by Susi Fox
‘What story?’
‘Mark hasn’t rung you?’
‘Should he have? What is it, Sash? Is something wrong?’
I lift my quilt to my nose. It smells of my childhood. It reminds me of my mother, and of Bec.
‘Oh, Bec. Everything is ruined. There was an accident. I’m okay, but I had to have an emergency caesar. I had a general anaesthetic, so I was asleep during the birth. After I woke up, I realised the baby they’re saying is mine isn’t mine. I have no idea how it happened. It’s a mix-up – a mistake. But all the staff won’t believe me. Even Mark won’t listen. They think I’m mentally unwell. But I’m not, Bec, I’m not. I know he’s not my baby.’
She exhales down the phone.
‘Wow, Sash. God, okay. I don’t even know what to say. This is huge. I mean, I thought you’d finally have everything you wanted.’ I wonder fleetingly if any part of her is happy to hear things have gone so wrong for me. ‘Hang on, did you say “he”? Did you have a boy, Sash? I thought you were expecting a girl.’
I almost sob. ‘The ultrasound said a girl. It felt like a girl, too. But the hospital is insistent I had a boy.’
‘That’s so weird. And you’re one hundred per cent sure the baby isn’t yours?’
I sniff back my tears. Even if no one else does, I need Bec to believe me.
‘You remember that boyfriend of yours you thought was gay?’
‘Daniel.’
‘And the other guy years ago, the one you just knew was cheating on you? This is the same. I know I’m right. It all feels wrong, Bec. The baby feels wrong when I hold him. When I look at him.’ Even as I say it, I realise how it sounds.
‘It couldn’t be first-time-mother nerves? The baby blues? Postnatal depression? Something like that?’
‘No.’ Though that’s what Mark must think. The psychiatrist, too. But I know myself. I’m not depressed, or confused, or delusional. And I know my baby. I carried this life inside me for the last eight months. Toby is not my child.
‘Have you checked the other babies yet to see if yours could be elsewhere in the nursery?’
‘I checked them already.’
‘Are you certain? Only once? You’ve got to check again, Sash.’
‘Okay.’ Thank God Bec is onside. I desperately need her optimism. I don’t want to revert to my state of mind during those dark years of infertility, when I was starting to lose hope not only in my chances of a baby, but in my marriage, too. There had been a time when I felt I had failed Mark so completely I could barely look him in the eye. I even told him he should think about leaving me. He shushed me, of course, said I was being ridiculous. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d wanted to, though. My parents’ split had taught me from a young age that sometimes love just isn’t enough.
Early in this pregnancy, at our scan appointment with Dr Yang, I sat straight-backed at the opposite end of the cramped couch in the waiting room, my legs crossed away from Mark, flipping through Time magazines as I sneaked glances at the other, happier couples also waiting. Mark’s foot tapped on the carpet while my heart steeled in anticipation of a crumpled foetus. Dr Yang emerged from her room and, with an extended arm like an usher, directed us into the sterile space where I undressed behind a curtain and slipped into a hospital gown. I sat astride the plastic examination chair, which stuck to the back of my thighs, Mark beside me so I could clench his sweating hand in mine, my legs splayed to either side, the physical contact the closest we’d been to having sex since I’d conceived. I gritted my teeth as Dr Yang placed the lubricated probe inside me.
‘Ready?’ she’d said, and she showed us an image of the foetus on the screen, indicating the beating heart, the nasal bone, the spindly limbs – all good signs, all things we’d never seen on our ultrasound before, and I tried to smile, really I did, and Mark smiled back, and I hoped then that the chasm between us wasn’t too wide to bridge now that things were working for the first time.
Afterwards, as we walked out into the sunshine, I had grasped Mark’s hand, daring anyone who came across us to notice how hard I was trying to pretend that our marriage was really, absolutely, one hundred per cent fine.
Bec’s voice jolts me back to the present.
