The Mothers

by Genevieve Gannon

  ‘You fainted,’ he said, stroking her forehead. ‘The doctors say you had a panic attack.’ The memory hit her like a freight truck. She sat up. Dan rushed into her arms, enfolding her in a hug. She clung to him, tears coming quickly.

  ‘So it wasn’t a dream?’

  ‘No. No.’ His voice was small. ‘It wasn’t.’ His fingers dug into her back. Her tears soaked into his shirt.

  She took a deep breath. ‘Have they taken him?’

  ‘Not yet. He’s outside with Fiona.’

  She felt a tug and looked down to see a drip in her arm, her blonde hairs flattened under the sticky tape. Heart-monitor pads were glued to her chest. She ripped the sticky tabs from her skin and pulled the needle from her arm. ‘I have to see him.’

  ‘Take my arm,’ Dan said, lowering the metal bar.

  Grace reached for Dan and sadly rubbed the collar of his shirt between her thumb and forefinger. ‘I hope I didn’t give you a scare.’

  He patted her hand. ‘They’re just out here.’

  Grace found her mother on the bench, jiggling Sam to stop him from crying. His face was tearstained.

  ‘Oh, my poor boy,’ Grace said as Fiona passed him over. He began to calm down as she drew circles on his back with her palm. ‘Mum’s here,’ she said. ‘Sh. Mum’s here.’

  A uniformed officer stood on either side of Fiona alongside the court liaison officer. All three looked uncomfortable, shuffling aside to accommodate Grace and Dan but with no intention of leaving. Grace cocooned Sam in her arms. ‘I’m sorry, little one,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t keep you. I’m sorry. I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry.’

  Dan put his arms around his wife, the baby sheltered between them.

  ‘We love you, little man,’ he whispered. Sam yawned and rested his cheek against Grace. ‘We will always love you.’

  Grace remained in the corridor holding Sam until the liaison officer prised him from her hands. She slid down onto the linoleum floor and sobbed unreservedly while Dan held her, until two nurses hooked their arms under her and tenderly lifted her to her hospital bed. One covered her face with a plastic mask then punctured her arm with a needle that made the world soft and cartoon-like. Later they gave her tablets to help her sleep, which she did, waking only long enough to take more pills. She was instructed to stay in hospital.

  ‘The doctor asked if you wanted something. For the pain,’ Dan said the next time she woke.

  ‘Ha.’ She laughed, a hollow croak. ‘There isn’t enough medicine in the world.’

  When she was discharged they went not to Glebe but to a house in Pearl Beach that Beth had rented for them. ‘I thought it might be hard to face the house straightaway,’ she had said. ‘Stay here until you feel ready.’

  ‘We don’t deserve you,’ Dan replied.

  They opened the fridge to find it full of casseroles, curries and pasta packed in Tupperware, each from a different friend, each labelled with a handwritten note of love.

  Grace accepted Beth’s offer to clear out the nursery for them. When they returned home the white room was bare, but for a large bunch of flowers and a book on loss. For the first few nights Grace would leave their bed in the middle of the night to sleep on the floor in Sam’s room under a blue blanket embroidered with an S. Dan would wake up alone and find her cried out on the carpet, her nose red and puffy.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she would say when he helped her up. ‘I don’t mean to make this harder for you.’

  ‘We have to help each other,’ he said.

  Grace had five months of maternity leave remaining and she decided to take it all. Dan returned to the office after a month.

  The grief hit him hardest around six pm, which is when he would usually come home to his wife and son. This was when Grace was at her most useful. Making dinner became her daily mission. If she did nothing else it was okay, as long as she made Dan dinner. The simple, achievable task gave each day purpose.

  The weeks stretched on, boundless and blank. Visitors came but were forgotten the moment they left. Weeks waned but the pain did not.

  Grace tried to read to pass the time, but she couldn’t focus. She tried to run, but she had no stamina.

  ‘How will we go on, Dan?’ Grace asked, as she slotted another gift of lasagne into the freezer one unremarkable day.

  ‘Perhaps we could get that dog we were talking about?’ Dan said.

