A Mother's Secret

by T J Stimson

  ‘There’s so much to take in,’ Maddie said.

  Jessica smiled sadly. ‘I know. The review booklet in your packet outlines the steps you have to go through and will answer many of your questions. I’ll give you my contact details and, of course, you can get in touch any time.’

  ‘What about the funeral?’ Lucas asked. ‘When can we arrange that?’

  ‘Not until after the inquest, I’m afraid.’

  Maddie felt the room swim. ‘He has to stay here till then?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Can we at least bring our other children here to say goodbye to him?’ asked Lucas.

  ‘No!’ Maddie exclaimed.

  ‘Actually, Maddie, we do recommend siblings be allowed to see their brother or sister,’ the counsellor said gently. ‘Children are very literal. They need to see what death means. It helps them understand what’s happened and that the baby has really died and isn’t coming back.’

  Maddie choked back a sob. Lucas reached for her hand and she gripped his fingers, too distraught to speak.

  Jessica picked up her folder. ‘If you’d like, I can also make footprints of his hands and feet, as keepsakes. Would you like a lock of his hair as a memento? I can arrange that, too.’

  ‘Yes, we’d like that,’ Lucas said hoarsely, as Maddie nodded.

  ‘I’ll have everything sent on to you,’ Jessica said. ‘If you’re ready, I’ll take you to see him now.’

  Maddie clutched Lucas’s hand as they followed Jessica back through the hospital foyer towards the lifts. All these people going about their normal daily lives. Queueing for coffee, reading newspapers, checking emails, as if nothing had happened. As if her baby hadn’t just died. That woman dragging her screaming toddler away from the sweet counter in the hospital gift shop had no idea how lucky she was that her little girl was still alive. Right now, she was probably wondering why she’d bothered having children. She didn’t realise the happiness she took for granted could be snatched away in an instant.

  A couple with a newborn in a plastic car seat followed them into the crowded lift, wearing the proud, self-conscious expressions of new parents. The young mother fussed with the baby’s blue blanket, tucking it tightly around his crumpled red face. It doesn’t matter what you do, Maddie wanted to tell her, you can’t keep your baby safe. You can do everything right: you can keep his head warm and test his bathwater with your elbow and put him to sleep on his back and keep small parts out of reach and it still won’t be enough. It will never be enough, because while you’re sleeping, death can steal your baby without you even knowing.

  Lucas saw her staring. He moved to block her view and she buried her face in his chest. Her legs shook and she would have fallen if he hadn’t held her.

  When the lift doors opened, Jessica led them along a labyrinth of hospital corridors and then stopped by a plain, unmarked door. ‘I want you to prepare yourselves,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s going to be a shock, seeing him again.’

  ‘Can we hold him?’ Lucas asked.

  ‘If you’d like to. It can be very upsetting for some parents. He won’t be warm, the way you expect. But you can spend as much time with him as you need. After you’ve gone, I’ll take the hand and footprints and a lock of his hair. You can bring your other children back later today or tomorrow to say goodbye to him. There’s a very helpful leaflet in the packet I handed you about explaining death to very young children.’

  Lucas turned to Maddie. ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’

  She nodded bravely, her chest suddenly tight. Her breath was coming in shallow gasps. It took every ounce of her resolve not to turn and run away.

  Jessica opened the door. The room was bright and well-lit, painted a soft lilac with a frieze of white lilies running midway around the wall. A matching blind filtered sunshine from the small window. It reminded Maddie achingly of the hospital room she’d had when Noah was born.

  Summoning all her courage, she gripped Lucas’s hand and approached the small transparent cot in the centre of the room. It looked exactly like the ones in the maternity ward. A tiny figure lay swaddled in the middle of it. The stillness in the room was tangible. This wasn’t a child who was sleeping. The essence that had been Noah had palpably gone.

  Maddie gazed down at the pale white face, as cold and inanimate as a carving. Two livid purple bruises stood out shockingly against his blue-white skin and she wondered how she could have not noticed them before. He looked like a little waxwork doll, not human at all.

