by Susi Fox
‘Then who? Who told you everything?’
Dr Niles raises her pointed eyebrows.
‘Bec?’
Dr Niles gives a slight shake of her head, her hair falling back into place. ‘Is Bec that friend of yours? The one who finally stopped calling me?’
‘My father, then.’
‘I haven’t spoken to your father.’
‘Surely not Ondine.’
Her eyebrows crowd together. Not Ondine, then. There’s only one other person who knows me and my mistakes. But she has nothing to do with the mother–baby unit.
‘Brigitte?’
Dr Niles’ face is blank.
‘But why the hell would she do that?’
She shrugs.
My brain sorts through what I’ve told Brigitte, what I haven’t, as if I’m trying to sift through a pile of flood-damaged papers that are falling apart in my hands. I can’t understand why she’s been speaking with Dr Niles. Nothing makes any sense.
‘I have to go,’ I say.
There’s something going on here. I need to figure out Brigitte’s motives for betraying me to Dr Niles. Perhaps if I read her medical notes, I’ll gain insight into her motives. Then I can finally try to see my son.
Dr Niles snaps the top of her fountain pen back in place.
‘I’m sure you’re aware we have significant concerns about your safety around the babies, Sasha,’ she says. ‘Believe me, from now on we’ll be watching you very closely indeed.’
Four Months Earlier
MARK
The night I popped in to tell them Sash was pregnant, Mum was at the sink, wringing water from a sponge. Dad was at the dining table, a handful of empty stubbies before him.
‘What on earth are you thinking?’ Dad said, his words slurring into each other. ‘Simon would never have done this.’
When Simon died, their criticisms of him evaporated. He became revered, remembered as the perfect child; the perfect son. It didn’t bother me. It was how I’d always seen him anyhow: the greatest brother; my best friend. The only problem was that, for my parents, I was left behind to make all the mistakes. It was a bad move to open my own café, they said. To marry a woman whose mother had abandoned her family, who might do the same. Now it seemed having a baby with Sash was the worst decision of all.
But I had one trump card left.
‘It’s a boy.’
I wasn’t sure it was a boy, of course, but I had a strong feeling the twenty-week ultrasound would prove me right. Intuition didn’t strike me often, but when it did, it was always correct. Like how I knew Sash was the woman for me from the very start.
As for the baby, I was certain Mum and Dad would be thrilled about a grandson. The baby would be like another Simon all over again. Not a replacement, but a form of solace.
I was right. Mum dropped the sponge into the soapy sink and clapped her hands on her cheeks.
‘A boy? How delightful. Hear that, Ray? It’s like a gift from Simon. A baby boy.’
Dad plonked his stubby on the table and stood to shake my hand.
‘Congratulations, son. A grandson to carry on the family name.’
Driving home that evening, I was speeding through the countryside when I was overcome with a surge of heat in my body. I had the oddest sensation someone was in the passenger seat.
‘Simon,’ I said aloud, knowing it was ridiculous to address my long-dead brother but needing to speak to him anyway. ‘Thank you for the baby. We’re going to be a family now, Sash and me.’ I listened to the engine hum in the silent night. ‘I have my own life to live now, bro. I can’t live your life as well anymore. But I still want you to be beside me. Like a mentor. A guide.’
On the roadside, I spotted an enormous shadow on the approaching rise. As I drew closer to the knoll, I could make out a kangaroo in the headlights, erect. A male, standing alone. I’d seen him in the area before, but never this close. He was big enough to smash the windscreen, take me with him to our graves.
I applied the brakes, skidded to a stop beside the roo. He swivelled his head, taking me in. His fur glistened red in the headlights. His eyes were pinpoints of light rimmed with black. There was something of a challenge in his gaze; an expectation. A total absence of fear.
Before I could unclick my seatbelt, he turned and leaped over the fence into the thick blackness of the bush. I emerged from the car, blinking in the darkness as I peered after him. There was no sign of him amid the host of thick trunks. I was tempted to follow him in, but something held me back.