  ‘I don’t think I’m ready.’

  ‘We can go somewhere,’ Dan said. ‘Somewhere completely different.’

  ‘That’s not a bad idea,’ said Grace weakly.

  ‘Asia? Or Eastern Europe.’

  ‘Yes, I like that. I want to be as far away as possible,’ Grace said. ‘Somewhere nothing can remind me of him.’

  Forty-five

  ‘It’s here.’ Nick dragged the cardboard box into the cramped Coogee lounge room. ‘I’ll set it up in the bedroom until we get the keys to the house.’

  ‘Thanks. When did I think I was going to shop for cots and prams with a new baby to care for?’ Priya was seated on her couch with her son in one arm and a bottle in the other hand, trying to gently press the teat between his lips. Bags of hand-me-down baby clothes crowded around the two of them like nosy relatives. Priya’s feet were propped up on the box the new car seat had come in.

  ‘I understand why you didn’t want to fill the house with baby things until after the hearing. Imagine having to return them if the judge had gone the other way,’ Nick said, scoring the tape that sealed the box with his Stanley knife. Neither spoke for a moment. Spectres of Grace and Dan Arden packing away all of their baby’s things hung in the air.

  ‘Anyway, we’ve done all right.’ Nick started pulling cot pieces from the flat pack.

  Viv had loaned Priya a truckload of stuff but now Priya wanted to give her baby his own things. It was irrational, but she knew everything in the Arden house would have been new, and she didn’t want any less for him now that he lived with her. Already she feared she was falling short.

  ‘He won’t feed,’ Priya said, as her son again twisted away from the bottle.

  ‘He’s adjusting.’

  ‘I want everything to be perfect for him. I keep thinking, what if he’s sad? What if he misses Grace and Dan? What if I inflicted that on him?’

  ‘Pri.’ Nick sat on the couch beside her. ‘You can’t think like that.’

  ‘When he won’t eat, I think, is it my fault?’

  ‘You’re just tired.’ The bottle teat slipped into Sam’s mouth and soon he began to suckle hungrily. ‘There now, does that look like the face of a miserable baby?’

  ‘No,’ she said, stroking his cheek with her thumb. ‘He’s a prince.’ ‘It’s natural to take time to acclimatise. You’ll see. When we’ve moved into the new house you’ll feel much more like yourself. Maybe we could have a little party. Introduce everyone to him. Like a naming day.’

  ‘I like that idea.’ She smiled. ‘I was thinking I would keep his name. He’s been Sam all his life. I don’t want to change him. Not after all the other change he’s been through.’

  ‘You don’t think it will upset you to use the name the other couple gave him?’

  ‘No. I had an uncle Samad. It means eternal. Sadavir can be his middle name.’

  ‘Sam Sadavir Laghari,’ Nick said, caressing the baby’s cheek. ‘What adventures you’ll have.’

  Forty-six

  Ashley Li leaned forward and adjusted her skirt, thinking she had to be the only person on earth who returned from a shoestring tour of Asia having put on weight. She had not had time to shop for a new outfit, so her waistband was cutting uncomfortably into her side.

  ‘And you left your last job because … ?’

  ‘Umm.’ She still hadn’t come up with a satisfactory answer to that question: something that wouldn’t cast her in a bad light, but was also truthful. I walked out on my much older lover after he covered up a major medical error, which I also had a hand in wouldn’t do.


  ‘It was time to move on,’ she said.

  The interviewer grunted. ‘It’s perplexing. Empona is so revered. And you’re not without a profile yourself.’ He raised his eyebrows, wanting Ashley to elaborate.

  Ashley’s fingers curled tightly around the leather portfolio on her lap. ‘I’m looking for new challenges,’ she said, not untruthfully. Doctor Forsyth’s clinic was the last on her list of prospects. He was a round-faced man of roughly fifty, and his questioning was far more pointed than she had been prepared for. He was looking down at her résumé, frowning, until he clicked his tongue and passed it back to her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Doctor Li, I’m looking for a very specific skill set and you’re just not the right candidate.’

