by Susi Fox
‘That means nothing,’ I say. ‘You should know that. All I want is to find my baby. Surely that’s not too much to ask?’
Two nurses approach from the desk, their jaws set. They stop a few metres away from me. Are they afraid to get too close?
‘You need a hand, Ursula?’ one says. ‘You want to call a code?’
A code. They’re asking if Ursula wants to call hospital security.
Ursula eyes me from where she stands beside the bench. ‘Call Dr Niles,’ she says.
‘You’re going to shut me down, is that it?’ I screech. ‘Call me crazy?’
There’s a stirring among a few visitors seated around other nursery cots. A low murmuring rises in the hot air. Am I speaking louder than I should? Or are these parents sick of being ignored as well?
‘You must know the case in the US,’ I say, raising my voice as Mark approaches me. Where has he been? ‘It was a midwife error. There have been many other cases, too.’ My voice falters. All at once, I can’t recall any details.
Mark shakes his head at Ursula, holding his palm up to her. She and the other nurses step away. He kneels before me on the laminated floor, his hands resting on my knees, his eyes frozen as if in fear. His voice is the one he uses during animal rescues, when he’s trying to placate injured wildlife.
‘Darling, you need to calm down. There’s someone come to see you. Someone you can count on.’
A shadowy figure looms behind Mark and comes into focus.
‘Congratulations, you two.’
It’s Dad standing above me, his gravelly voice thinner than normal as he bends down to the wheelchair and plants a dry kiss on my cheek. He’s clutching a green shopping bag and a newspaper, the deep wrinkles on his hands folding in on themselves like rippled waves approaching shore.
Mark walks off, to give us privacy I presume. The nurses return to the desk. The scattered visitors remain beside their newborns. Dad is staring at me like he did when I would occasionally misbehave as a child. No sense telling him about the baby mix-up. He’s still traumatised from my birth all those years ago. He wouldn’t believe me, anyway. Plus he couldn’t possibly understand what I’m going through.
Dad leans towards the humidicrib and peers inside.
‘Your baby looks just like you when you were born.’
Dad has never had much of an eye for faces.
‘I’m not sure, Dad.’
He doesn’t seem to hear me. From deep in the shopping bag he retrieves a quilt that he lays with ceremony in my lap.
‘Thought you might like this for him.’
It’s my childhood patchwork quilt. The cotton is cool under my fingertips. Some of the patterns are familiar – teddy bears, whales, fire trucks – and others I don’t recall at all. As a child, I used to hold it to my nose and rub the material across my skin, inhaling the various smells embedded within the fabrics. It was my main source of comfort.
‘I don’t think I ever told you, but your mother made it for you. When she was pregnant.’
I trace the outlines of the octagons, stitched together with tiny white threads, and spread the quilt across my lap. For a moment, the drama of the day feels far away. My mother made this just for me.
‘Did she always sew?’
‘Rose used to make pottery when I first met her. But she made such a mess with the clay, I suggested she move into sewing.’
He produces a photo album from the bag. There’s a pink giraffe on the cover.
‘Your baby album. I dug it out, too. Thought you might be interested.’
I haven’t seen one like this for years: photographs adhering to the sticky, yellowing backing paper, clear plastic folded over to hold them in place. After all this time, the plastic is coming unstuck. Some of the photos have slipped down the pages, slid underneath the plastic covers as if they’re trying to escape.
‘Dad, what was Mum like after I was born?’
His face breaks out in a creased grin. ‘Overjoyed.’ Then his eyes drop.
I flick through the images. I’m a newborn, swaddled in blankets and a knitted beanie, my mother clutching me in an awkward embrace as she stares at the camera from under her eyelids, unsmiling.
‘She doesn’t look … overjoyed.’
Dad seats himself beside the humidicrib and puts his bag on the floor between us. He unfolds the newspaper, then refolds it in a complicated pattern so only the crossword is visible.
‘These days they might have diagnosed her with something. They love doing that, don’t they?’
I clutch at the quilt.
‘What do you mean?’
Dad fills in some letters across the top line.