‘Look, Sash, I believe you. I’m completely behind you – I know you’d be behind me if I were in the same situation. It’s a mother’s instinct. And you don’t get things wrong. It makes sense why they’re not believing you. It’s classic, isn’t it? You’ve seen the studies? Women’s pain getting dismissed in emergency departments. It happens all the time here in the UK, too. And didn’t you see it happen in paeds? You know, they label the mothers anxious, then their child’s illness is dismissed. Or the staff suspect the mothers are trying to make their children sick.’
‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ I say.
‘I’m sure you haven’t done anything wrong,’ she says soothingly. ‘You’ve got to make sure they know it, too. Those studies from med school – you remember?’ She details the Rosenhan experiments, where research assistants pretended to hear voices. As soon as they were admitted to psychiatric wards, they denied hearing anything. They were locked up, couldn’t talk their way out of there for weeks, until they were finally able to convince the psychiatrists of their sanity. Bec pauses to put on her most serious voice. ‘Once you get a label, it’s hard to shake. So, for them to believe you, you’ve got to act completely sane. No – correct that. Beyond sane. You got it?’
‘I’m trying.’
‘I’m sure you are.’
Our years of shared experience wrap like a woollen scarf around my shoulders, soft and warm. Part of me is surprised that, after her avoidance of me these last few months, she so readily believes me; yet her trust makes my heart soften in relief.
She pipes up again, her enthusiasm apparent.
‘I’ve got another idea. Why don’t I call the ward and pretend I’m a friend of one of the other mothers who gave birth today? Then I can find out the other babies’ names and pass them on to you. We can do some sleuthing together.’
‘It’s ridiculous, Bec. It’ll never work.’
She humphs. ‘Alright. Well, if the medical staff are so cocky, they should be willing to prove they’re right.’
‘They’re refusing to take me seriously.’
‘You have to push harder.’
‘Mark’s talking to them now. I’m hoping he’ll be able to sort all this out.’ I hug the quilt to my chest, imagining my mother embracing me. Were she here, would she know how to help?
‘I hope he can do something. But, Sash, you’ve got to act sane. Like I know you are. Remember – completely, utterly sane. Don’t leave them any room for doubt.’
I’m sane. I know I’m sane. There is something, though, that is causing my heart to feel like a boulder in my chest.
‘You don’t think there’s any way my baby could have died? They would have had to tell me, right?’ I try to keep the tremor from my voice.
‘Your baby’s alive,’ Bec assures me. ‘And you’ll find her. Or him. You’ve just got to search again.’
But her intonation sounds hollower than I’ve ever heard before. Does she really know that for certain? I have no choice but to believe her. I hear her swallow down the line.
‘Sash, I’m so sorry I can’t be there with you.’
I bite my lower lip. She could come, surely?
‘I wish I could, really I do. But there’s no way I can postpone a round of IVF for a month, not with the egg donor. The timelines are tight. I have an embryo transfer scheduled for next week.’
Last time we spoke, Bec disclosed that her eggs had been declared unfit for baby-making – scrambled, she had said with a heavy laugh. She and Adam had been spending hours sorting through scores of egg donor profiles, trying to select the description that most closely resembled her own physical characteristics.
‘Sperm donor too?’ I’d asked, remembering Adam’s sperm weren’t exactly top-notch.
‘Adam has refused,’ s
he said. ‘He wouldn’t want a child that wasn’t biologically his.’
But it’s okay for you to be a non-biological mother? I wanted to say. I kept quiet. I understood; she would do anything to have a baby. I’d been just the same.
It was only when Bec said they weren’t planning on telling any future child they’d used an egg donor that I cleared my throat.
‘You don’t think the child will have a right to know their biological parent?’
‘They’ll be our child,’ Bec said. ‘No point in telling them.’
‘What did the IVF clinic suggest you do?’
She’d laughed. ‘The clinic wants the money. They let us do what we like.’
Maybe Mark had been right to refuse to go down the IVF route. So many ethical questions without a clear answer. So much room for hurt, and for mistakes.
‘I understand why you can’t come back to Australia right now,’ I say, trying not to reveal the despair in my voice. ‘You’ll get pregnant soon, I’m positive.’ I’m not, but I can’t tell her that. We held the hope for each other for so long; I can’t back out now.
