Stolen Child

by Laurie Gough

  Aside from the pain of contractions, there was the matter of where the baby was being born. We’d planned on having our baby at a lovely little birthing centre not far from Wakefield. The baby would enter the world gently, into the loving arms of two midwives in a candlelit room on a cozy bed, or possibly, in a tub of warm water. Music of our choice could be played in the background, and wholesome vegetarian meals would be served. No drugs to ease the pain would be allowed, but that was okay since pain was just a state of mind. It had all sounded like some sort of love-in, a celestial, exotic event that we could cherish for years, and, perhaps, digitally record.

  But we weren’t at the lovely birthing centre. We were in a French hospital in Ottawa because of a law stating that if a woman’s water breaks and she hasn’t begun dilating within twenty-four hours, she must deliver in a hospital rather than with a midwife. That’s why I’d spent the day in a dingy-walled hospital room on a hard bed, wired to monitors, with a steady stream of nurses going on and off their hectic shifts. I’d also been induced with oxytocin. When you’re induced, your contractions come on much stronger than ordinary contractions, like wild horses thundering across your kidneys. The obstetrician came in early on to tell me I should have an epidural, which I refused, and then I didn’t see him again for hours. Finally, at midnight, after twenty-four hours of more pain than I knew was humanly possible, I recall shouting, “Give me the epidural!”

  After the epidural kicked in, the contractions were just something to watch on a monitor. But then the monitor started showing that the baby’s heart was slowing down dangerously because of the oxytocin. By this time it was 2:00 a.m. and there was just one night nurse left on duty in the short-staffed ward — it was almost Christmas. Every time the monitor started beeping to indicate red alert, the sprite little nurse, named Josie, would run in frantically to tell me the baby’s heart was slowing down, then she’d stick her fingers inside me to tickle the baby’s head to revive him until the monitor showed his heart charging up again. Every time this happened, I’d look at Rob, terrified. I simply could not comprehend that all this time there’d been a catastrophe concealed in this pregnancy. I hadn’t seen it coming: a baby with a fragile heart. I have no idea how many times Josie saved our baby’s life by tickling his tiny head. I’d never heard of saving a life by tickling but I was so grateful to Josie that I contemplated naming our baby son after her. Come on, baby, I was thinking, don’t die, you’re being tickled! See how fun life will be? One of those times when Josie was trying to revive the baby, she started yelling for another nurse to come help her. No other nurse appeared — the ward was hauntingly empty — so she got Rob to help by manoeuvring my body around to kick-start the baby’s heart. All the while she kept yelling for the no-show nurse to come help.

  In that grey, morgue-like room, it was just me, Rob, Josie, and an unborn baby with a dead-beat heart.

  Finally, the doctor rushed in to tell me I should have an emergency C-section. My own heart sank. This was not what I’d imagined. Half an hour later, I was wheeled down the hall into a fluorescent-lit surgery room. The lights were blinding. My baby will leave the womb and enter Las Vegas, I kept thinking. My arms were shackled down crucifix-style at my wrists, Rob was above me, dressed in green, sterile scrubs, wearing a mask. Everything was happening at lightning speed. Suddenly, I was sliced open, but all I could see was the doctor’s face as he reached inside me. For a moment, he looked puzzled. “The baby’s backward,” he said. “And the cord is around his neck.” Jeepers, I thought, this baby has issues. Then the doctor got the other doctors to count to four. They counted, pushed down on me, then, suddenly, miraculously, the room was filled with the sound of a baby crying. A baby crying, I thought. There really was a baby in there all along. Imagine that!

