‘Fiona tells me you’re doing well, Alison,’ she said. ‘You can leave whenever you’re ready. But before you go, I’d like you to take these tablets.’ She held out a small canister containing two pills. ‘They’re called Dostinex. They’ll help to suppress the production of prolactin, which is the milk hormone. They’re usually quite effective in preventing your milk from coming in, but if by chance they don’t work properly, you may continue to produce small amounts of milk for a little while.’
Yet another thing Tom hadn’t even considered. Why was the human body so deficient that it allowed these indignities to occur? Hadn’t Ali suffered enough? Tom filled a glass with water and held it out to Ali, and she took the tablets from the doctor and swallowed them without argument.
‘I’ll leave you alone now,’ Kathy said. ‘Please spend as much time here as you need, and when you’re ready to go home, just give Fiona a buzz.’ She left the room quietly.
So this was it. The last time they would spend with their daughter. He brought Elizabeth over to Ali and eased himself onto the bed beside her. As they cradled their baby together, Tom’s limbs relaxed and a wave of exhaustion flooded through him. It was so tempting to just let go, to allow himself to drift into sleep with his wife’s body pressed against his, Elizabeth in the crook of his arm. But he couldn’t waste these final moments. He didn’t want to miss a second.
Ali
They’d been lying still for a long time when Ali felt Tom stir beside her. Her buttocks were numb and the arm that rested under Elizabeth had begun to tingle, but she hadn’t dared move. She knew they couldn’t stay here forever, but she clung onto the moment.
Tom sat up and looked down at her, his face threatening to crack as he spoke the words she’d been dreading. ‘Are you ready to go?’
Pain coursed through her, robbing her breath. She wondered what the hospital staff would do if she refused to walk out of this room, if she refused to let go of her baby, because she couldn’t see how it was going to be possible. But she nodded.
‘Do you want to have a shower first?’ he asked. ‘I brought you a change of clothes.’
‘I think I’ll just get dressed. Thanks.’
She allowed Tom to take Elizabeth from her and help her down from the bed. She dressed slowly in the clothes he had brought, stuffing yesterday’s discarded clothes into the bag and leaving the hospital gown lying over the bed. The faint tang of her body odour reached her nostrils as she bent to slip on her shoes. The idea of going home to their empty house struck dread into her.
‘I’m going to call for Fiona, OK?’ Tom sounded tentative, as if he were expecting her to protest, but she just nodded again.
He pressed the green button on the wall behind the bed. The muted beep was like the final klaxon on Elizabeth’s life. Ali willed time to slow down, to stop, so that the midwife would never get to their room, so that she never had to walk away. Fiona poked her head into the room. ‘Ready to go? I’ll wait out here while you say your final goodbyes. You can put Elizabeth in the bassinet when you’re ready.’
Ali took Elizabeth from Tom and held the tiny body against hers for the last time. The pain in her heart intensified, wrung out of its last drops of love.
‘Goodbye, my love,’ she whispered against her baby’s head. ‘I’m so sorry.’
She handed her back to Tom and turned away as he bent his head to her. She couldn’t watch him place her in the bassinet. Then his arm was around her shoulders and he was guiding her out of the room.
Ali collapsed against her husband in the hallway, moaning as her heart was wrenched from her chest, not just once, but again and again and again. She hadn’t thought it would be possible to feel worse, but walking away from Elizabeth was an agony unlike anything she had ever imagined.
She would never see her again.
Never.
A long wail escaped from deep within her. Tom held her up as they walked down the hallway. Through her tears, she saw the blurry shapes of other people passing by them, but she couldn’t halt the animal cries that tore from her body.
The icy bite of the driving rain as Tom half carried her through the sliding doors of the hospital and into the open was a welcome relief from the claustrophobic shroud of grief. She gasped for breath between her sobs, drinking the damp air, wishing the rain would wash her away. Wishing the puddles on the footpath would join into a giant, swirling pool and swallow her whole.
