by Susi Fox
‘I didn’t check his toes. He does have my attached earlobes. You know, like my father’s, joined directly to my head. The ones you hate.’
I inhale, hoping Mark won’t notice. There would be only one thing worse than a mistake about the baby’s identity: that the real mistake is in my imagination; that I will continue to feel nothing for my son at all.
‘He has your skin, your pale skin. I would recognise his face anywhere, Sash. Let’s visit him now, together. It’ll help you feel better.’
‘There’s nothing the matter with me. I’m just tired.’
‘Well, let’s go now, then,’ Mark insists. It seems I no longer have a choice.
Thirteen Years Earlier
MARK
Life with Sash began unexpectedly. All the guys except Adam and I had pulled out of the boys’ night we’d been planning for months. In the dim jazz club, a veil of musty cigarette smoke hovered in the air above my head. I sucked down the dregs of my lager, warm and flat in my mouth, as the quartet stepped away for a quick break. Adam had started chatting up a brunette near the toilets. I was alone, stuck on a table up the back, starting to wish I’d stayed at home like the other guys.
I approached the bar. Beside me, a woman pulled up a stool. Her blonde hair was clipped short against her head, her face slender with a pointed chin, like a pixie. She wasn’t my usual type, but she was what other men would call beautiful.
‘Having a good night?’ I said.
‘Sure.’ She pointed over at Adam and the brunette, now entwined on a couch by the far wall. ‘I think our friends are hooking up.’
She was right. Adam and the unnamed brunette were sucking at each other’s necks. It looked like they were going to have a damn fine night.
‘Would you like a beer?’ She was forward right from the start. When I nodded, she called the barman over, ordered me a lager. She chose my favourite brand. ‘I trust your friend treats women well.’
‘Of course.’
‘Bec’s had a bad run, that’s all.’ The band piped up, drowning out whatever she said next. I slurped my beer, rested my elbows on the bar, trying to appear like I was following the subtleties of the solo. She raised her voice above the saxophone.
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m an apprentice chef. But my real dream is to start my own café.’ I’d never said it aloud until that moment, but something about this woman demanded ambition. Courage. Vision.
‘Hey, that’s really cool,’ she said. ‘Tell me more.’
I thought fast. ‘I’m scoping out sites for an organic food café. It’s been my dream forever to set one up.’
‘I love organic food.’
I grinned. ‘And you? What do you do?’
‘Nothing special.’
‘Nothing special sounds great.’
Her cheeks, her eyes, lit up. Before the end of the song, her hand was cupped around my ear, her warm breath on my neck. ‘It’s too loud for me. You want to get out of here? I don’t even like jazz.’
I’m still not one hundred per cent sure what it was about her that made me say yes without hesitation. Perhaps it was the warmth radiating from her skin, maybe the flash of her silver earrings in the wan light, or the smile that danced freely on her face.
We ended up down by the bay, on the thin strip between footpath and water. She walked by my side, close to the lapping waves, as our soles padded against the shore.
‘You seem quiet somehow. I don’t know, like you’re sad,’ she said softly.
I tried to keep my face blank, kicked sand into the air.
‘My brother died recently.’
‘Your brother? I’m so sorry.’
‘My twin.’
She stopped, looking out at the twinkle of lights on the other side of the bay, and seated herself on the sand.
‘That’s awful. I’m sorry. What was he like?’
I sank down beside her, found myself telling her the whole story of Simon. The cancer in his blood. His stoicism as needles pierced every part of him. The hair in clumps on the pillowslip, caught in the drain. The doctors who insisted on just one more test, one more treatment, until they had no promises left. She listened, nodded at all the right places. She seemed to get it. I was pretty sure Simon would have approved of her.
Then she told me about her mother. It wasn’t the whole story, I know that now, but it was enough to understand that Sash had suffered and come out the other side lighter, alive and beaming, her skin warm as she reached for my hand.
That’s where it all started, I suppose, as the stars fell over us like a blanket, her head resting in my lap, water licking the sand.
