by Susi Fox
On the mattress, a syringe half-full of clear liquid. A discarded IV cap.
I clap my hand to my mouth, suck in air between my fingers.
Toby was sicker than Gabriel. Wasn’t it Toby being resuscitated? So why isn’t Gabriel in his cot?
Oxygen tubing, attached to the wall, is strung out like a snakeskin across the ground.
Please God, no. It can’t be him. It can’t be Gabriel. My son.
A minute bloodstain on the sheet. From putting in an IV? I touch it with my fingerpad.
I slump against the bench, my hand sliding off the humidicrib as my legs buckle from underneath me and I slither to the ground on all fours.
The cold vinyl cuts into my knees. My forehead meets the ground in a futile prayer. This is floor that he gazed upon. His skin cells will be on this vinyl. A cell memory. I run my palm over the surface, collecting flecks of black and grey dust, and the precious ones, the white flakes of skin. I kiss at my hand. There is dust and dirt on my lips. But his skin, too. It feels dry and warm.
I use the humidicrib rails to haul myself to standing and run my fingers across its metal rim, the buttons that have kept him alive, kept him warm.
The perspex is smooth. Too smooth. I want to shatter it to fragments so sharp they could pierce my heart.
I lift the side of the humidicrib and press my face into the small cotton sheet. He is still here with me, his scent of honey and cinnamon and hot buttered toast. I breathe him in deep, right to the base of my lungs.
The sheet sticks as I try to pull my head free. I tug and it lifts away with me. I fold it into a tiny square and stuff it down my bra, next to my breast, where it will be safe.
I lean over and cradle the mattress in my arms, between my elbows. I press my lips to its plastic cover, which could almost be a baby’s skin.
I stroke the plastic, slippery beneath my palm, and imagine my baby is here with me. I think he’s too hot. He needs cooling down.
The face washers are kept on a shelf at the base of the humidicrib. I wet one under the cold tap in the sink beside the cot and go through the motions of wiping his forehead. He’s cooler now. He’s more comfortable. Maybe he’s going to be okay.
An alarm sounds from a cot across the way.
The plastic is sticking to my elbows. I wrench it off, haul the mattress back into place. This isn’t my baby. This isn’t him at all.
I snap the side of the humidicrib closed. I must see Gabriel. I need to cradle him, hug him. Hold his cold, dead body in my arms.
The resuscitation room is empty. The emergency is long over.
The heat lamp perched over the resuscitation cot is still on but there’s no baby beneath it. I bring my face to the mattress. I can smell him here, too, can feel his presence through every pore of my skin. I must have missed him by the slimmest fraction of time.
The cot creaks as I drop my face against the sheet. The heat from the lamp above sears my skin.
This is where he lay. Where he took his last breaths.
With my head at an angle, on the whiteboard on the wall I can make out times of procedures. IV insertion. Intubation attempts. CPR. Doses of drugs: suxamethonium, propofol, adrenaline, amiodarone, bicarbonate. Medication vials half-empty on the benchtops. Opened plastic packets like lolly wrappers on the floor. They gave him everything they could to try and keep him alive.
I cry out. It was all I wanted, all I asked for. A baby. A family. Someone to love and to love me in return.
I don’t know how to bear this. Please, Mum, please help me. I don’t know how to make this right.
I peer through the fog filling the room, imagine Lucia’s face before me, imagine her stroking my back, telling me everything will be alright.
Gabriel trusted that I would find him. He cried for me. He expected me to be there to comfort him. I failed him.
Through my tears, I listen for him, for his cry, for his voice.
Nothing but silence.
A scuffle from the door. Ursula, her face a blank mask. ‘You really shouldn’t be in here.’ She assists me to stand.
‘Please,’ I say, grasping for the side of the cot, trying to hold fast. ‘No.’
‘You must come this way,’ she says. She prises my fingers, one by one, off the cot rail. With her hand steady in the small of my back, she directs me into the nursery.