Before I ring off the call, Bec begins to describe a torturous baby shower she was forced to attend recently: pin the sperm on the egg, guess the baby-food flavour, taste the chocolate bar microwaved into the nappy. Her story makes me want to scream. Clutching at the quilt draped over me, I try to listen, try to laugh at the right moments but it’s impossible to feign interest. Doesn’t she understand what I’m going through here?
Bec hears the crack in my voice and stops.
‘You know everything always works out for you, Sash,’ she says. ‘So this will all end up fine, too. You’ll find your baby really soon, I’m sure of it.’ I hear her take a deep breath. ‘Sash, I’m sorry I haven’t been calling you. I’ve wanted to. It’s just been too hard; you being pregnant and all. I hope you understand.’
And I do.
When she’s off the line, I close my eyes and try to imagine the ebb and flow of breath in my chest. It used to help during the relentless infertility investigations. Now, in the thick heat of the room, my lungs are clamped tight like a stony seawall.
The quilt is cold in my lap. I clutch my phone to my chest, all too aware of the stretches of ocean, the thousands of kilometres, that lie between Bec and me.
Two Years Earlier
MARK
I’d seen Sash sad before. I mean, really sad. But there was something about the miscarriages that sucked the light from her face. We’d been trying for at least six years before then – six years of waiting; of frustration and tedium and heartbreak – and then everything happened at once.
It wasn’t exactly a miscarriage, the doctors told her. It wasn’t a baby, yet. They called it a chemical pregnancy. I got what they were trying to say, that there hadn’t been a formed human inside her. Sash, of course, took it the wrong way.
‘What am I, a nuclear weapons factory?’ she said at the dinner table one evening soon after the first time. She was dicing into minuscule cubes, with a steak knife, the pork belly I’d spent hours perfecting.
‘You were only five weeks,’ I said. ‘I guess this one wasn’t meant to be.’
I was trying to help, make her feel okay about it all, but apparently that was the wrong thing to say too.
Her eyes dulled. Then her head dropped.
‘I felt it inside me,’ she said. ‘It spoke to me before it left.’
I stopped chewing, mid-crackle. ‘It did?’
It spoke to her, she said in a whisper. Unintelligible words, like the chattering of a child from the next room.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘A child in the next room.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t defined speech. It wasn’t full words or sentences. Maybe it was more of a sense of someone there. Barely audible, but present.’
My fork clattered as it dropped onto my plate. ‘I don’t get it.’
A presence. That was it. She couldn’t explain any further. It wasn’t something that could be firmly pinned down.
Sash isn’t religious, not even spiritual. These sorts of things don’t happen to her. Or, for that matter, to us. I’ve never heard Simon’s voice in my head. I’ve had to conjure him up in my mind each time I make a decision; imagine what he would say, what he would do. I told Sash I didn’t understand, that she needed to explain it again.
But she didn’t have an explanation. All she knew was that she hadn’t imagined it.
Knowing her, how could I not believe her?
I decided to plant a sapling. For Sash. For the baby. It was the least I could do.
Down at the bottom of our property, on the edge of the bush, I dug a hole in the dusty ground. It wasn’t quite visible from the house, so she’d have to search it out if she wanted to grieve. From what I could see, she’d already spent a lot of time grieving over a pregnancy that was not meant to be. I would never have told her that, of course. Instead, I tried to get her to focus on the future, on things she could control.
Over the summer and into the autumn, she continued to blame herself. Hardly surprising – she likes to blame herself for everything. One day it was the sip of champagne at a work function that did it, the next the spoonful of gorgonzola pasta I’d made for our anniversary. I never knew what to say. I was pretty sure she was wrong, that it was sheer bad luck, but she’s the doctor. Wouldn’t she understand more than anyone why things had gone wrong?
That winter, she became obsessive. Getting pregnant was all she could think about. It took her mind off Damien so I was happy enough to listen as she ran through her new fertility-boosting methods.
