My Sister's Child

by Caroline Finnerty

  Jo knew she now needed to talk to Isla and make sure that she’d meant what she’d said. She knew that Isla could throw words around carelessly without considering their meaning. She was worried that she had jumped in as usual on the spur of the moment. But it was like someone had thrown her a lifeline in an ocean of despair, so she took it, practically snatched it out of her younger sister’s hands and was now clinging on desperately to it.

  Isla had been surprised but happy when Jo called over to her flat to talk about it one evening after work.

  “I thought you’d completely discounted that idea?” she’d said.

  “I had – you were about ten steps ahead of where I was at that point but, after I had time to think about it properly and rationally, I realised it’s the next best option. I’ve had time to accept that I’m never going to have a genetic child of my own but this is pretty close.”

  “Well, I’m glad. I feel really happy that I can hopefully – I mean if everything is okay with me – that I can help you in some way.”

  Isla hadn’t seen it as any big deal: Jo wanted a baby, she needed some eggs – she had some. They had the same parents, so she figured it was the same difference.

  “I really hope so, Isla. I couldn’t face any more setbacks. I’m pinning everything on this – sorry, I don’t mean to put you under pressure.” Jo had laughed nervously.

  “Hey, don’t worry, this is going to work. I just know it is.”

  Jo laughed and hugged her close. “God, I hope you’re right. Thank you so much, Isla. I will never, ever forget what you are doing for us. Ever.”

  They didn’t tell anyone what they were about to embark on. They went back to Dr Collins, the three of them, at the very earliest appointment that Jo could get. It had felt strange consulting as a trio instead of the duo that Jo and Ryan had been working as for so long. They did initial tests on Isla to make sure that she was healthy and didn’t have any potential fertility issues herself.

  When they all looked good, Isla had to go through the counselling which was a requirement of the clinic. Jo knew that legally it was part of the protocol but it still made her nervous in case they said something to Isla that would trigger a change of mind and cause her to back out of it. But Isla didn’t and she signed the paperwork. Jo drafted up a confidentiality agreement, which she made Isla sign but Isla knew that that was just the solicitor coming out in Jo.

  Then the clinic had encouraged Ryan and Jo to discuss what, if anything, they would tell the potential child about how she or he was conceived. Jo was adamant that she didn’t want anyone to know but Ryan was unsure. He had asked how a child would feel to find out when it was older that it was conceived using a donor? He felt that its trust in its parents would be completely damaged and the fact that it had been this big secret might make it think that its parents were ashamed of its start in life.

  “At least if you tell it when it’s young, it grows up with its conception as part of its identity and it shouldn’t be any big deal,” he had argued.

  However, Jo was completely opposed to ever telling the child, so he let it go.

  When they had all the issues ironed out, they were good to go and it was time for the drugs. Isla took the medication she was given on the days she was told to. She had to give herself a daily injection to shut down her reproductive system, which seemed crazy to her, but it was explained that it was so the clinic could be in control of her cycle – most importantly, over when she would drop those eggs.

  Isla hated needles. It was not the injection itself but the anticipation that she found awful so Jo had offered to come over at the same time every day to do it for her. It also allowed Jo to make sure that Isla was doing everything as she was supposed to do it. Jo was finding the lack of control hard and the fact that she was relying on her sister, who could be flaky at the best of times, to get it right was making her anxious. A side effect of the injection was that Isla’s body thought it was going through the menopause and she was experiencing all of those symptoms. She would wake up at night with her sheets soaked through with sweat. She would have to go outside the back door in work to cool down when the heat from a hot flush became too much. And the pounding headaches too. But she knew that it was nothing compared to the torture that Jo had put herself through for years. She had watched her sister go through some very dark days so a few weeks of injections and a few hot flushes were nothing to moan about when you thought about it like that.

  Then they harvested Isla’s eggs and that was her part over. They mixed them with Ryan’s sperm and it resulted in two embryos. One was implanted into Jo and they made the decision to freeze the other as a backup in case it didn’t work the first time and, if it did work, then it potentially could be a future brother or sister to the first child.

  They had another horrible wait then to see if the treatment had worked but when Jo woke up feeling nauseous even before she had done a test, she had dared to hope. Thankfully the embryo had taken and, when a second pink line had appeared where there had only been a single line for so many years, she rang Ryan at work in a teary, trembling mess.

  The next phone call she made was to Isla.

  “Thank you for this gift, Isla – I will never be able to thank you enough.”

  Jo would never forget her reply.

  “I’ve got a good feeling about this, Jo. You’re finally going to get your baby.”

  Jo had liked the fact that she had used the word ‘your’.

  Chapter 4

  Little Star

  As the weeks went on Jo had tentatively ticked them off on her calendar. She did not want to get her hopes raised but for once it seemed that everything was going well inside her womb. She had been extremely anxious during the first twelve weeks. She would continuously run to the bathroom just to make sure that there was no bleeding. She was so worried. It wasn’t until she got through the first trimester that she finally dared to believe that it might just happen. That at last there might be a baby in their future.