  And finally she understood her baby was dead.

  Lydia

  She’s never seen Mae this angry. Her mother shouts so loud that spit comes out of her mouth and her eyes almost pop out of her head. Do you know what you’ve put me through, you little cunt? Bowing and scraping to them stuck-up bastards to get you back. Just to keep a bleeding roof over me head!

  Mae makes her take off the dress Jean gave her, and the shoes, and refuses to let her put on her old clothes, so she has to sit, shivering, in the corner of the room in her underwear. You think you’re better than me, do you, with your fancy airs and graces and your posh dresses, you’d better think again, you’re nothing without me, nothing, do you hear me, you little piece of shit?

  The gloomy house seems even darker and more scary now. It smells bad and there are mice and spiders everywhere. Every night, she cries herself to sleep on the bare scratchy mattress, trying not to think about the pink sheets or the way Jean used to stroke her hair and tuck her into bed. It doesn’t take long for the hunger pangs to come back, gnawing away at her insides. When Mae beats her for sneaking downstairs for a drink of water, she doesn’t even bother to protect herself. She just wants it to be over.

  Mae has so many special friends these days, she can’t keep track. They don’t just come at night, now, they come at all hours, with their big bellies and greasy hair and their way of looking at her that makes her skin feel itchy like it’s covered with bugs. She sees them giving Mae money sometimes and cigarettes.

  One day, she goes to the bathroom and walks in on one of the men, bare-chested, doing up his trousers. She sees his thing, it’s all white, unnaturally white, like a strange pale worm curled up in a nest of brown hair, and she can’t stop staring even though it makes her feel sick to look at it. He laughs, do you want some girlie, you want some of this? and she turns and runs out of the bathroom.

  But Mae is waiting. How much? Mae asks the man. He laughs again, but Mae doesn’t laugh, her eyes narrow and her face gets that look, like when she strangled the ducks in the bath with her bare hands. Come on Jimmy, how much?

  Time to earn your keep, Mae tells her. She drags her by the hair into her bedroom, and it smells bad in here, sweaty and damp and something else, something that makes her wrinkle her nose in disgust. Mae’s never let her come in here before. There is a red scarf thrown over the lamp on the dresser and strange pictures on the walls. She tries to free herself from Mae, she has a really bad feeling in the pit of her stomach – danger danger – but Mae smacks her around the head so hard her ears ring and she feels dizzy, and the man is here and the two of them pick her up and toss her on the bed as if she is as light as a kitten.

  Then Mae leaves her alone with the man, and she starts to cry, she’s scared, so scared, and she tries to scramble away across the bed, but the man is too quick for her, he catches her by her skinny ankle and drags her back across the bed and pins her down, and she closes her eyes tight, tight. If she keeps them shut, maybe none of this will be real.

  She’ll wake up in her pretty bed with the pink sheets and none of this will be real.

  Chapter 12

  Saturday noon

  She couldn’t stop screaming. She refused to look at the cold, dead baby in the crib, the full enormity of her loss finally hitting home. Lucas wrapped his arms around her, but she thrashed against him, unable and unwilling to be comforted. In the end, one of the doctors prescribed some kind of tranquilliser for her, Valium or Xanax, by t
his stage Maddie didn’t care; she simply took what they gave her, praying it’d knock her out, praying she’d wake up and find this had all been a hideous nightmare, nothing but a bad dream.

  But everything stayed savagely real. She and Lucas left the hospital without Noah, her arms horribly empty, travelling home together in silence in the back of a taxi. Mercifully, the driver didn’t try to talk to them, depositing them outside their house with a sympathetic discretion that suggested he’d worked the hospital route before.

  Maddie glanced up at the nursery window as they got out of the cab. It was still thrown open from where she must have flung it wide to shout down to Lucas for help. Was that really just six hours ago? Already, it seemed to belong to a different life.

