic fern beside a row of chairs, a pinboard of smiling baby photos opposite. We reach a small annexe. Faint baby mewls are audible. A long, shiny metal sink is attached to one wall, numerous taps without handles perched above it. An opaque glass door beside the annexe sink is labelled in thick black font: Special Care Nursery. Wash your hands before entering.

  ‘Mind you don’t forget,’ Ursula says. ‘Infections can spread quickly. We’ve had issues before when people didn’t wash their hands.’

  The water comes on with an automated spurt as I place my fingers beneath the tap. I lather purple liquid soap in my palms and use a nailbrush to scrub at the tinges of blood coating the side of my fingers until I’ve rid my skin of all the stains. I’m very careful. I know, more than anyone, how dangerous infections can be.

  The door slides open with a rasping sound to reveal the cacophony within. Bleeping monitors, crying babies, apnoea alarms reverberating off the bleach-white walls. Hitting the back of my nostrils, the scent of starched linen. The sweetness of newborn faeces. The reek of latex gloves. It’s all too familiar, back from my rotation as a junior doctor in a nursery in the big smoke, when I had no clue how to slide needles into the miniature babies’ veins or how to thread tubes into their tiny lungs. Back when I had no experience of how sick a baby could get.

  Ursula pushes me over the threshold into a low-ceilinged room. Mark must be here. My baby, too. My stomach knots.

  To the right of the L-shaped nursery, humidicribs – plastic boxes illuminated with white lights, each containing a miniature baby – are trimmed with leads and monitors attached to flashing screens on the benches beside them like a perverse Christmas display. Two lines of the cribs stretch down a long corridor, about five on either side. The small window on the far wall is the only source of natural light. Open cots, for the larger, less sick babies, cluster close to the nurses’ station in the smaller arm of the ward to the left. With two separate wings, I imagine it’s hard for the staff to keep an eye on all the babies at once. I can only hope they’re taking good care of my son.

  A gaggle of nurses survey me from the desk beside the door as I’m wheeled towards the corridor of humidicribs on my right. The nurses here are overworked, indifferent, hostile even; I can see it in their narrow eyes and tight lips. Another mother who has made more work for us. Another mother who has failed her baby.

  As for the building, it is shabby, old-fashioned, a tad unclean. It feels backward compared with the progressive city hospital where I worked as a junior doctor; where I first met Damien, the baby from years ago who I’m still trying to forget. That hospital had a completely different atmosphere, an aura of calm, modernity and efficiency pervading the entire organisation.

  Ursula points down to the end of the row.

  ‘Your baby is this way. We’ll get a doctor to come and let you know how he’s doing very soon.’

  Is it because she knows I’m a doctor that she doesn’t feel comfortable telling me herself?

  ‘And Mark?’

  ‘I believe he’s just headed off. I’m sure he’ll be back any moment.’

  Where could he have been going? Downstairs to see me?

  ‘You’ve worked in a nursery before, I take it?’ Ursula says.

  I nod, even though it was only for a short time and long ago, during my paediatrics term as a medical resident. Like all young doctors, I rotated through multiple specialties, trying to find the one that suited me best. Obstetrics, paediatrics, emergency, psychiatry, among others. Ursula doesn’t need to know how little I remember of those early days; how much I’ve blocked from my mind.

  There must be twenty or so infants in here. I have no idea where my baby is.

  ‘Here we are,’ Ursula says, tugging me to a stop beside a humidicrib on the left, beside the window. ‘Your baby.’

  My heart skips a beat. Part of me doesn’t want to look. I fixate on the outside of the humidicrib. It’s an unfamiliar model: matt-grey base with a rail strung along the side, see-through plastic over the top like a snow globe, enclosing another world. A rectangle of blue card is sticky-taped to the cot wall in front of me, coming unstuck at one corner.

  Name: _________________

  Baby of: Sasha Moloney

  Sex: Male

  Then a list of numbers: his weight, date and time of birth.