Day 1, Saturday Lunchtime
A line, the colour of a cleanly sliced wound, is sewn into the white wool blanket perched on my lap. I pinch at it as Mark pushes me through the automatic door to the nursery. Buzzing conversation fades to a flatline. Parents and relatives have turned to look at me, the newest mother here. The nurses are observing me too, their mouths set in smiles.
Close to the nurses’ station we pass a door labelled Resuscitation Room, which I didn’t notice last time. I hope I’ll never need to enter that space. Babies are squawking across the nursery, their cries rising in non-harmonic discord. The air is filled with a sickly sweet smell, from the formula room I realise as we sweep past the labelled door. I hope I’ll still be able to breastfeed. Then again, it may be one more thing that’s out of my control.
As we near the end of the corridor of humidicribs, Mark pushes me to the right instead of the left.
‘This is the wrong side,’ I say.
‘They’ve moved him since you visited. Another baby needed his humidicrib, for the lights.’ He pulls the wheelchair to an abrupt stop.
The card tacked to the crib is unchanged, with my name and a blank space for the baby’s. I peer through the plastic. I’m not sure what I was expecting until I feel my chest deflate. It’s the same baby from this morning.
On the other side of the narrow corridor, our baby’s old humidicrib is lit up in electric blue. There’s another baby inside. The phosphorescent light beams up through the plastic, casting wavy blue shadows against the nursery walls, as if we’re under the ocean, too deep to see the sky.
A petite, slender woman with porcelain skin sits straight-backed beside the blue cot. A bundle of red wool is arranged in her lap, grey knitting needles in her hands. Her delicate feet are slipped into sandals beneath her hospital gown. She’s singing a lullaby, almost to herself, as she picks up stitch after stitch. My Bonnie lies over the ocean. There’s a deep crease of worry between her eyebrows, but the woman’s eyes, small and deep-set like a bird’s, brighten as she catches sight of me.
I smile at her, my plastered-on smile cracking as I realise I’m not the only one finding this all too much. She smiles back, revealing a wide, innocent gap between her two front teeth. Then she lowers her eyes to the square of wool perched in her lap and brings the needles together with a quiet click. An introvert. Perhaps a potential ally. Or a friend.
Our baby’s new humidicrib is illuminated in insipid light that casts dark shadows in the corners. I reach to turn up the dial in order to examine him more closely, but Mark places his hand on mine.
‘They told me to keep the lights on low, Sash. We don’t want to stress him out.’
The baby is already crying, not the throaty squeal of a newborn, more like the high-pitched squall of a seagull. His eyes are scrunched closed, his face sunburnt-red. Turning the lights up briefly won’t affect the baby, but in this moment I’m too overwhelmed to explain that to Mark. He believes he’s doing the right thing by following the nurses’ instructions to the letter. I sniff back the hint of tears threatening to spill down my cheeks.
Mark opens the humidicrib doors – how many times has he done this already? – and nestles his hands around the baby, one cupping his skull, the other resting on his back, the same way he cradled the joey. ‘He likes it,’ Mark says, and indeed, the baby stops wail
ing, his cries easing into sniffs, then softening into silence. I hadn’t realised Mark had a skill with babies, hadn’t known he would have any idea what to do to settle them. It should be appealing, this trait in him. And yet it feels cruel, somehow, that he already has more of a bond with this baby than me.
The baby is lying on his stomach, his neck tilted to the side with his head lolled towards me. A flush of heat shimmers in my chest, a tidal wave of disappointment. I was right the first time: he’s nothing like the baby in my dreams, or in the deepest recesses of my mind. The elongation of his head appears to have eased since this morning, although his dark hair is still coated with vernix. The bruising on one hemisphere of his scalp has deepened from maroon into violet. His wide-set eyes, rimmed by stubby eyelashes and dark eyebrows, are unfocused, motionless. Downy black hair coats the olive skin of his shoulders. He’s more ape than human.
‘He’s cute, isn’t he?’ Mark says.