  The house was grimly quiet when they let themselves in. Emily and Jacob were at her mother’s and the police had gone. It all seemed so eerily normal. Dirty plates from last night still lay soaking in greasy water in the sink. Damp washing sat in a plastic laundry basket, waiting to go into the dryer. Sarah had put Noah’s changing bag away out of sight, but his bottles were still lined up on the kitchen windowsill and his bouncer remained in its usual place in a safe, draught-free corner of the kitchen, his favourite blanket folded neatly across it ready for him.

  Maddie snatched it up and buried her face in it.

  Lucas touched her shoulder. ‘Darling, don’t. You’ll just make it worse.’

  She raised her head. ‘How?’ she said dully. ‘How could it be worse?’

  Shrugging him away, she drifted through the silent house, roaming from room to room, randomly picking things up and putting them down as if she’d never seen them before. Nothing seemed familiar. Lucas followed her, but didn’t try to comfort her again.

  ‘Don’t,’ he repeated, as she reached the foot of the stairs.

  She ignored him, heading upstairs to Noah’s nursery. ‘You can turn this room back into your office, if you like,’ she said over her shoulder as he followed her. ‘I know how much you’ve hated having to share the downstairs study with me.’

  ‘Maddie …’

  ‘Or we could make this into a spare room. It’s a bit small, but you can fit a single bed in here and a dresser, once we get rid of Noah’s changing table. And the rocking chair,’ she added, her voice suddenly bitter. ‘I want that chair out of the house.’

  She yanked open the little blue chest of drawers and grabbed a neat pile of Babygros and threw them on the floor and then opened a second drawer and started emptying that too.

  Lucas shut the drawer. ‘Leave this.’

  ‘You can take the stair-gate down, now. Noah’s never going to need it, and it makes getting up and down the stairs so awkward when your arms are full of clean washing.’

  ‘You’re in shock, Maddie. Please, come back downstairs.’

  ‘The world doesn’t just stop because Noah died. Things still need to get done. Someone has to sort them out.’

  She wrenched the drawers open again and emptied their contents onto the floor. She didn’t know if it was shock, like Lucas said, or the medication they’d given her, but she was completely, blessedly, numb. She had to get rid of Noah’s clothes and toys, she had to erase every sign he’d ever existed, now, while she still could. She didn’t know if she would survive the pain of walking into Noah’s nursery, of seeing all his things still here, once that numbness wore off.

  She crouched down and began to pull sheets and blankets and towels off the shelf beneath Noah’s changing table, until Lucas knelt beside her and put his hands on hers.

  ‘Maddie, please. You have to stop.’

  Maddie stilled. ‘I’m afraid to stop,’ she whispered.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘If I stop, I might have time to think.’

  ‘I know,’ he said again.

  ‘How can he be gone, Lucas?’ she asked, bewildered. ‘How can this have happened?’

  ‘I thought we were safe now,’ Lucas said thickly. ‘I thought, we’ve had our share of grief and tragedy. That’s it now. I lost both my parents; you lost Benjamin. I thought at least that meant we were owed some good luck. At least it meant the children would be safe.’

  She had no room for pity. She knew that when the drugs wore off, the pain would return. It was actual, physical, as if her chest had been sliced open and her heart smashed into a thousand pieces. Heartbroken was no longer a metaphor but a description.

  ‘How do we survive this?’ she whispered. ‘How do we even get up tomorrow morning?’

  ‘We get up tomorrow because we don’t have a choice. Emily and Jacob need us.’

  She extricated herself from his arms and stood up stiffly. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how to tell their children that their brother had died. She rested her hands on the rail of Noah’s cot, staring at the mattress as if she could still see him there. ‘I was the one looking after him. I was the one who let him down. You weren’t even here.’

  ‘I should have been!’ Lucas shouted suddenly. ‘I should have been here!’

  ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  She looked at him. ‘Are you saying there’s something you could have done, that I didn’t?’

  His shoulders sagged, the fight suddenly leaving him. ‘No,’ he said wretchedly. ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘We can’t keep doing this, Lucas. It’s going to tear us apart.’

  Even as she said the words, she wondered if it was already too late. You were born alone and you died alone. And now she realised you grieved alone, too.

  Chapter 13

  Sunday 6.30 a.m.