  She smiled. ‘Doctor Forsyth, I have addressed every single point on the advertised selection criteria. If anything, I’m overqualified.’ Her voice acquired a tremble. She hadn’t worked in months, and she had been told she wasn’t right for every other job she had interviewed for that week. She swallowed. ‘If the issue is money I can be flexible.’

  ‘That may be true. But a team is like a machine. Every single piece has a purpose, and I’m afraid you’re not fit for our purpose.’

  ‘But if you’ll just—’

  He stood. ‘Thank you for coming in, Doctor Li.’

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘If anything should come up that I would be a right fit for …’

  ‘I have your details.’ He did not return her smile.

  ‘Thank you.’

  As she turned and walked towards the door her eyes alighted on a framed certificate from Monash Medical School, class of 1990. It was the same institution Roger had attended, in the same graduating year.

  ‘I’ve reached the end of the line,’ Ashley told her mother as they strolled along the Bronte foreshore. ‘Roger has white-anted me. He knows or wields influence over every fertility specialist in Sydney.’

  ‘How can that man still be practising after what the clinic did?’ Wendy Li asked.

  ‘The commissioner investigated it. He was fined. I heard on the grapevine Empona has instituted a barcoding system for every patient, and every single movement now has to be double-checked.’

  ‘And he wasn’t sanctioned?’

  ‘It was human error. No lives were lost. He didn’t breach any rules. The industry is self-governing.’ Ashley kicked a stone that was lying in her path.

  Thanks to the evidence she provided, a ruling had found that Ashley played no role in the mistake; rather, the embryologist who failed to properly clean the catheter was at fault. However, the investigator had also noted the embryologist had done everything required and the blunder was chalked up to a learning experience. It was an unfortunate, unforeseeable error, the report concluded. Roger had managed to minimise the damage to his reputation by having the finding supressed. He claimed it was necessary to protect the baby involved from prying journalists.

  ‘He settled with the families,’ Ashley told her mother. ‘It was all dealt with very quickly. I think he wanted to avoid a trial. I don’t know the exact payouts, but they were huge. The mother will never have to worry about her baby’s financial future. The Ardens got even more.’

  ‘That’s fair enough.’

  ‘I think about them every day. I liked them. Particularly Grace.’ A shiver of guilt passed through Ashley’s body. ‘Perhaps I deserve to be blacklisted.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ Wendy pressed her daughter’s arm. ‘You did nothing wrong. Things will die down. You have plenty of money to see you through. Why don’t you take some time off? Learn Mandarin properly. Or French cooking.’

  ‘I took a break. I need to work.’

  ‘Roger Osmond’s influence doesn’t extend beyond Sydney.’

  ‘He was trained in Melbourne.’

  ‘So go to Brisbane.’

  Ashley gazed out at the ocean. She and Roger had stayed in Brisbane for a conference during her last year at Empona. It was pretty. It had Sydney’s sunny disposition without its big city aggression. But it didn’t feel right.

  ‘Perhaps I need to get away completely. Start over somewhere I can do something useful with my skills, where the reward isn’t measured in dollars.’

  She had seen so many things during her travels. In India, her friend Lata had lectured her over daal about the impending gender-imbalance crisis caused by the corrupt use of sex-selection technology in a country where a boy is more desirable. In South Korea she’d heard stories of baby boxes, which had been set up so desperate women had somewhere safe to put unwanted infants. Since Ashley chose her destinations based on where her old university friends were living, she tended to experience each country through the lens of the newly born.

  In the Philippines she had met up with her friend Samara De Silva who was on a sabbatical at a university hospital training young doctors in assisted-reproduction advancements.

  ‘This country has a huge problem with abandoned children, and here I am engineering babies for those who otherwise might adopt,’ Samara had said. ‘It’s so frustrating but it makes money for the hospital, which is desperately needed.’

  They had walked to the viewing bay where babies who were just hours old slept behind a window while their mothers recuperated. The nurses had swaddled them in a triangular style so that the blanket ended in two points. Ashley put a hand to the glass. There was something heartwarming about the provincial swaddling style. The past year had been a long and lonely battle with her demons and now here she was, in the middle of the Philippines, looking at newborns wrapped up like unbaked samosas, smiling.