‘He’s kind of ugly.’ The moment it’s out, I know I’ve said the wrong thing.
Mark’s mouth gapes as if he’s about to berate me, but instead he takes a controlled breath and turns back to the crib.
‘Are you still okay with calling him Tobias? Toby?’
‘But we decided Gabrielle. So, Gabriel for a boy, right?’
‘I don’t know, Sash. Gabriel doesn’t seem right for him. He looks solid to me. Kind of strong. Tobias is a powerful name. Masculine. It was top of our boys’ names, remember? I think he looks more like a Tobias. What do you reckon?’
I shrug. We can always change it, I suppose.
‘Once it’s set, I don’t think we’ll be changing it, darling,’ Mark says lightly.
I can feel my face flush – did I say that aloud?
‘You make the decision,’ I mutter.
‘Toby it is, then,’ Mark says. ‘Maybe it’s time you held him.’
He goes to get a nurse to help us, glancing over his shoulder at me and giving me one of his smiles as he walks away.
Mark has left the humidicrib doors open. I inch my fingers through the holes until both hands rest on the baby. His skin is cold and moist, like a frog’s. His back arches and he emits a low-pitched whimper. I run my hand over his slimy skull, rubbing at the vernix with my fingertips, then bring my palm to rest on his ribcage, at the back. With the other hand, I reach down to his feet to check the webbing. An absence of webbing would be a hint that he’s not Mark’s son. All at once, before I can prise his toes apart, his breath begins to rasp in and out of him like a rattlesnake. I pull my hands from the portholes and shut them with a loud snap.
‘They hardly look human, do they?’
It’s the woman beside the blue-lit cot across the walkway, her face alight with an affable smile. Above her, the light dances on the nursery wall.
‘And they’re so fragile. It feels like even touching them could break their skin.’
At last, someone who seems to understand. Someone I might be able to connect with. Someone who can answer the question welling up inside me like a flood.
‘That’s exactly it,’ I say. I don’t add that the prematurity, at least, must be my fault.
She rests her knitting on her lap. ‘I’m Brigitte. My son is Jeremy. He was born this morning, thirty-seven weeks, four pounds, nine ounces.’
‘How much is that in kilos?’
‘Hmm, I don’t know. I do know it’ll take him a long time to get into this.’ She indicates the square of knitted wool on her lap. ‘I was planning to have it finished before he was born. I was expecting him to be bigger. At least now I have more time to get it done.’
I can’t knit, can’t even sew. I really should have learned how before now; it’s a motherly thing to do. Brigitte is like the parents I was envious of when I worked in paediatrics, the women born to be mothers. The women who always seemed so comfortable caring for their offspring. Who always knew exactly what to do.
‘This is Tobias.’ The name catches at the front of my mouth, almost stutters out as I pronounce it for the first time. I choose to recite his statistics from the namecard. It seems to be the way new mothers introduce themselves. ‘Emergency caesarean at thirty-five weeks, one point nine kilograms.’
Her eyes glaze. No doubt she considers me a failure for having had a caesarean. I tuck my fingers into my palms.
‘There was a lot of bleeding. Clots. Hence the caesar.’ My only other memory as I lay soaked in blood was the voice of Bec’s mother soothing me from within. My darling, oh my darling. Just breathe. I wish she were still alive, so she could comfort me in person.
Brigitte recoils from my description of the blood, shuddering.
‘Ugh. It sounds horrific. That’s why I studied naturopathy. What do you do?’
Naturopathy. Better if I don’t discuss my beliefs about natural medicine with her. And she probably won’t approve of my work.
‘I’m actually a pathologist.’
At first, I presume the breath she draws is in disgust – I know how naturopaths are about doctors. Then she begins to gush.
‘Wow, that’s just brilliant. You get to see everything. I must say, I do love those TV shows. Is it really like CSI? Fingerprints, DNA tests?’
‘I’m an anatomical pathologist. Not forensic. Most of my work is staring down microscopes at pink splodges and purple dots and writing reports that people skip over. I have to write the conclusions in capitals so they’re not overlooked.’