  And suddenly it didn’t matter so much about the inhospitability of the operating room. The marvel of a baby emerging into the world overwhelmed the blinding lights, the cold, hard medical equipment, and the surgical masks. As I waited to see my son, I felt transported, weightless, full of the wonder of human beauty that must come with all births, as if some ancient part of my mind were stirring in recognition. They only let me see him for a moment. Since my arms were fettered down all I could do was kiss his cheek — a child’s cheek of my own to kiss! Rob was beside me, clearly overtaken, able only to say, “Wow!” several dozen times. Then they scurried our baby off somewhere with Rob following, saying he wouldn’t let him out of his sight. I was whizzed off to a recovery room, wanting desperately to be with my baby but also so dazed from the drugs and so exhausted from not having slept in so long that my mind wasn’t actually working. I think an hour or so passed before someone floated me down a long white hall on a gurney until we arrived at a closed door. Then that door opened. I had no stomach muscles left to sit up, but I could turn my head to see that inside the quiet, darkened room, Rob was in a chair in the corner holding Quinn in a blanket.

  There are certain moments one remembers all one’s life and those moments are burned into the heart — the fragile, resilient, joyful heart — and later, years down the road, those moments can take your breath away, take up your whole life, or perhaps, save your life. That was one of those moments.

  CHAPTER 10

  Email, early October 2013

  Hi Tina,

  Quinn’s OCD is getting worse all the time. Yesterday he came home from school and said he couldn’t do any of his work because he told himself he had to erase and cross out everything he’d written. I took a look and saw that he’d scrawled sentences across the bottom of the page of his notebook, sentences that were all crossed out or erased. This meant that he didn’t get any of his schoolwork done and the next day, had to stay in for recess to do the work he’d missed. When he came home he said, “My life is a complete misery because of this fucking OCD and I wish I was dead!” Then he burst out crying and threw his bag across the room. Can you believe it? Quinn, the most undramatic child who ever lived. I immediately made an emergency call to the Quebec medical people (the people who put us on the two-year waiting list). I only got their voice mail. I was almost hysterical when I left the message, my heart bashing a hole in my chest. I said, “Someone has to see my son. We can’t wait two years. My child just told me he wished he was dead. We need help now! Please!”

  They didn’t even call back.

  I never thought life would be like this. I guess that’s what people always say when their world is falling apart.

  So long for now.

  Laurie

  In the midst of Quinn’s early days of unravelling, I still had to finish teaching some English as a second language classes in Wakefield, and have a tooth extracted (something that normally might have caused mild alarm but under the circumstances barely registered), and I was supposed to hold a writing workshop at my house one Saturday. I’d scheduled it months earlier and couldn’t cancel. On top of this, the day after my workshop I’d be driving to Montreal to teach for two days at a college there. Rob was also busy then but, luckily, Rob’s sister volunteered to take Quinn for a night. As usual Quinn was excited about visiting his aunt. But when she tried taking him to her curling club, he was afraid to get out of her car. A couple of days later, I Skyped Rob from Tina’s apartment in Montreal. Rob looked as if he’d been through a natural disaster: he was pale and visibly shaken. Quinn said hi to me, mumbled he’d be right back, then disappeared. I wondered why he wasn’t at school.

  “Things aren’t good,” said Rob, when Quinn had left and then he told me why he’d kept him home. “We’re going through these cognitive behaviour OCD workbooks and we’ve made an Excel chart, to list all his behaviours so he can rate them one to five. It’s like a Richter scale of anxiety. The ‘ones’ are supposed to be the stuff that doesn’t cause much anxiety. Those are the things he’s supposed to work on not doing first, the easiest things. But he’s rated every single behaviour as a five. That means not doing those things causes the highest po
ssible anxiety. Like a full-blown panic attack. If I leave him alone for a minute, it’s an OCD-fest. When I had a shower this morning I knew what he was doing in his room.”

  “What?” I choked out.

  “Climbing up on his dresser to reach that picture on the wall.” I knew what picture he meant. It was of Quinn as a baby surrounded by his grandparents, all of them smiling under some trees on a summer evening by the Ottawa River. “He’s touching your dad in the photo. Asking him to come back. The usual. It’s not enough just to say the words any more. Now he has to touch an image of your dad at the same time.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That’s probably what he’s doing right now.” Rob stopped talking. Across the invisible miles between us, all we could do was stare helplessly into the abyss of each other.