My mother. What might she say? That I tried too hard. That I pushed too hard to have a baby. That somehow this was all my fault. Had this been her, she would have let go, let her ending come. I’m not like her. I don’t want ends. I want beginnings. They have to understand what they’ve done, each of them. Not Brigitte, though. I understand what she did. And she didn’t mean to make my son sick. It’s all too much, too quick to process. What I do know is it’s the hospital who should pay. I should bring them down. Bring them down for all the other women the system has failed to believe across the years, the women who’ve been mocked and dismissed and ignored. Bring them down for what’s been done.
Ursula presses me on to where Mark now stands by the nursery door, his jaw rimmed with stubble, crumpled clothes hanging off his broad frame. He was supposed to be waiting for me in the car. What is he doing here? And, I find myself asking again, how much does he know about our son?
He grabs my arm, pulls me close. ‘Sash, look.’
A squalling baby, its face red raw, its hands clenched.
I pull away from him. ‘Leave me,’ I say. ‘It’s too much.’
His hand is firm on my clothes. ‘Look.’
The name tag.
It’s Toby.
‘He’s doing okay, Sash. He’s just been moved to an open cot,’ Mark says.
In my resident days, the doctors used to say that closer to the door was closer to home.
Toby’s forehead is sweaty under my palm. My finger slides down the bridge of his nose, to its peak. His cry eases a little.
Toby is not my son. But he needs a mother, a mother who wants, loves, adores him. Who loves him unconditionally. Like Lucia loved me. I wonder if I can be enough for him, and him for me.
‘Shh,’ I say, ‘Shh, Toby. Hush.’
I pull the wraps around him, not too tight, and lift him to my chest. He’s heavier than I imagined as he settles in against me, his face paling to a shade of peach. His arm grasps at me, takes my pinky in his hand, the creases of his palm folding over me so I can’t let go.
His eyes are the colour of shimmering twilight. Around the outer rim of his iris, a deep ocean of blue, impenetrable. Can I ever truly know you? And can you ever know me?
Toby looks back at me.
I think I could hold him like this for the longest time.
Then, a commotion at the door.
Brigitte charges into the nursery. Her blue floral dress hangs loose on her thin frame, her shoulders hunched like an old woman. Her long dishevelled hair is shaken from its tie and dangles down her back.
Ursula steps forward from the nurses’ desk as if to comfort her but Brigitte turns her back on her and swivels in my direction. ‘How dare you?’ she screeches.
I clutch Toby to my chest. He doesn’t deserve any of this.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ Her jaw is tight, the whites of her eyes a deep red. ‘They’re saying he died from an infection. You infected him.’ Spittle flicks through the gap between her front teeth.
‘No,’ I say, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’ All at once it comes to me, how this has come about. I saw Brigitte forget to wash her hands in the nursery bathroom. Inadvertently, it appears, she is responsible for the death of a baby. My son, who I carried with me for thirty-five weeks. I should be beyond furious, I suppose; yet what I feel is a blanket of horror cloaking me, like in those times I have made catastrophic mistakes.
Brigitte’s face is contorted with grief. She hisses, too soft for anyone but me to hear. ‘You know what I did, don’t you?’ She searches my expression. ‘Given the opportunity, any good mother would take a chance to rewrite the past.’ Lo
uder now: ‘How come this baby gets to live? You don’t even love him. I’ve seen the way you look at him.’
Mark steps forward but he’s too far away to reach us. I hadn’t noticed how close Brigitte has managed to come. She’s right in front of me now, her stale breath catching my nostrils as she reaches towards me, her arms outstretched.
‘Give him to me,’ she says. ‘I can love him more than you will.’ She leans in.
I step back, hugging Toby to me. She encircles him with her hands and tries to wrestle him from my grasp, and with the vigour of grief she’s so strong that I don’t know if I can keep holding him, if I have the strength to never let him go. Her fingers dig deeper into his wraps as my hold on him loosens, and as she pulls he begins to give way.
For a moment, with the slipperiness of my palms, the lightness of Toby in my grasp, I contemplate letting him slide into her arms. It would be almost like letting go of a breath, or a sneeze, something released involuntarily, to give him over to her soft hands, softer than mine, her nails more baby-friendly than my bitten-down quicks and my dry, cracked skin. With her hands, her grip, she would be able to hold him more tightly, more easily, more like I think a mother should.