  Soon her belly had started to push forward and she was so proud when she finally had a bump to show off. It finally felt real. People in shops admired it, colleagues in work offered to carry her heavy files to and from meetings. When she met up with friends, they said that pregnancy suited her. She loved joining in conversations with other pregnant women in the office who were complaining of backache or of the poor choice of maternity clothes available to them. She had been overhearing those conversations with a heaviness in her heart for so long that she was now embracing the chance to finally be one of those women who chatted idly in the lift or stopped by the photocopier to discuss their pregnancies. She was basking in the attention. She had wanted to be that woman a long time and, now that it had arrived, she was relishing every minute of it. Everything in her life finally was perfect: she had Ryan and they were soon to be parents.

  It was almost going too well. Then their baby had decided to arrive at twenty-seven weeks, which was a frightening experience for any pregnant woman but, when you had gone through all that they had been through at that stage, it was terrifying.

  Jo had been feeling off that day and had gone home from work to lie down. She had called Ryan to tell him and he had said that it was just stress – that she was doing too much in work and needed to think about throttling back now that she was entering into the third trimester. She had agreed with him and made the decision to leave the office at five o’clock every day. She had gone home and climbed into bed. She felt so heavy and every part of her felt achy like the very worst flu. She had slept for about an hour and when she woke up and got out of bed her waters had broken. She rang Ryan in an awful state and he came home and took her straight to the hospital. They admitted her and gave her drugs to try to stop her baby from coming but the baby was insistent and was born less than two hours later. The midwives announced she was a girl and Jo caught a glimpse of a tiny pink thing before she was rushed away immediately to the special care unit. She could remember Ryan squeezing her ha
nd so tightly that it hurt.

  Then she had started to haemorrhage. She was shaking and shivering and felt so very cold. The cold, the cold. She remembered saying to Ryan, “I’m so cold. I need a blanket. Can you get me a blanket? I’m so cold.” Her teeth were chattering wildly against each other. She could remember looking down and seeing the colour red, bright poppy-red, soaking into the white sheets, and then she felt it form a warm sticky pool underneath her. She had looked at Ryan who had blanched as if the blood was running from his own body instead of hers. She remembered the alarm on the face of the midwife in the room with them. Ryan had started stumbling backwards until he found himself sitting in a chair with his head in his hands. Then the room had started to fill with people. Midwives, people wearing green scrubs, they all came running into the room.

  She could remember that the colour of the blood was so rich she almost thought it was beautiful. She was transfixed by it as it seeped across the cloth. She would pick a point on the starched white sheet and watch as the blood journeyed towards it. Then she would pick another one further away and do the same thing again. They were all running around her, talking in panicked, pressured tones to each other. She could hear the snap of latex gloves being pulled on. Machines beeping. The redness had now reached her toes and the shivering was getting worse.

  She wanted to sleep badly like she had never needed to sleep before. Her body needed rest but she was being frustrated by a midwife who kept talking to her and asking silly things like where she lived and what colour car she drove. She knew now that they were trying to keep her awake. She could hear Ryan, somewhere on the periphery, asking what was happening over and over again but nobody was answering him. She wanted to ask where the baby was and whether or not she was okay but she couldn’t make her mouth form the words. Instead, all she could hear was the rattle of her own teeth, enamel on enamel. They were pulling at her heavy arms, inserting needles and cannulas without any consideration as to whether they might have been hurting her. They pumped blood into her from plump plastic bags filtering down through tubes that led into her body but it came out again just as fast. The redness had now made its way down over the sides of the bed. They reached inside her trying to remove fragments of the placenta and they didn’t care if it was hurting her. She looked down over the side of the bed and saw the blood pooling onto the grey vinyl floor.

  Ryan had told her that next they were running with her trolley down to theatre and thrusting a clipboard with a form in front of him asking for his consent to the surgery with the possibility of a hysterectomy if they were unable to stem the blood flow. He had signed it without hesitation. She knew that he didn’t have much choice: it was either consent to the hysterectomy or have a dead wife with her womb and ovaries intact.

  Then they lowered a mask down over her face and that was the last thing she remembered.

  Ryan had often told the story of an awful wait where minutes turned into hours and he didn’t know if his newborn, much-longed-for baby was dead or alive, or if his wife – the person who brought this much-longed-for baby into the world – was dead or alive.

  Jo lost her womb and ovaries on the operating table – not that it mattered to her of course. They had proven themselves more than dysfunctional over the years.