* * *
When the roller door on their garage closed behind them, the silence was absolute. Tom had turned up the heating in the car as high as it would go, and Ali was nauseous from the thick fug of heat, but her hands still shook. She wondered absently if she was in shock.
The house was cold, but Tom lit their gas flame heater and closed off the living area while Ali stood helplessly in the middle of the room. Then he came to her and put his arms around her. He held her so tight she could hardly breathe, and she clung to him as if fighting a current that was trying to sweep her away. They cried into one another’s shoulders, and for a few fleeting minutes, Ali felt as if she could get through this, so long as Tom was there with her.
Then the shrill ring of the telephone tore them apart. They stared at each other as the jarring sound clanged around the room. Neither moved to answer it. Finally, the ringing stopped and silence pressed in again.
‘God,’ Ali said. ‘How are we going to tell everybody?’
Tom swallowed. ‘I don’t know. One person at a time, I guess.’
The thought of the task was overwhelming.
Ali looked down. ‘I’m going to have a shower.’
Foreboding rose inside her as she saw the closed door to what would have been Elizabeth’s room. She was afraid of what she would see, but her feet took her of their own accord. She stopped in front of the door, her hand resting on the handle. Waited. Closed her eyes, inhaled and turned the handle.
Other than the chest of drawers, there was nothing. Even before they’d begun preparing for the baby, this room had been crowded with odds and ends they’d never found a home for.
But now it was cold. White. Empty.
She crossed the room and opened the drawers. Empty. Although she’d dreaded seeing the remnants of their anticipation for Elizabeth’s birth, somehow this was worse, as if she’d never been inside Ali at all.
Ali didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry at Tom for taking everything away. But as she walked out of the room, and the door clicked closed behind her, she felt a door close inside her as well.
Before
Ali’s head rested on her mother’s shoulder, her long curtain of blonde hair hanging across her face. Her mother had urged her to try to sleep while they waited for the news, but she couldn’t bring herself to close her eyes. Not while her dad lay on the operating table, an army of doctors trying to save his heart. Her brain was in overdrive, trying to remember the last thing she’d said to him. Probably something shouted, something angry, because he’d told her she couldn’t go out with Kayla and Claudia after she’d wagged school last week. What if that had been her last chance to speak to him? What if…
But she couldn’t think that way. Her mum wouldn’t allow that kind of negativity. As if reading her mind, her mother’s arm tightened around Ali’s shoulders. ‘Your dad’s a tough old bugger. He’ll pull through this.’
Ali couldn’t bring herself to say anything in case she accidentally spoke her deepest fears. Instead, she tried to draw strength from the familiar warmth of her mother’s bulk. But then she felt her mother stiffen against her, and she looked up to see the doctor approaching. It wasn’t like on TV where the doctor walks towards you down a long corridor, as if through a tunnel of adversity, and the background sounds melt away and all you hear is the echoing pound of his shoes as he gets closer and closer. He just appeared from around the corner, his mask hanging from his neck, a surgical cap still covering his hair. Her heart leapt with sudden hope. But then she saw his expression. Sober. Composed, but with a hint
of sadness, of disappointment, overlaying his exhaustion.
Her mother’s arm dropped from Ali’s shoulders as she rose to meet him. Ali felt cold.
‘I’m so sorry, Mrs O’Hare.’ Time seemed to snag; the doctor’s mouth moved in slow motion. ‘Your husband experienced a haemorrhage during the surgery. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to save him.’
Her mother’s head slumped forward and her shoulders began to shake as the doctor explained what had happened. Ali stood up. Her body was fuzzy; her mind couldn’t process how it could be that her dad was no longer here. The doctor included her in his condolences and walked quietly away. Ali’s mum continued to cry, at first softly, then louder and louder. Ali tried to take her hand, but it remained limp in hers. She tried to force herself to feel something, but numbness kept spreading through her body.
‘Mum.’
Her mother pulled her hand away and covered her face, crying harder.
‘Mum?’