  ‘Aren’t they adorable little things?’ Samara said.

  Afterwards they ate kaldereta from one of the dozens of open-faced food places that operated in an alleyway along the western flank of the hospital.

  ‘I really love it here,’ Samara said. ‘Even though what I’m doing is non-essential, I feel like I’m helping them exploit a profitable service that will ultimately be good for the hospital. And God knows they need it.’

  Barefoot children ran up and down the alley. Occasionally one stopped and held out a palm for money. Samara produced a seemingly endless stream of coins for the outstretched hands. ‘How long have you been travelling around the Philippines?’

  ‘Just a week, but I’ve been on the move for about nine months now,’ Ashley said.

  ‘Reclaiming your misspent youth?’

  ‘Actually, I’m getting a little restless. Bored, I guess.’

  ‘You know, this is a beautiful part of the world. Troubled, of course, but it’s sunny every day and they could really use someone with your expertise.’

  Ashley, nodding, had said: ‘I should look into it.’

  And she had meant to. But she didn’t. Until now. Now she would. She had to.

  Forty-seven

  ‘Is that it?’

  The waiter had placed a slice of fish in front of Dan. The underside was a pearly white, but on top the silver skin looked slimy, and the fin, which was still attached, threatened to start flapping around any moment. ‘I know they said fresh, but I was expecting some sort of food preparation,’ he said.

  ‘That’s their speciality here,’ Grace replied, lifting a neat square of blushing salmon with her chopsticks. ‘I’m sure it will be delicious.’

  Dan cautiously sliced off a small corner of flesh—the knife glided through like butter—dabbed it in the sauce, and put it in his mouth.

  ‘Well?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Oh, it’s amazing,’ Dan sighed.

  ‘Mine too, but I don’t get any pleasure from it,’ she said, glum.

  ‘What do you say afterwards we go out in search of some Japanese dessert? Are you game for some black sesame ice-cream?’

  Grace nodded and reached across the table for his hand, grateful, despite everything, to have found such a marvellous man.

  They had first travelled to Japan and tried to lose themselves in onsens and sushi bars. Next, Grace booked a hotel room in Reykjavik, Icel
and, a city that smelled like fresh-cut pine and snow. They swam in the Blue Lagoon and drank frosty beer while submerged in milky water under a dome of blue sky, and Grace could almost imagine a time when she would not be miserable. Almost.

  Then they went to Germany, and then on to Slovenia. They admired Lake Bled and skirted the alps. Word came that Elliott’s application for leave to appeal had been had been refused. Heartbroken, they detoured through Belgium, searching for respite. Grace made a study of chocolate fudge truffles, though they tasted like ash in her mouth. The beer might as well have been bilge water. Both she and Dan grew thin, despite their efforts at indulgence. When Grace saw kids running barefoot through the busy streets of Naples she thought again about fostering a little one who needed a stable home. The vague notion both excited and scared her.

  She felt like she was waiting, but for what she couldn’t say. A resolution? She knew there could be no happy ending. Sometimes her grief filled her with a dark dread and made it seem like there was nothing left to look forward to. There was something about flying that triggered it, the sense of expectation a voyage brought with it that was somehow hollow because they couldn’t outrun their loss. It travelled with them. In them.

  As she contemplated her options while waiting for the lights to change at a smoggy Napoli intersection, she felt a tug on her shirt. It was a little boy holding up an empty, gnawed McDonald’s cup, begging for change. Grace dropped in a five euro note and knew what she wanted to do next.

  ‘Dan,’ she said, ‘let’s go home.’

  Forty-eight

  Samara put in a good word for Ashley, who soon found herself on staff at the University Foundation Hospital in Angeles City. It was a strange town. The sun perpetually shone, but the air was hazy. And despite the manifold churches and the religious icons that filled shop windows, the rosary beads that dangled from car mirrors, and the tropical flowers that made every street corner and shop appear to have been festooned with leis, there was an air of seediness in the dirt-poor town.