  I have to bend around the card to see him. There are wires taped to his chest, a tube emerging from his nose. He’s tiny – smaller, even, than the teddy I bought him, waiting in the cot back home. His chest sucks in between his ribs, his abdomen flailing with each breath. He doesn’t look comfortable. His arms and legs are kindling-thin, with wads of padding at the knees and elbows for him to grow into, his skin almost translucent with purple streams of veins beneath.

  He looks like he’s struggling. Like he knows he should still be inside my womb. Him being born prematurely – I blame myself. As his mother, the one who was supposed to keep him safe, I know it’s my fault. Yet despite my guilt, there’s no stirring in my chest, no tightening of my heart. He doesn’t look like the baby who appeared in my pregnancy dreams. I stare at him as I would any other premature newborn. I don’t feel like his mother at all. Fleetingly, I’m struck by a terrible idea: what if this isn’t my baby? But I reorder my thoughts, pushing that inconceivable notion to the back of my mind.

  Ursula is back at the desk, chatting to another nurse. They both stop speaking to glance up at me. I give them a cursory smile and turn back to my baby.

  I understood it would be love at first sight. That’s what I’d heard other mothers describe, what I’d read, what I’d always believed it would be like. It’s strange, I suppose, but I find this baby unappealing. He has a flat-bridged nose, wide-set eyes that are blue-grey in colour – different from Mark’s, and my own – and ears that protrude like a monkey’s. A few tufts of dark hair jut out through pocks of dried blood on his conical scalp.

  I’m waiting for a maternal connection to kick in, a sense of certainty to settle over me, but as the seconds tick past nothing changes. This could be anyone’s baby. Shut away behind plastic, with no way to reach him, no way to touch him, no way to feel the texture of his skin – he’s barely more than an outline of a child. This isn’t what I’ve been spending months planning for. This isn’t what I believed motherhood would feel like at all. I wish Mark were here. I need him to tell me that everything is going to be alright.

  Around me, several mothers stroke their babies’ backs, cooing and ahhing and smiling in delight. A father a few cots over tickles his newborn under its chin as it snuffles and gurgles. I observe them, trying to figure out how they are able to touch their children. Of course – the portholes. I can’t believe I’ve forgotten.

  I fiddle with the latch on one of the two round portholes lining a side of the humidicrib, pressing the catch firmly until it releases with a pop and the door springs open. This is the moment I had dreamed of. Skin on skin with my baby, for the very first time. I lean forwards in my wheelchair and ease my hand over to my son.

  The sole of his foot is squishy, like mincemeat. I recoil. The other mothers are still massaging their own babies. I reach for him again, edge my thumb into the arch of his foot, but he thrusts his leg at my hand, kicking me away. I extricate my arm from the porthole and snap the door shut.

  I’d imagined my baby’s body on my chest, nuzzling into my breasts; hardly the vision now before me, of a skinny, skeletal mound struggling to breathe, unaware I’m even here.

  I remember one of my patients, a new mother, years ago, when I was a junior doctor. In her shared postnatal room she had been trying to put her newborn to her breast, but the baby kept pulling away.

  ‘This is the worst,’ the woman had complained to me, staring down at her son as he lay on the blanket, perched long and restless between her outstretched legs. ‘How can I love him when
he doesn’t even seem to want to know me?’

  I’d clicked my tongue. ‘It’s not that he doesn’t want to know you,’ I’d said. ‘He’s learning. Breastfeeding is a learned skill for both of you.’

  ‘Then why is it so goddamn hard?’ the woman said.

  With no personal experience of babies or motherhood, I didn’t have an answer for her back then. I thought she was the one with the problem. I had no idea how right she was; how hard this could be.

  Beside me, the small window provides the nursery’s only viewpoint to the outside world. The pane has been tinted black to soften the glare. I can still see out, but no one can see in. The town’s main road runs directly below, cars gliding over asphalt. Across from the hospital, a playground glistens, ringed by a black fence. There’s a clump of gums at the far corner of the park. Beyond the trees, red rooftops stretch like blood-flecked breakers into the distance towards the hills where the bush begins.

  The park is where I want to be right now. Away from this sterile, noisy place. Away from this tiny baby who might live, or who might die. But no one would understand my desire to flee. This is my child. And he needs me.