  When she had come around, she could remember reaching up and trying to pull the mask off her face. She could remember seeing Isla’s concerned face; she could see the worry in her eyes as they looked down into hers. She looked tired, thought Jo. She didn’t remember it but she had asked if her baby was alive before falling back asleep again. The next time she came round, she saw Ryan. His face was grey and tired and he looked older somehow. Again, she asked where her baby was and the nurse came in and sedated her. When she was lucid, Ryan told her that their daughter was alive and Jo would never forget how hearing that news felt. Even without knowing her condition, to hear the words “our daughter” was so sweet to the ears. She didn’t care about the pain or the weakness or the disorientation of being in a white room with wires and tubes: Ryan had said the words “our daughter”. She didn’t think that any medicine the doctors could have given her would have made her as determined to get well again as those words had done. When she was a bit stronger he had told her that the baby had almost died twice on them. Ryan hadn’t known who to go to – whether he should sit outside the operating theatre as surgeons battled to save his dying wife or in the neonatal intensive-care unit where the newborn infant that she had given birth to was fighting for its own life. He had watched in horror through the glass partition wall as they worked on the baby, large hands working on a tiny body. They had managed to resuscitate her on her way out of this world and brought her back to them. Twice.

  By the time Jo was well enough to see her for the first time, she was five days old. Jo could still remember seeing a tiny red baby. She hadn’t expected that but her skin looked raw, like a case of bad sunburn. She imagined it would hurt her if they touched her. The nurses told them she was very sick and, although she was stable at that point, she was not yet out of the woods. But there was no way Jo could let her go – they had fought so hard to get her, their daughter. They had been down such a long road at that stage, that only to get her for a few days and then to have to say goodbye to her would have been too cruel a fate. So she prayed and prayed for her to get better. And miraculously she did. They told Jo that she wouldn’t be able to breastfeed her, that her body would be too weak to produce milk after what she had been through but she asked for a pump and she persevered with it. She kept on pumping until the droplets of milk grew into a trickle and then a steady stream.

  Then they realised that they had been calling her “the baby” for two entire weeks. They were still a bit detached and were too afraid to name her. It was like they both thought that they would be tempting fate by doing something like that. But one day the nurse looking after her had chided them gently, saying that the baby should have a name, so they had decided to call her Réiltín, which meant ‘Little Star’. Whenever Jo looked up at a star in the night sky, she was always amazed by the fact that the light that she was seeing had been emitted millions of years ago and that she was looking at history rather than the present. It reminded her of how small we all are on earth. It used to give her comfort when she was going through her fertility treatment because there was a bigger picture out there which we could only hope to catch a glimpse of. As humans we thought we knew so much but there was a whole galaxy out there, which we knew nothing about. It gave her hope that miracles could happen and when she had held her baby daughter in her arms for the first time she knew that that was exactly what had happened: she had her own star.

  Jo grew stronger and was discharged from hospital and she and Ryan went home together, feeling weird and guilty too, like a huge part of them was missing. They went in to the hospital to see Réiltín every day and gradually they began to see improvements: she began to gain weight, breathe by herself and develop a swallow reflex, which they were told was important for feeding. Finally, almost ten weeks after she was born, they were told that she was doing well and once she gained some more weight they would be able to take her home.

  Jo knew that she would be indebted to Isla for the rest of her life. Never could she have even begun trying to find the words to thank her sister for her selfless gift. The gift of a child. For allowing Jo the privilege of being able to give Ryan a child of his own. And in all of her wildest dreams, Jo never could have imagined that it would be as amazing as it was. Any worry that she’d had about loving Réiltín less because she wasn’t her genetic child was unfounded. From the first time that she was allowed to hold her, she had known that Réiltín was her baby.

  The day she finally brought Réiltín home from hospital, she was blown away. She was frightened, amazed, scared, in love, disbelieving that she was finally there in their home. She worried that her body would not be able to give this weak little baby all that she needed to grow. She worried whether, after their long wait,
they were really up to the challenge or if they were going to fall at the first hurdle. She had a few panicky nights where she literally would not sleep because she was watching Réiltín with a sense of wonderment and awe but also an undertone of panic. But everyone told her that it was just nerves – apparently it happened, especially when people had been through the wringer to have a baby like she had. She supposed that it was a trauma of some sort.

  Chapter 5

  Anchors

  “Hey, Isla!” Réiltín jumped up off the sofa and ran out to the hallway to throw her arms around her aunt as she came in through the door that evening.

  “Happy birthday, Réilt! Cool hair!” Isla said. “Show me?” She ran her fingers through Réiltín’s thick auburn hair, which was now streaked electric blue.

  “Don’t encourage her, Isla – it looks terrible,” Jo said as she came into the kitchen.

  “When did you do it?”

  “When I came home after school.”

  “Of course, it would have to be permanent!” Jo said.

  “Mum, I am fourteen years old!”

  “Only as of today, Réiltín!”

  “I just want to play around a bit. It’s not forever – it will grow out.”

  “Well, your school will not be happy – you know it’s in the rulebook about dying your hair. Don’t blame me if you get a note home!”

  “Relax, everyone does it, Mum!” Réiltín protested.

  “So what are we having for dinner?” Isla asked.

  “I’ll give you a clue . . . Réiltín’s favourite . . .”

  “That’s easy – burgers and chips!”

  Jo smiled. “I hope you’re not too hungry – it will be another half an hour or so – I got delayed finishing off the icing on the cake.”