‘That postnatal depression thing, I suppose,’ he says. ‘Everyone has it these days.’
I scrunch up my eyes. ‘You never told me that. And you never showed me this album before.’
‘I thought I had.’
The photographs swim before me. Me, as a toddler in a wading pool; pushing a wooden toy wagon; naked in a bath. My mother has disappeared. I’d always assumed it was because she took the photos. I press the album closed.
‘No. You never told me.’
Glimpses used to come to me from time to time: visions of my mother’s pale face in the mirror of her bedroom dresser. She would be running a brush from her roots down to her split ends, or dabbing on foundation, or plucking stray hairs from her chin with tweezers. She never noticed me sitting beside her on the dresser stool. Her face began to glow, and I would reach out my hand to the mirror, but before I could touch her reflection the picture always fractured into shards.
I push the quilt and photo album back into the shopping bag. The fusty smell of mothballs hits me, the scent of my mother’s sewing chest. The quilt must have taken hours and hours to make, tiny threads stitched into place with an image of me held in her mind as I kicked away at the inside of her. Some of the stitches are pulling loose and patches of material are fraying like old cobwebs. It will be my job to learn to sew, otherwise the quilt will fall apart.
Dad lifts his pen from where it has leached a small pool of ink onto the newsprint. He won’t meet my eyes.
‘Rose was in a psychiatric ward several times. You were six months old the first time – too young to remember. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this now. It’s all coming back.’
Coldness flows through me. He has definitely never told me this before. I shiver and clutch my arms to my chest. Dad is still speaking. He pauses, running his eyes over my face, my hands.
‘Of course, you’ll be fine. A natural. You’re nothing like her.’
He’s always bluntly forthright, so I can usually trust his assessment of me. But if I’m not like my mother, who am I like?
He folds the newspaper up until it’s small enough to squeeze into his pocket.
‘You always seemed so … well adjusted after she left. It never seemed to have affected you much.’
Heat rises behind my eyelids. ‘I guess not.’
He leans to kiss me goodbye.
‘I got the nine-letter word today, by the way. Exonerate.’
He’s leaving already? Even though he’s always been out of touch with his feelings, emotionally repressed, he’s still an ally. I need him here. I turn my head so his lips graze my ear.
‘Can’t you stay a little longer?’
‘I’d love to, but I’ve got a golf match. By the way, this is for Toby.’
The crinkly yellow cellophane sticks to my damp fingers.
‘I bought it from the Women’s Auxiliary downstairs. Rose was a knitter too, you know.’
His shoes squeak on the vinyl as he shuffles towards the nursery door.
I rip the sticky tape from the cellophane. Inside is a soft blue woollen cardigan with a cable-stitch neckline and pearly buttons down the front. It’s simple but lovely. I hold it up against the perspex of Toby’s cot. It’s still a little big for a premmie. Down the track, it’ll look lovely on our baby – when we find her, that is.
I’m hoping the staff will listen to Mark, take him seriously. He’ll be able to track her down. I only hope it won’t take him too long.
Day 1, Saturday Afternoon
Mark gives me a smile as he returns. I’m not sure how long has passed since Dad left.
‘Everything’s going to be fine, Sash,’ he says, with more confidence than I feel. He takes hold of the wheelchair handles. ‘They want us to head back to your room to have a chat.’
The corridors, the lift back down to level one, crowd in as Mark guides me back to the maternity ward. I’m Alice in a nightmarish Wonderland, growing larger and larger as the hospital walls shrink around me. Babies squeal from each door we pass, their cries echoing through my skull like foghorns. I can’t help wishing one of these healthy term babies would suddenly reveal itself as my own missing child.
In my room, Dr Solomon is waiting for me, clad in a shiny suit with a tie hanging straight down the middle of his starched shirt. His hands are thrust into his pockets. He taps a buffed boot on the dusty carpet at the side of my bed.
Ursula stands beside him, her harsh gaze following me. Mark pulls me to a stop and helps me up onto the bed. I bite my lip so as not to scream from the piercing pain in my gut. I don’t want to show any sign of weakness right now.