  I felt a rising panic in my chest. How could this be happening to our family? How could there have been a crisis hidden inside our happiness? I inhaled a long ragged breath. Just then, Halla hurtled into the apartment, and for the first time I felt something like envy at how normal and carefree other people’s kids seemed. Quinn used to be like this, and not so long ago, either. Halla was thrilled I was Skyping with his friend. “Is Quinn there, too? Can I talk to him?” His brown eyes were wide with innocent anticipation.

  “That’s a great idea, Halla.”

  Watching the two boys talk — mostly about Minecraft and an upcoming cross-country race that Quinn would be running in — the envy I’d felt earlier was swept away by a deep thankfulness for their friendship. Quinn seemed almost his old self talking to Halla. If you have OCD and are immersed in something else, like an interesting conversation or playing with a friend, you can temporarily suspend your OCD. This seemed to be happening as the boys talked. I was even more glad now that I’d be driving Tina and Halla, who was homeschooled, back with me to Wakefield that day. Thanksgiving was coming up and we’d all be spending several days together. Even my mother was coming.

  CHAPTER 11

  When Tina, Halla, and I arrived that evening, Quinn met us at the front door, his eyes shining with his news, or in my mind, with his latest obsession: he was going to win the two-kilometre cross-country race that Friday. It was all he could talk about. The cross-country race was an annual event involving all the schools in the district and it was held at the Wakefield School because it bordered a hilly forest full of trails. Quinn’s obsession was still tied to his grandpa. If he won the race, his grandpa would come back. If he didn’t win, he wouldn’t come back. If he tapped the photo on the wall, closed his eyes, and said, “Come back” ten times, he’d win the race. Or perhaps he’d have to tap it twenty times, or thirty times, depending on the time of day. The photo of my dad also had to be the last thing he’d look at before going to sleep at night and the first thing he’d open his eyes to in the morning. He’d also taken to climbing a pine tree at the end of our laneway every evening exactly at sunset to ask my dad to come back. Keeping up with the various rituals wasn’t easy for us. They were a moving target. OCD was a shape-shifter. We also realized that the compulsions we saw were just the tip of a deep uncharted iceberg. The mental compulsions inside his head were even worse, plaguing Quinn, and keeping him from sleeping at night. He was beginning to have dark circles under his eyes.

  One night before the race, Quinn and I sat down together on the couch to go through some of the exercises in the OCD workbook. In the background, the host of a CBC radio show, a former musician, was talking about Neil Young. I flipped through the OCD book. One exercise asked the child to draw a picture of himself fighting off the OCD monster.

  “I can’t draw it,” said Quinn. “It’s too hard.”

  “But you love drawing. You’re such a good artist.” I thought of the stacks of sketchbooks he’d gone through in his life, replicating cars, bicycles, forests, and cities.

  “I’d just have to erase it if I drew it. I have to erase everything. That’s why I walk back the same way I came. To erase that I was here. To get everything back to zero.”

  “Well, what would you draw in the workbook if you could? What would a picture of you fighting the OCD monster look like?” Neil Young was singing “Sugar Mountain” on the radio and the song drifted into a rusty place inside me where I hadn’t been for a long time. Quinn seemed to be contemplating, staring hard at the OCD book.

  “I know!” Quinn’s face lit up. “I’d draw Grandpa and me running the race together, holding hands, being chased by the OCD monster. Then winning the race!”

  Somehow I didn’t think that’s what the authors of the book were going for.

  “I hope to God he loses that race,” said Rob to Tina and me later that night when we were sitting around a fire outside and the kids had gone to bed. “Winning would be the worst thing for him. Winning would show him his superstitions are valid, that the OCD bully has control, that all those compulsions paid off. We have to keep telling him that his need to win is the OCD, not him, and he should just enjoy the race.”

  “Thank goodness for Owen,” I said. Owen was a boy in Quinn’s class who always came first in the cross-country race. Quinn always came second. It happened every year.