Tom
The glowing red numbers on the bedside clock said 3:52am. Tom blinked a few times, unsure why he had woken. The house was shrouded in silence. It took him a few moments to realise there was no steady breathing coming from the other side of the bed. He felt around in the dark. He was alone.
The bedroom door was closed; a tiny crack of light peeped from beneath.
It was only then that the events of the previous night rushed back to him all at once, and he felt as if his chest would cave in from the pressure of them.
Ali had been insensible after they’d come home. She’d sat huddled in front of the heater all afternoon, shivering, while Tom had begun to make the phone calls.
The call to Ali’s mother had been the most difficult. Ali had scoffed when he’d put Hazel’s number in his phone years ago, but he’d been grateful not to have to ask her for it for this task. She’d been so angry when he suggested she call Hazel herself, and though she apologised later, making the call had still felt like an act of betrayal.
He’d finally managed to coax Ali to bed in the early evening, and she’d still been asleep when he’d joined her, but now the sheets beside him were cold. He swung out of bed and threw open the door, not bothering to put on his robe despite the goosebumps that rose on his bare skin.
A soft yellow glow came from the doorway of the study. Ali glanced over her shoulder at him as he walked in. She sat at the desk, her laptop open in front of her. Her eyes were red, her face wet with tears. Her fluffy blue dressing gown engulfed a body diminished by crushed hope. It felt wrong to be naked before such stripped-back grief, and Tom had the sudden, overpowering urge to flee. But he didn’t move.
‘Are you OK?’ The question was idiotic, redundant.
She gestured to the laptop. ‘One in a hundred and thirty. That’s the stillbirth rate in Australia.’
He waited for her to go on.
‘We’re prepared for the possibility of congenital disorders, heart disease, Down Syndrome. But no one mentions stillbirth.’ Her breath caught on a sob. ‘Why doesn’t anyone talk about it?’
Tom stepped forward and pulled her up from the chair and into his arms. He held her tightly as she cried into his chest. He had the feeling there was something he should be saying, some words of comfort, but he couldn’t conjure any sense of hope. He could see nothing ahead of this dark pit they’d landed in.
‘Come back to bed,’ he urged when her sobs had subsided.
Ali allowed him to lead her back to their bedroom, and she slid obediently under the covers on her side. But when he tried to hold her, she shuffled away from him to the very edge of the bed. Tom rolled onto his back and stared into the dark. He was determined to be her pillar of strength, but what about him? Who was going to hold him up?
Ali
Waking up was the hardest part of Ali’s day. She coped with the trip to meet the funeral director. She coped with picking out an urn for Elizabeth’s ashes. She withstood the inevitable parade of visits from Tom’s parents and sister with numb acceptance.
It was waking up that was the hardest part.
On that first day home she’d wondered how she would ever be able to sleep again, but it crept up on her with devious stealth, betrayed her with its ability to swathe her in peace, make her forget, so that each awakening was a fresh loss, a scab ripped off the wound again and again, day after day.
When morning first edged into her consciousness, before she’d even opened her eyes, she would lie still, enjoying the warm cocoon of the bed. She would roll over, her eyes would flutter open, and there would be Tom, her beloved Tom. It would take her a second to process the reason for the thick growth of beard he’d never left unshaven this long for their entire marriage.
And then she would remember.
At first, raw horror. Then shame that she had forgotten. Then, a deep hopelessness that didn’t leave her until the depths of the night when finally she succumbed to sleep once again.
Tom’s mother brought them endless meals: casseroles, soups, tuna mornay. The containers piled up in the freezer. The extra flesh that pregnancy had lent her rapidly fell away, exposing angular shoulders and hips. Only her belly remained, cruelly leaving her with the appearance that she was still pregnant.
Tom tried to encourage her to get out of the house, to talk to her friends, but she was paralysed. No matter how many blankets she added to the bed, no matter how close she sat to the gas fire, she couldn’t seem to get warm. Growing a baby had powered her body with an internal generator, getting her through the first month of winter with barely a shiver. And now, the absence of that hot water bottle inside had left her empty and cold.