As my head is propped against the pillow, my eyes fall on the van Gogh reproduction above the bedside table. I hadn’t noticed it earlier today. First Steps: a mother, supportive, holds her child beneath his armpits as he takes tentative steps towards his father in a field. On our New York trip, while Mark frequented hip cafés for inspiration, I wandered through the Metropolitan Museum of Art and stumbled on this painting. My eyes had filled with tears as I’d stared at the figures, envisaging myself as the mother sacrificing everything for her child, Mark as the father beckoning to his son.
Dr Solomon folds his arms and enunciates his words. ‘I believe there is a problem?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘We need to find our baby. Please help us.’
Mark sits at the foot of the bed, grasping so tight to my hand that my knuckles ache. ‘Please,’ he echoes.
I tell Dr Solomon everything: the medications, the blood test that went awry, the general anaesthetic, the protracted time Toby spent away from me, his lack of resemblance to Mark or me. Dr Solomon stands very still, uncrossing his arms every now and then to scratch his nose or smooth down his hair. Ursula stares at me from the other side of the room.
When I finish, Dr Solomon gestures for me to lie down. Mark helps me into a recline. Dr Solomon raises my gown. With his brisk, cold hands on my belly, pressing hard to ensure my womb is still contracted and checking my dressing, I feel a little like a corpse. He pulls the covers back across my naked skin, grunting with satisfaction.
‘I apologise for any misunderstandings with the nursing staff,’ he says in a gruff voice. ‘I inspected Toby in the nursery before coming here. He is the baby I delivered in the early hours of this morning. I know you were expecting a girl, but you definitely had a little boy. Your baby was labelled with two name bands at birth, ankle and wrist, as is standard protocol. Because of his gestation, a midwife transported him from the theatre to the nursery.’ He signs my medical file and places it on the tray table beside me.
He hasn’t heard anything I’ve said.
‘But it was supposed to be a girl,’ I murmur.
Dr Solomon shakes his head back and forth.
‘I presume you know that no test in medicine, including an ultrasound, is one hundred per cent correct.’
‘I was convinced,’ I say with more certainty now. ‘It felt like a girl to me.’
‘Uh-huh.’
This is what they do, doctors. Dismiss the pieces of the puzzle that don’t fit. Dismiss female intuition, too.
‘Was our baby left alone at any stage?’ I ask. Mark squeezes my hand tight. Easy, Sash.
‘You were with the baby the whole time, weren’t you?’ Dr Solomon says, indicating Ursula.
‘Oh, yes,’ she says, running the chain of her glasses between forefinger and thumb. ‘He was never left alone.’
‘But she got my name wrong,’ I cry, pulling myself to sitting with the overhead handlebar. The stitches on my belly, and the cut on my finger from the kangaroo rescue, prick and burn.
Ursula picks up my file and makes a show of inspecting the pages under the lights. How can she be allowed to get away with this? How can any of them?
‘I just need proof. Can’t we do DNA testing?’
‘He’s not an IVF baby, is he?’ Dr Solomon says.
During the months that stretched into years as we tried to conceive, I’d pushed and pushed Mark to start IVF. I asked in the car, I asked over the dinner table, I asked in bed. Mark resisted each and every time. Finally, one morning over Mark’s poached eggs, I’d exploded.
‘Don’t you even want a baby?’
He’d carefully tipped the plastic ladle, egg inside, to drain water back into the saucepan. ‘More than anything.’
‘More than me?’
He shook his head. ‘Sash, come on. I don’t want you having invasive medical stuff. Not after watching Simon. All those needles. In his arms. His spine. His hip. I told you what he went through, right?’ He slid the egg onto his slice of toast. ‘You know I can’t stand hospitals.’
I thrust my knife into my own egg. Yolk oozed out like bodily fluids, spilling over my spinach, weaving its way around the mushrooms.
‘Plus, there’s been enough going on in recent years with … you know,’ he’d said. ‘That baby who died. I don’t want to be responsible for causing you more stress.’
I dabbed the tines of my fork into the yellow goo and spread it over the edges of my plate.
‘I’ll do anything except IVF,’ he said.