  Maddie opened her eyes, and for a few merciful moments, as she hovered between sleep and wakefulness, she’d forgotten. And then remembrance slammed into her like a freight train.

  She hadn’t known how savagely physical grief was. Losing Benjamin had been bad, but it was nothing compared to this. Her body felt brutalised. She curled herself into a tight ball, hugging her knees to her chest, and pressed her pillow over her ears as if she could use it to block out her thoughts. If she could just get back to sleep, maybe she’d wake up again in her own life, instead of a nightmare that belonged to somebody else.

  Her breasts were burning. It was time for Noah’s feed. Except Noah was dead.

  She threw back the covers and ran into the bathroom, retching violently into the lavatory bowl. She hadn’t eaten in thirty-six hours; she was bringing up nothing but bile. She couldn’t block the image in her head of Noah lying cold and white and still in that hideous plastic crib. Try as she might, she couldn’t summon an image of her son alive.

  She rocked back on her bare heels and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The phone was ringing, but she ignored it. She couldn’t imagine going to answer it. She couldn’t imagine leaving this bathroom at all.

  The ringing stopped. She heard the muffled sound of Lucas’s voice as he spoke to someone, and moments later, he appeared in the bathroom doorway. He’d pulled on a pair of jeans and a cotton sweater, but he looked haggard and unkempt and at least twenty years older than yesterday. She’d never seen him unshaven, she thought irrelevantly. She hadn’t realised he was going so grey.

  ‘That was the hospital on the phone,’ he said.

  She looked at him blankly.

  He rubbed his hand over his stubble. ‘They said if we want to take Emily and Jacob in, we need to go today.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To see Noah,’ Lucas said bleakly. ‘We talked about this yesterday, Maddie. The children need to see him, so they can say goodbye. It’ll help them understand what’s happened and that he isn’t coming back.’

  ‘No. I’m not ready.’

  Lucas hesitated. ‘They have to conduct a postmortem,’ he said finally. ‘It’s a sudden death. They don’t have any choice. It’s … it’s better if Emily and Jacob see him now. Before.’

  A noise like the sound of a thousand bees filled her head and she reached out for the cold porce
lain solidity of the lavatory, her knuckles whitening. A post-mortem. They were going to cut her baby up. Cut into his fragile little body with their sharp knives and scalpels, dig around his insides, saw open his skull and cut out his heart.

  ‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t have them hurt him. They can’t touch our baby, Lucas.’

  ‘It’s not Noah anymore,’ Lucas said miserably. ‘It’s just the husk of him. The wrapping he came in. The real Noah is with us, in our hearts. No one can touch that.’

  ‘I can’t remember what he looks like,’ she said suddenly. ‘I keep trying to picture him, and I can’t remember what he looks like.’ Her voice had an edge of panic. ‘I keep seeing him in that room. Cold and white and dead. I don’t want to do that to Emily and Jacob. I don’t want that to be the way they remember him.’

  ‘They need to understand what’s happened, Maddie. We can’t hide it from them. Maybe it’s good that Noah doesn’t look like he’s asleep, even if it is a bit scary. They need to know the difference between death and sleeping, so they’re not terrified every time they go to bed.’

  ‘They don’t need to know about death!’ she cried. ‘They’re nine and two years old!’

  ‘Maddie, I don’t want them to know about death either. At their age, they shouldn’t have to deal with anything more traumatic than the death of a goldfish.’ He crouched down beside her. ‘But I’ve been through this. I was thirteen when my parents died and I couldn’t make sense of it until my Aunt Dot took me to see them in the funeral home. It was smoke that’d killed them, not the fire, so it was OK. They weren’t burned. They didn’t look like they were sleeping, they looked like they were dead, but I could handle that. It made sense.’ He touched her cheek, turning her to look at him. ‘Candace was only four, and everyone thought she was too young to see them. They thought it’d give her nightmares. Aunt Dot told her they were dead, but Candace thought that just meant they’d gone away somewhere. She waited for years for them to come back, long after she’d stopped asking for them. I think a part of her is still waiting.’