She was accustomed to maintaining careful control of everything in her life, but this was like careening down a hill in a go-kart with no brakes. There was nothing to clutch on to, no one to catch her… except Tom, but he seemed numb and vague, as if he were simply waiting to wake from a nightmare.
Ali hadn’t felt that terrifying lack of control since her dad had died. She’d been sixteen, that self-absorbed age when she was actively distancing herself from her parents, with no inkling of the possibility of tragedy. It had been a cruel shock.
She’d had the kind of father who’d called her princess and told terrible dad jokes; the kind of mother who baked coconut slices and Anzac biscuits. It had been a normal, happy childhood, until he’d died and everything had fallen apart. She’d had to rebuild herself, piece by agonising piece. She wasn’t sure she had the strength to do it again.
When Tom had tried to convince her to call her mother to tell her what had happened, she’d lashed out at him. Her anger had felt purposeful, righteous. She’d felt guilty later, of course. She’d apologised to him, but the resentment had lingered as she’d watched him go out into the backyard to call Hazel himself. Something she’d always loved about her husband was his desire to do the right thing, but her mother was the one thing they’d never seen eye to eye on. She knew Tom had always hoped she’d repair the relationship, but he didn’t understand.
People like Hazel didn’t deserve another chance. Not after all the chances she’d had.
Tom
From the moment they’d started trying for a baby, Tom had felt like a new man. It was as if the very decision had made a father out of him. The world had been new. He’d walked with a lighter step. He’d smiled at everyone he passed on the street. And when he was behind the wheel of his car, he’d finally understood the motivation for those ridiculous ‘baby on board’ signs he’d always hated (although he’d still sworn they’d never have one).
But now, as the doorbell heralded the arrival of the latest well-wishers come to pay their respects, he no longer understood how he felt. Between them, he and Ali had conceived, carried and birthed a child, and yet he was not a father. He felt hollow, scraped-out, as if he’d been the one carrying the baby.
He opened the door to his friend Jason and Jason’s wife Anthea. He’d known Jason since first year uni and they’d been mates ever since, even after Jason had
dropped out of law school and switched to accounting. After Tom’s own family, Jason had been the first person he had called when they got home from the hospital, the first person he’d wanted to talk to, but he was relieved to see they hadn’t brought their twin daughters with them today. Ali wouldn’t have coped with that. But the sight of Anthea, her head covered with a bright scarf, was a guilty reminder that the couple faced their own problems. Anthea had recently begun chemotherapy after being diagnosed with breast cancer. She had tears in her eyes now as she stepped forward to embrace Tom.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
Jason was next, clasping Tom to him in a fierce hug that communicated his feelings more than words. ‘How’s Ali doing?’ he asked as Tom led them down the hallway.
‘As you’d expect,’ Tom said. ‘She’s barely said a word since we got home. She won’t even tell any of her friends what happened.’
‘Should we go?’ Anthea sounded anxious. ‘I don’t want to make things more difficult for her.’
Tom shook his head. ‘No, I think it’s good for both of us to be with people we care about right now.’
But when Ali looked up at them from her position on the floor in front of the gas fire, face wan, legs drawn up to her chest, Tom wasn’t sure if that were true. A miniature crack opened in his heart as she struggled to her feet and forced an approximation of a smile to her face.
Anthea instantly folded Ali into her arms and held her for a long time. Tom watched his wife’s face over Anthea’s shoulder, the way she squeezed her eyes shut tight. Her fists were clenched against Anthea’s back, knuckles white with the effort of holding on. He wished she’d let go. He wished she would talk to him. To anyone.
At last Anthea released her and they sat down on the couch, Jason perched uncomfortably on the edge of one of the armchairs. Tom made a pot of tea and placed it on the coffee table along with four cups, a sugar basin and a small jug of milk, then sank into the other armchair. No one moved. No one spoke.
Misconception Page 5