Sash. She needed me. She always would.
The asphalt crunched beneath my feet. The leather car seat was still warm. Sash. And the baby in her womb. I had to head back home. Both of them were waiting for me.
Day 7, Friday Late Afternoon
I stride to the lift, take it to the first floor: the postnatal ward. I haven’t been here for nearly a week, not since the morning after the birth. The corridor and nurses’ station are deserted. I only need a moment.
Top drawer on the right, Brigitte said. I sidle behind the desk and pull open the drawer.
The two blood-red folders I’m looking for are at the top of the pile. S. Moloney. And B. Black.
I hesitate at the folder marked with my name. No doubt there are a multitude of offensive, inaccurate observations to sift through. I sigh. I’m in a hurry. Mark is still waiting for me in the car, I presume. I don’t want him to suspect that I’m trying to see Toby. And I’m certain to be interrupted by another patient or a nurse at any moment. I don’t have time to care what the hospital staff say, what they think, about me now.
I take out Brigitte’s folder and flip it open to the first page.
Brigitte, naturopath, single. Two miscarriages, one stillbirth at 24 weeks.
So much she hasn’t told me. So many times she didn’t tell me the truth.
I turn the page. Handwritten in capitals, underlined in red: ALLEGED SEXUAL ASSAULT BY UNKNOWN ASSAILANT IN HER HOME PRIOR TO PREGNANCY. NOT FOR VAGINAL EXAMINATIONS UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.
I close the file. I don’t need to read any more.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say aloud. It’s directed at Toby but it could be for Brigitte, for all of us, all women with our secrets and necessary lies.
My mind churns.
Brigitte questioned me about my parenting, my plans for more children, my marriage.
She prevented me from seeing Jeremy after I raised the possibility of a baby mix-up.
She gave me a hand-knitted jumper for Toby.
Hardly firm evidence of what she might have done.
I try to reassure myself that I could never switch my baby with someone else’s. But I know I can barely imagine what Brigitte has been through.
An announcement sounds on the hospital loudspeakers: Code Blue, Special Care Nursery.
Toby. No. This can’t be happening.
I shove the folder in the drawer and slam it shut, then scurry down the corridor to the lifts and press the number five button again and again. Finally the lift doors open and I tumble in. On level five I scrub my hands over the sink, then I move towards the nursery door. It slides open with a whirring sound. Brigitte stands before me. I almost knock her down in my haste to enter. She averts her gaze and steps into the foyer, towards the lifts. I have no time to talk to her now.
Through the open nursery door, I hear chaotic sounds reverberating from the resuscitation room: urgent voices, beeping monitors, squealing alarms. Through the glass panel on the door, I can see medical staff clustered around a trolley in the resuscitation room, their huddle obscuring the baby being resuscitated from my view.
Ursula approaches me at the door, her face pale. ‘You’ll have to wait in the hall,’ she says, yanking at my elbow.
‘Is it Toby?’
‘You’ll have to wait,’ she repeats. She presses me back, out through the nursery door and annexe, into the cool corridor. ‘Take a seat.’ Her face has a weary, haunted look. ‘We’re not letting any paren
ts in right now. I’ll come and speak to you when I can.’
How could I possibly sit? I pace the threadbare carpet. My fingers are frozen from shock. I thrust my hands into the pockets of Mark’s jacket. Inside the leather, my fingers catch on a crumpled ball of paper. I pull it out. A snow-white letter, the one Mark stashed in his pocket back home. The DNA results. I lean against the photo board on the wall and unfurl the pages. This is what I thought I had to wait for. What I thought I’d needed all along. What I risked everything to obtain. Mark said he didn’t even bother to read the results.
My heart hammers like a drum. When Mark pulled out the letter at home, I had thought I didn’t need to read it either, that I could trust my intuition. It’s only now that I realise I need definitive evidence, to prove to others as much as to myself who my child really is. I need more than my heart, more than my brain or my gut can know. I need the certainty that scientific proof can provide – that Toby is, after all, my son.