  On the morning of the race, the air was crisp, the sky a deep sapphire blue that you only see in autumn, and maple trees were clutching the last of summer’s green in their arms. I was at the school to volunteer as a spotter for the runners, to watch in case a kid slipped in the mud, tripped on a root, or sprained an ankle trudging up and down the steep wooded inclines of the forest. But mainly, I was there to see Quinn.

  As I walked through the schoolyard toward my assigned spot up in the woods, I was suddenly struck with a hollow feeling as I passed by kids Quinn had known for years, playing soccer and basketball, laughing, running, living their gloriously unfractured lives. It was hard to accept that fate could be so unfair, that the lives of these other kids seemed so unscarred. Then I immediately felt selfish, thinking of starving children in war-torn countries, or kids who’d died or had some fatal disease. Just thinking of that kind of suffering and the parents of those children made my heart unexpectedly swell with an overwhelming empathy, which hit me harder than it ever had before.

  I ran into my friend Anna as I walked toward the woods. Anna, who was from England, was one of the most caring people I’d ever met. She was a psychotherapist with a lilting Yorkshire accent and auburn ringlets. When she had first moved to Canada she used to look after Quinn sometimes when he was a baby. She’d always loved Quinn.

  “Laurie, I have something to tell you.” Her eyebrows were knitted with concern. She put her hand on my arm. I braced myself. “I saw Quinn yesterday walking his bike up the hill to school. He was … stuck.”

  “Stuck?” My ribcage suddenly felt like a corset.

  “He was just standing there with his bike, not moving. Frozen. For a long time. I asked him if he needed help and he started crying. I asked him what was wrong and he said he didn’t want to go to school. We talked for a bit, then he seemed to gather up the strength to keep going up the hill to school.”

  I tried not to cry myself as I felt my throat clenching but it was no use. So this was why he’d been taking so long to get home from school. He was getting stuck. Was he trying to stop time? What was this particular OCD ritual about? My eyes felt the stabbing pressure of tears. This was all too much. I couldn’t speak. Anna hugged me and told me she’d help us, that she’d do everything she could, call all her contacts in her therapy world, help us figure it out. We weren’t alone. Quinn is strong, she kept saying. He’ll get through this. He has strong parents who love him more than anything. I nodded, tried to smile, and felt the hard knot in my chest loosening. Through my tears I stared down at the yellow leaves lying belly-up on the ground, dried and pointy like claws. I still couldn’t speak but knew Anna would understand.

  An hour or so later the gun went off for Quinn’s race. Up until then, I’d been standing at the top of
the first big hill with another volunteer mother as packs of kids surged by us every fifteen minutes. Between bouts of stampeding kids — some running fast, some running at a jogger’s pace, some barely running at all — the other mother was promoting the virtues of her paleo diet. I didn’t have it in me to question her. What did it matter? When she stopped talking midsentence, I followed her gaze. On the trail through the trees, Quinn and Owen were charging like rams up the steep hill, panting hard, leaving a throng of other ten-year-old boys in their wake. While they ran off toward the cemetery, I sprinted down the other way to the finish line, musty leaves crackling beneath my feet as I crunched over them. Rob was at the finish line, too. I wondered if his heart was thundering like mine was. It was an odd feeling not to want your kid to win a race, especially when your kid was so set on it. I had to remind myself it was the OCD bully demanding he win, not Quinn.

  At the finish line, we watched for the runners to emerge out of the woods. I wondered if some of the boys from other schools might have overtaken Owen and Quinn. It was possible they’d spent all their energy too early. But suddenly, there they were, Owen and Quinn storming out of the woods, and running neck and neck with fifty metres to go. The schoolyard felt electric as kids roared and cheered, jumping up and down, shouting their names. Time seemed to slow down for me as I watched Quinn, a startling blaze of velocity dashing over the Earth. Was he thinking of outrunning Death at that moment, beating it at its own game? Or was he just Quinn, my little boy who’d always loved to run? I felt a sudden twinge of aching nostalgia for his rolly-legged toddler self so determined to run as fast and far as possible before tumbling to the ground.