  A siren blares from the road as a fire truck weaves in and out of lanes, lights blazing. The memory comes to me in a scatter of broken images: our car lurching across the road. A dark shape rising through the windscreen. The pulsing blue lights of an approaching vehicle. I was brought here by ambulance. Mark called the emergency services from the roadside.

  On the humidicrib panel, two numbers flicker red amid the dials and knobs. Oxygen, twenty-nine per cent. Temperature, thirty-four degrees Celsius. A grey monitor is fixed to the wall above my head, displaying more numbers on its screen. Heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation – all flashing in lurid blue, red, green.

  Beneath the clear plastic, the baby’s bellybutton stalk is cherry-red, oozing yellow. Should I call a nurse, warn them about the possibility of infection? But the staff are capable professionals – I should focus on being a mother, rather than a doctor, for now.

  I inspect my son closer. His fingers tapping against the cot sides are pudgy, his palms thick; both out of proportion to his scrawny body. It has been a while since I dealt with living, breathing babies. Aren’t they all unattractive, a little hard to bond with? Maybe I just need more time to feel something for mine?

  The residual sedatives loosen my muscles, turning my limbs to liquid rubber, thickening my eyelids even as I try to prop them open. Ursula is behind me, her hands pressing on my shoulders, offering to take me back downstairs. I try to resist – I should be here, waiting for Mark – but Ursula is firm.

  ‘You need some rest,’ she says.

  She wheels me back out through the sliding nursery door, into the shiny elevator, then along the long pink corridor to my private maternity room. She shuts the door behind her, guides me into bed and tucks me in tight. The babies in the other rooms are quiet now. Fluorescent lights hum above my head. When Ursula flicks them off, I try to fight against the endless blackness, the mind-numbing promise of not having to think or feel, even as my body limbers into stillness. As sleep engulfs me, I feel like Mark could almost be at my bedside, scratching the itchy spot between my shoulders that I can’t quite reach, smoothing down my hair, whispering that he loves me, that everything is going to be alright.

  Day Zero, Friday, Approaching Sunset

  I’m thirty-five weeks pregnant. We’re cruising home along country back roads. In the cocoon of the car, with the sun piercing the clouds on the horizon and spilling pinpoint shafts of light onto distant hills, I make the promise again to myself and to my unborn daughter: I’m going to be a perfect mother.

  Mark is in the passenger seat, the whiskey from his Friday-afternoon work drinks hot on his breath. A lock of hair is curled over his forehead and the top button of his favourite shirt is undone as he sings along to Billie Holiday in an off-key falsetto. When the song ends, he leans over to me and presses his lips close to my ear. He has something good to share with me when we get home, he whispers, then strokes my swollen belly with the flat of his palm. I smile to myself and nudge him away with my elbow.

  On the side of the road, near the approaching curve, a grey figure comes into view. A kangaroo, bouncing towards us. There’s no time. I hit the brakes. There’s a sickening thud on the left bumper as the car shudders to a stop.

  Clutching the steering wheel, I try to slow my racing mind. My heart is hammering. I don’t want to see the damage I have done – I wish I could just leave, keep driving, forget this ever happened. This isn’t me. I’m not a person who has accidents, not a person who makes mistakes or causes intentional harm. I’m the person who always tries to do the right thing.

  ‘Pull over, pull over,’ Mark says, his words slurred.

  My fingers tremble as I ease the car onto the shoulder of the curve. I can feel myself starting to hyperventilate.

  Mark flips open the glove box and pulls out the small animal-rescue kit we keep handy. Although he’s been a chef since his early twenties, he likes to play the amateur vet when he gets the chance. I got him into it during the early days of our relationship, taught him the ropes. Until now, lumps by the dirty roadside have always been caused by someone else.

  ‘Baby’s alright?’

  I place my hand on my tight abdomen and nod. He passes the kit across to me. ‘Then I suppose we’d better check on this roo.’