With trembling fingers, I smooth the sheets of paper flat and hold them out in front of me. I hesitate. A small part of me doesn’t want to know. But I realise that now there is no turning back.
I look down at the results. My eyes blur and the paper shakes in my hand. The DNA results are not at all what I expect.
Brigitte. She must have switched our babies.
Jeremy – Gabriel – is my son.
From the resuscitation room, the clamour of voices settles to a whisper, then dense silence. Staff emerge from the nursery in small groups, their heads cast low as they pad along the corridor. Dr Green follows them out, her gaze on the lifts. None of them has noticed me standing by the photo board.
I cling to the wall to steady myself. When the nursery has cleared, I stuff the results back in the jacket pocket. My heart is racing.
I make my way towards the nursery. As the door slides open, Ursula’s torso is a solid trunk before me.
I try to weave my way around her. ‘I need to see my son.’
‘It’s not the right time.’ Her hand on my shoulder is a crab claw, gripping tight, as she proceeds with me to the furthest corner of the annexe, behind the sink, away from the nursery door.
Ursula. She’s treated me poorly since I was admitted. Does she know about the mix-up?
‘Was it you?’ I say. ‘Did you know Toby wasn’t mine this whole time?’
‘We’ve been through this.’ She looks down and flattens her pinafore across her thighs.
‘You knew. You knew and you did nothing?’ I wrench the letter from my pocket, wave it in her face. ‘I have proof, Ursula.’ I unfold the paper and slam it against the wall, point at the results in black and white. ‘Look. Jeremy is my son. Like I said all along.’
As Ursula inspects the letter, her chin sags. She pauses, as if to consider her options, then starts slowly. ‘I … She has no one, you know. She’s all alone.’
‘She said she has a husband. Friends.’
Ursula shakes her head. ‘There is no husband. Brigitte is single. And she has no friends.’
The cards that surrounded Jeremy’s cot, all with the same handwriting – Brigitte did indeed write every one.
There’s only one way I can see this will be resolved. ‘Let me take Jeremy home. None of this has to be exposed. Otherwise I will bring it all into the open: the hospital’s culpability, your knowledge of the situation. You will lose your job.’
Ursula presses her back to the wall, her eyes falling to her feet.
‘How could you let her get away with it?’ I say.
Water drips from the taps into the metal sink, a steady beat.
‘I … It wasn’t Brigitte.’ She swallows, her voice thick. ‘I made the swap.’
Ursula? My heart threatens to stop. It feels as if blood is coagulating in my chest.
Huddled against the annexe wall, she appears almost pitiful. Her explanation starts haltingly. ‘The hospital stripped my supervisor role from me after the Serratia outbreak. They shoved me into an antenatal clinic rotation as if I was in disgrace. That’s where I met Brigitte, on her first antenatal visit. She was twenty weeks by the time her pregnancy was discovered. She’d been in denial about what happened, I suppose – the rape.’ She spits out the word as anger flares in her voice.
‘Despite her repulsion at how she became pregnant, she couldn’t face a termination. She struggled the whole pregnancy. Of course she did. Who wouldn’t? She was so afraid she wouldn’t be able to love her son after he was born. We bonded. We understood each other. I told her about something similar that had happened to me, years ago; something I’d never told anyone. We became close. Friends, almost.’
I listen to Ursula in silent disbelief.
‘I arranged her induction with the hope that I would be on duty at the time of the birth. It turned out perfectly. The labour ward was short-staffed, so I was called into work early and Brigitte was allocated to me. As soon as her baby was birthed, and I laid him in her arms, I knew her fears were founded. He looked nothing like her. She didn’t say a word; just turned her face to the wall.
‘She was so torn down below that she had to have stitches. While that was going on, I took her baby to the nursery. She looked relieved as I wheeled him out of the room in his crib.