We didn’t speak for three days. In the end, Mark won. We did what he wanted. Waited. Hoped for a miracle. I never had a choice.
‘There was no IVF,’ I say to Dr Solomon now.
‘Then there can’t have been any sort of mix-up in a petri dish or a lab. There certainly hasn’t been a mix-up here. So there doesn’t seem to be any need for DNA tests, does there?’
Dr Solomon’s voice sounds ominously grave. I’m confused. Then concerned. Surely something terrible hasn’t happened to my baby. They would have had to say something, wouldn’t they? And yes, I feel my baby is missing, but there are a finite number of premature babies here in the hospital. We just need to work through the options systematically. But everyone’s looking at me with such pity that I feel nauseated. Have I missed something? What is Dr Solomon saying?
I can feel my breathing quicken. None of the cases I’ve heard about involved cover-ups of dead babies. It would be unfathomable. Yet doctors prefer to hide their mistakes. Bury them, in fact.
Ursula spoke about something going around the hospital in the past. An infection. It comes to me for the second time, a terrible lurch – is it possible my child could be dead?
‘Has something happened to my baby?’ I ask shakily.
Dr Solomon and Ursula exchange glances.
‘Of course not, Sasha,’ he says at once.
The relief floods through my body until I realise with a start that I’ll have to be more careful. I shouldn’t make any more accusations while my baby is still missing – not until I know the truth.
I give Mark’s hand a firm squeeze. Help, please.
‘Couldn’t we check Toby’s DNA, to be sure?’ Mark says.
Dr Solomon smooths down his tie.
‘All the documentation is in order. There’s nothing further that needs to be done at this stage.’
‘Why won’t you respect my wishes?’ I say, almost crushing Mark’s hand in mine. ‘Why aren’t you helping us find our baby?’
‘Sasha, we’re all trying to help you.’ Dr Solomon reaches for the drug chart hanging on the end of my bed. ‘There’s an order for sleeping tablets, two before bed, and Valium as required. And do make sure you take enough painkillers. That
should make you altogether more comfortable,’ he says.
Mark presses my hand between his palms. Everything will be okay. Mark listens to doctors, but what he can’t understand is that doctors aren’t always right.
Dr Solomon hangs the chart back on my bed with a clatter and heads for the door, Ursula following him.
‘Please,’ I say, struggling not to yell. How can the conversation be over? ‘Can’t you call my specialist from the Royal? Dr Yang. She’ll tell you what I’m like. She knows I wouldn’t make up something like this. Mark will tell you, too. Mark, tell him.’
Before Mark can say something, Dr Solomon speaks. ‘I’ve already spoken with Dr Yang. We felt it would be best for you to speak with a colleague of mine. I’ve asked her to come and meet with you as soon as possible, to sort everything out today.’ He turns to Mark, sitting stony beside me. ‘I’d like a word with you outside if I may.’
Mark gives me his best attempt at a reassuring smile as he trails Dr Solomon and Ursula out the door.
I’m alone, again.
Maybe they’re right and I’m wrong. A hospital conspiracy is definitely far-fetched. And how could there have even been a baby swap, or a death, when Mark was there with Ursula the whole time? Maybe I should be listening to the doctors. Believing them. Doctors usually know what they’re talking about. Don’t they?
Breathe, I tell myself. They’ve listened to you. They wouldn’t lie to a patient. You’re tired, you’re sick …
I’ve been wrong before. My intuition about Damien was wrong. After him, I feared I wasn’t safe to take care of children, believed I wasn’t responsible enough. Even before that, I’d already doubted my ability to be a good enough mother, questioned whether I even had the right to try given my own mother had walked out on her parental responsibilities. I feared I’d inherited some sort of bad-mother gene.
I suppose there’s a simple solution: I just need to spend more time with Toby, try harder to be his mother. Even if I’m still far from convinced that he’s my child, I need to try to love him, in the same way I was able to love the other babies that stopped growing inside me without even thinking. It’s not Toby’s fault that he’s trapped upstairs in a plastic box. How hard could it be to try to give him love?