My mother. She held me tight as she slipped into darkness. I remember her arms pressing me into her cooling chest. She had wanted to take me with her. For some reason, I didn’t follow her. I stayed alive. And despite everything, I have continued to choose life. Even as I remained unsure whether I could be different to my mother, I chose to have a baby. My doubt in my mothering ability lingers. But I know I will do anything, everything I can, to make sure I never hurt my son.
Brigitte scrabbles for him, yanking at his wraps. I press Toby firmly to me. Even though I couldn’t love him for so long, didn’t even consider him mine, I know I gave him what I could. I can only pray that he will forgive me for my failures one day.
A vision of Toby pulls into focus: the depth of his gaze, his subtle frown, the way he closed his fingers around my pinky.
I am his mother. She gave him away.
She gave him away to me.
‘He’s mine!’ My voice is strong and clear, echoing through the nursery. I give a jolt and step back from Brigitte.
Her grasp slips from Toby, her empty hands clutching the air in front of her.
My baby, finally in my arms.
I press him to me, so warm against my chest. His heart is beating at the same rate as mine; we’re in synchrony.
Mark holds Brigitte by her wrists. She swivels her head to Ursula, standing by the nurses’ desk. ‘Help, Ursula,’ she calls. ‘I need your help again.’ Ursula gives a slight shake of her head and reaches for the phone. An emergency code comes over the loudspeaker and, almost immediately, security staff dash through the door. They surround Brigitte as she collapses to the ground. They drag her, kicking and screaming, away.
In my arms, my baby begins to cry, his screams pulsing through my chest. I cradle him. ‘Shh, shh,’ I whisper into his ear, stroking his back up and down, down and up. ‘Everything will be alright.’
At the nurses’ station, Dr Green speaks frantically on the phone. Mark shouts at Ursula, flinging his arms about as she huddles against the wall. I can’t hear what either of them is saying.
I feel compassion for Brigitte, for what she’s been through, for the desperation that drove her to forsake her child. I know she will seek redemption eventually. As for me, I have redemption of my own to seek.
Toby’s screams begin to subside. He pauses longer and longer between his cries until he’s whimpering, then snuffling. I study his face as I rub gentle circles on his chest, finding features I’d noticed in quiet, hidden moments and forgotten until today. The curve between his nose and eyes. The shape of his eyebrows, thicker in the middle, thinning at the edges. The gentle crease under his lower lip.
I press him to my cheek and kiss him, on the crown of his head, the curl of his ear, the rise of his cheek, all of his parts coalescing to form a whole. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ I say. He settles into silence and softens in my arms, staring up at me, his eyes shiny and clear, willing me to be his mother and to love him, and, after so many days, hours, minutes, I finally believe that I can.
Six Months After Birth
MARK
The windscreen wipers shift left to right in a jerky beat, lulling Toby to sleep. He’s been an easy baby, even easier for Sash than for me. He tends to fall asleep in our arms, or in the carrier when we take him for walks around the lake.
In the rear-vision mirror, I can see him strapped into his capsule in the back seat. His eyelids droop until they’re closed. Against the windscreen, the rain comes down in sheets, pooling over the road.
I glance back at Toby. His nose, long and proud. His hair, swept to one side, highlighting his wide forehead. His neck tilted at an angle, exposing his earlobe joined to his head.
Impossible.
He looks exactly like Simon.
I turn my eyes to the road, where a sulphur-crested cockatoo is pecking at the ground beside a rotting kangaroo carcass. Fixated by the image, I miss the curve of the road and speed across the shoulder. With no time to brake I swerve, the wheels skimming across the dirt at the roadside, the steering wheel slipping from my hands. The car spins out of control and I wonder if we will stop, and when, and what it might feel like for it to end here, now, but then the car squeals to a juddering halt.
Rain hammers on the roof. Toby begins to whimper, a soft cry that fills the cabin in the quietness of the bush. I shift my limbs in the seat and check on him. It looks like we’re both okay. The cockatoo flaps across the road, squawking. Everything is going to be fine.