  We’ve been stopping for animals for years now. Our ‘rescues’. Seeing Mark at times like this still reminds me of how he was all those years ago, when we fell in love. Early in our courtship, I had established that I never wanted to have children. Growing up without a mother for most of my life, I was convinced I would be inadequate at the job. Mark had quietly acquiesced. Then, one day, I saw him pull a newborn kitten from a box behind our garden shed, its eyes still fused shut. As he cradled it in his palm, I had a sudden flush of icy-cold certainty that spread from my chest along my arms, to the tips of my fingers. This man was built to be a father. I would never be enough. He would always be wishing for more than me.

  Fortunately for Mark – for both of us – a few years later I started paediatrics training. The first birth I attended was for a baby expected to require resuscitation. As I sidled into the room, I found the mother pushing, a sweat barely breaking on her brow. Before I could arrange the resuscitation cot, the baby slid out of her straight into the waiting obstetrician’s arms. As the newborn was placed on the mother’s chest, I saw how they both lit up: the mother’s face was ecstatic, the baby’s serene. He was already breathing, his inhalations perfectly aligned with his mother’s. It turned out there was no need for me to be there at all.

  At first, I didn’t notice that my ovaries had kicked into overdrive. But with each new birth I attended, each newborn baby I examined and handed to its glowing mother, the idea of having my own baby began to seem more and more possible, less and less unappealing. I could be like these women. With Mark’s support, maybe I could be a good enough mother, too.

  Mark was delighted, his enthusiasm contagious. He said he’d known the best way for me to come around was to allow me to arrive at the same conclusion myself. I didn’t even let his patronising tone bother me. We would have a baby. Why cause unnecessary argument? Soon, getting pregnant became all I could think about. Mark certainly didn’t complain as my conception attempts began to take on the fervour of a religious zealot.

  But what followed was eight years of blindsiding infertility. Two miscarriages. Every test known to Western medicine revealed it was me – my eggs and my endometriosis – that was the problem. Mark’s sperm were top-notch. Then we tried every possible medical intervention, short of the IVF Mark refused to attempt. We had exhausted our supply of hope. Not only was I devastated, but I had also let down the man I loved in not being able to give him what he wanted most. Until, finally, this: our miracle pregnancy. And a marriage that hadn’t quite recovered from the years of infertility, despite our attempts at marri
age counselling. Maybe if the waiting hadn’t gone on for so many years, I wouldn’t have been contemplating asking Mark for a trial separation just before I discovered I was pregnant. But none of that mattered anymore. Everything would be better between us once this baby was born.

  I ease myself out of the car. The kangaroo is lying on its side, legs askew on the gravel. She has a pouch: a female. She lies still, watching me with panicked eyes as I approach. Her left leg is twisted at a terrible angle. Blood oozes from a deep cut near her knee, pooling on the asphalt, her front paws scrabbling at the dirt beside her.

  Mark crouches down and shuffles closer, whispering reassurance. Her paws stop clawing the ground, her head lolls back onto the road and her eyes glaze over. We’re too late. Mark’s face creases. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him at a rescue. Lately, we’ve rarely been in the car together. He rolls his shirtsleeves up to his elbows, pulls on plastic gloves, then passes me a pair. Time to check the pouch. Kneeling on the gravel, he reaches down into the fuzzy pocket. His hand seems to snag on something. I hope for his sake it’s not a pinky – a joey too small to survive. Mark hates having to kill them, even though it’s the humane thing to do.

  He grasps the leg and tugs the joey up towards the surface. It’s still suckling on its mother. But it’s more than twenty centimetres long; large enough to be given a chance at life. I reach for the surgical scissors in the kit as Mark clutches the joey. After I had taken some weekend classes from the local animal shelter, I taught him about the way joeys grasp tight to the teat, continuing to suckle, long after their mothers are dead. Pulling them off damages their jaws, making it impossible for them to survive. The only way to save them is to cut them out. I’ve sliced through dozens of animal teats over the years, as well as far worse things in my patients: cancers and pus-filled boils and maggoty wounds. Yet tonight the thought of cutting through the tag of spongy flesh turns my stomach. Clenching my teeth, I bend over and stretch the teat long with one hand, then snip through it with a single snap.