No more food or drink she deemed unhealthy – dairy, wheat, alcohol, caffeine. Frankly, there wasn’t much left she could consume. Then there was the yoga practice. The exercise. And, worst of all, the Chinese herbs she boiled up on the stove three times a day, filling our house with the stench of a rubbish tip.
I tried to point out that the extremes to which she was pushing herself weren’t necessarily conducive to pregnancy. She refused to listen. What would I know? I hadn’t felt a life take hold inside me, she said. No, I wanted to say, but I’m watching one slip past before my eyes.
After the second miscarriage, that winter, with flakes of snow melting to water as they hit the grass outside, I chose a candlebark. The shovel nearly broke as I dug into the frozen ground. Still, it was important. It was all I felt I could do.
When I’d stamped down the soil round the sapling, I heard a rustle behind me. Sash, clutching two steaming mugs of coffee in her hands. She handed one to me, then pointed to a trail coursing down my cheek through the caked-on mud.
‘You’ve been crying,’ she said.
‘Sweat.’
‘It’s too cold for sweat.’ Cushions of steam puffed from her mouth.
‘It’s rain, then.’
She held an upturned palm in the air, feeling for drops.
‘You haven’t cried at all?’
I sipped at my coffee, shrugged.
‘Oh my God.’ She bit her lip.
Mist rose around us as raindrops began to spatter our skin like pinpricks. We never spoke about the chemical pregnancies – the miscarriages – again.
One evening the following autumn, on my return from work, I found her in the kitchen. She was slicing fresh limes from our garden on a wooden chopping board. Her eyes were alight like candles. I slid my arm around her belly.
‘Do you have good news?’
‘The best.’
The skin of her neck was tinged with salt.
‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘Fingers crossed this one sticks.’
‘It’s already stuck,’ she said. She held up an uncut lime in her palm, the peel glistening. ‘Would you believe our baby is already this size? I’m twelve weeks today.’
I pulled away, eased myself down onto the kitchen stool.
She wanted to surprise me, she said. I was surprised. She hadn’t wanted to get excited, given the last two times. Of course
she would have told me if it hadn’t worked out. I wondered if she was telling the truth about that.
‘Now we can be happy,’ she said. ‘You’re happy, right?’
I was. But there was no way I was going to let myself get too excited until Sash held our baby in her arms.
I had been watering the saplings three times a week to keep them going through the tinder-dry summer. The kangaroos were getting to them over the chicken wire, stripping the leaves from the twigs. I built the fence higher, reinforced it with a double layer of wire. I hoped like hell it would be enough to keep the saplings alive until the autumn rains came down.
Day 1, Saturday Afternoon
The porcelain of the ensuite sink is cold beneath my palm. I’m grasping onto it to keep myself upright as I use my mobile to call the labour ward. I’m hoping Bec’s idea might just work.
‘How can I help you?’ A gruff, tight voice. Ursula has picked up.
I try to imitate Bec’s musical lilt and hint of a British accent.
‘One of my relatives gave birth today. I was just speaking to her and I got disconnected. Could you please put me through again?’
‘What’s her name?’
‘She’s my … cousin’s wife. Her baby was born today. I got put through to the wrong mother before – Toby’s mother?’ I give an awkward laugh.
‘I’m sorry, I need a name.’
I only have one other name to draw on. I say it aloud. Saskia Martin – the name Ursula called me by mistake. I only hope she’s the other mother. There can’t be too many other women who gave birth here today.
‘Oh, you want to speak with Saskia. I’ll put you through to her now.’
‘Look, actually, don’t worry about putting me back through,’ I say. ‘I’d hate to disturb her again. Maybe I’ll come and visit her and the baby later this afternoon instead.’ I’ll track her down on the ward myself.
‘I suggest you speak to her now. She might not be here this afternoon. Her baby was flown to St Patrick’s in the city this morning.’
An emergency code rings out across the hospital loudspeakers. I cover the microphone on my mobile, a little too late, and hang up. I scuttle back to bed as fast as I can, conceal the phone beneath my pillow and fling the covers over me. Soft footsteps pad across the corridor. I press my eyelids closed. The footsteps pause at my doorway.