Except it isn’t. Not really.
There are so many things I can’t tell Sash. I’ll never be able to let on about this accident, for starters. Nor that Bill told me years ago what her mother did, what she tried to do to Sash. Or my deathly regret that I never got to know Gabriel.
How wrong I’ve been. About Sash. About everything.
I’d read the DNA results when they arrived at the house but, thinking Sash had deliberately engineered the results to confirm her suspicions, refused to believe them. I only deduced what had happened in the nursery as I took Brigitte’s wrists in my palms, her fingers clawing for what I had thought was my biological child. Sash was cradling him, loving him in this new way before I could. I knew instantly that all of us would be best served by my silence. I can’t say I understand Sash’s decision, but who am I to judge her choice, after all she’s been through? That first evening, after she’d claimed Toby, I briefly told her what I’d concluded in a private moment. I didn’t ask her anything more. I didn’t need to know the details. I’d already said and done enough.
Besides, everything that has happened is at least partly my fault.
The morning Toby was born, I lied to Sash. I had gone home. I told myself that after the night we’d had, I needed rest. I was exhausted. Wrecked. Back in the cocoon of our house, I tried to cook something for Sash. The smoke alarm woke me from my slumber. I took the ruined ragout from the stove, had a shower to wash away the stench of the joey and, on the way back to the hospital, bought roses and some food at the cafeteria for Sash.
Sash was still asleep when I left the roses by her bed. I headed back to the nursery, planning to see our son. But my limbs were like iron bars. I couldn’t force myself to go inside. The thought of seeing our baby pale and naked under artificial lights, tubes fed into him to keep him alive; it was too much like what I’d seen with Simon. I wasn’t prepared to watch our son go.
Maybe if I’d stayed with him like I’d promised Sash I would; if I hadn’t failed him on his first day of life; if I’d told Sash the truth from the start, before it all began; maybe then, everything would have been alright.
Simon, and Gabriel, I couldn’t save. Now I have Toby. Him, I can protect.
I reach behind me to the back seat, unclip Toby and pull him into my arms. He shuffles against me, his eyes still sh
ut. I hug him to me as the rain beats down on the roof, carrying dirt from the duco onto the road, carrying our mistakes into the bush where I hope, in time, they will turn to fertile ground.
Nine Months After Birth
A flock of yellow balloons hovers above the crowd gathering on the oval. Mark has Toby strapped to his chest as he strides towards me. He’s been taking care of Toby during my job interview. He is committed to being a stay-at-home dad. The restaurant, and the café, are out of the picture. Our family comes first, he says.
‘How did you go?’ He hands me his own small bundle of balloons to hold them by their shiny strings, then pecks my cheek. I give an encouraging smile.
‘Fine. I think I’ve got it.’ The pathology company in the city doesn’t know my history. It’s anonymous, safer than working in a smaller town, given everything we’ve been through.
People cluster in a loose circle on the damp grass. As always, I scan the crowd for long, plaited hair, piercing eyes, a gap between front teeth. I look for her everywhere now. She will come back for him one day. I wouldn’t blame her. That is what I would do.
Ursula cornered me after Brigitte had been taken away.
‘You never tell anyone anything,’ she said with an almost apologetic smile, ‘and I’ll make sure Brigitte never does the same.’
I knew, even then, that there were no guarantees.
Mark struggles with the clip to unhook the baby carrier from his chest. I fiddle with the clasp. As Mark loosens the straps, Toby wakens momentarily, stretching an arm towards me. Mark lifts him and delivers him into my embrace.
Toby is heavier now. Warm, too, despite the coolness of the late-afternoon air. He is alive, so alive. He gives a faint sigh, his breath tinged with the sweetness of breastmilk. I wipe away a streak of white above his upper lip then stroke the fuzz of hair on his scalp. Does a child ever really belong to a mother? For now, at least, he is mine.
‘I got five balloons.’ Mark removes the carrier from around his waist, stretches it across my belly and clicks it in place.