‘Later, when I took her to see him, she didn’t want to approach his humidicrib. Instead she started to look at the other babies. I warned her against it, told her it wasn’t a good idea, that it wasn’t even allowed. She should have been focusing on her own baby. But as soon as her eyes fell on Jeremy, she was in love in a way I knew she could never be with her son.’ She pauses as a staff member exits the nursery. The nurse glances in our direction then continues to the lifts.
The words hurtle out of me. ‘But I loved my son. Even before he was born. How could you – how could she – do that to me? To my family?’
A darkness spreads over Ursula’s face as she straightens her spine against the wall. ‘I knew you could love any baby. I read your notes while you were in the caesar. I had them faxed over from the Royal. You were desperate for a baby. I’ve seen it with many women. After infertility, after trying so hard and for so long, you would have been happy with any child.
‘When Brigitte made a suggestion for me to swap your babies, I thought it was an offhand comment. It was only when she offered me a reasonable sum that I realised she wasn’t joking. And I was desperate.’ She bends over, her hands coming to rest on her thighs. ‘It’s not so easy to get by these days. You’re a pathologist – you wouldn’t understand what it’s like as a nurse in a public hospital. Our pay and our conditions get worse every year – and then I was demoted. You try to pay the bills, the mortgage, after that. You try to survive. And Brigitte had been a nurse – she understood perfectly what I was going through.
‘But now Brigitte had financial compensation, because of what happened to her. She could afford to pay me. It was so easy, you know. Easier than you would think. The name tags almost slipped off them both. I’d attached them to their wrists myself. It was simple to write new ones and discard the old.
‘After, it all unfolded as I’d hoped. Brigitte was insistent that she get to know you, ensure Toby was going to a good home. She was happy that you would do a good enough job raising him. She only started to become wary of you when you asked to hold Jeremy. I fobbed off her concerns and didn’t tell her of your suspicions until she witnessed you having the let-down reflex. I’d been hoping you would eventually come to believe that you had been mistaken. You were the only person who noticed there was a problem. Really, the biggest problem was you.’
Ursula’s piercing gaze, like a bird ready to swoop, startles me from my frozen state.
‘Someone else should have noticed. The babies were different gestations. Hitting different developmental milestones.’
‘We all see what we want to see. Isn’t that right?’ she says.
Dr Solomon. Dr Niles. Dr Green. Even Mark. It was easier for them to believe I was mentally unwell than to see the trut
h.
‘Was it you who told Dr Niles on me? Who told her I thought Jeremy was mine?’
‘You were doing the wrong thing. Breaking the rules of the nursery. Of course Dr Niles needed to know.’
I shudder. ‘What exactly did you tell her?’
‘I simply told her what happened, and what you told Brigitte. Nothing but the truth.’ She counts the facts off on her fingers as she speaks. ‘That both you and your mother had been suicidal. That you weren’t taking your medication. That you felt bad about a child’s death. That you tried to hold Jeremy. That you told Brigitte you wanted to hold him. That you had a let-down reflex when you looked at him. That you still considered Jeremy your son.’
‘What about my marriage? What did you say to Dr Niles?’
‘What Brigitte passed on. Dr Niles is having problems of her own, I believe. Marital problems. Infertility. Perhaps she believed she could learn something from you.’
There is nothing I could teach Dr Niles, except perhaps what I have learned from pathology: that everyone has something wrong with them under their thin coat of skin.
‘And Toby. Is he okay?’
Out in the corridor, from near the stairwell, a desperate wail. It’s a woman’s cry. Ursula’s head jerks towards the sound. ‘I have to go. Wait here.’ She steps back, straightens her pinafore then hurries in the direction of the stairwell.
She hasn’t answered my question. But I can take this chance to see my Gabriel. I slip through the nursery door, hurry along the corridor to his cot and thrust open the partitions.
His humidicrib is empty. Where is he? Surely he hasn’t been discharged. He was jaundiced, a little unwell. He needed to stay in hospital, receive medical care.