‘So, you love your work, then?’ she says with a grin.
‘I suppose. Some days. I don’t like the dissecting dead babies part.’
The first baby I dissected had been found by her mother in her cot, a suspected SIDS case. Her body was stiff as I shifted her into position on the steel tray. She looked and felt like a hard plastic doll; not like a real baby at all. As I sliced through her skin, her guts spilled out of the slit, slippery on the steel. I gagged. I resolved to quit right there and then. Not just pathology, but all of medicine. I was never coming back.
It was my supervisor who led me from the locker room back to that dissection room, to the baby waiting for me on the steel. It was my duty, she said, to find out why this baby had died. To give her parents the answer they so desperately needed. It was the best thing I could do, for them and for her.
So that is what I did; what I still do from time to time. Cutting through the babies’ wafer-thin flesh, digging deep into them, searching their shelled-out cavities for something or someone to blame. I don’t pretend it’s pleasant. I try not to talk about it to my friends when they become new mothers. I don’t think they’d understand.
Brigitte is staring at me now with a look of horror on her face, as if I might be contemplating dissecting her baby. With the heat of the nursery and the fatigue muddying my brain, I realise abruptly that I’ve said the wrong thing.
‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned that. I’ve just got babies on my mind.’ I flash her a weak smile, which feels more like a grimace. The muscles in my face ache with the effort.
Brigitte frowns back at me, before looking down at her thin hands, clasped together in her lap.
‘I lost faith in Western medicine years ago. I only trusted natural remedies. That’s why I became a naturopath. Then, last year, I developed a new appreciation for doctors when my cousin’s baby was born at twenty-four weeks. They didn’t think he was going to make it. Somehow, thanks to the hospital, he pulled through. And it looks like he’s going to be fine long-term.’
‘Poor parents,’ I murmur. Thirty-five weeks feels bad enough.
‘It was tough for them.’ She nods. ‘They’re through the worst of it now, though. As for me, I can’t wait to get Jeremy out of here. I’m looking forward to taking him home. A new start.’
Brigitte’s lips are blue, almost cyanotic. I want to reach for her wrist, check her pulse, make sure she isn’t becoming one of my corpses, before I realise it’s the humidicrib lights tainting the colour of her skin. Still leaning forward, I almost whisper the question
that burns in my chest.
‘Is it normal to feel nothing?’
Brigitte’s eyes soften.
‘For the baby? Probably. The social worker told me bonding is harder when they’re in the nursery. I mean, I’m sitting here, but I could be anywhere, right? How would my baby know? I can’t even hold him yet. It’s harder to love them when they’re behind plastic.’ She smiles kindly.
Maybe that’s why I’m finding him ugly. Maybe all premature babies are. Maybe all mothers think the same thing.
‘You’re normal,’ she says reassuringly. ‘It’s your husband who seems unusually keen. He’s been here most of the morning. I mean, I guess you’re lucky, right? Is he that attentive with you, too?’
I shrug. He hasn’t always been, but I’m not about to disclose that to a stranger, no matter how trustworthy she seems. ‘What about you?’
She sighs. ‘John is more like a part-time husband. He’s a fly-in, fly-out engineer. I’ve been trying to call him all day to tell him the news. Remote sites. They’re the worst.’
A hand on my shoulder, the weight of a dumbbell. Mark, with Ursula by his side.
‘I can help you with your first hold with Toby before my lunch break.’ Ursula opens the whole sidewall of the humidicrib and adjusts the leads and tubes. ‘You’re ready?’ Before I can answer, she lifts Toby high into the air, the leads draped over her arm as she delivers him into the crooks of my elbows.
He’s lighter than I expected, nearly weightless.
He lies motionless in my arms. There’s a metallic scent wafting off him, perhaps from the antibiotics, perhaps his natural smell. His eyes are pinched shut, as if the industrial scent is being emitted from me.
I look up at Mark. He is gazing at Toby in adoration.
I begin to peel the wraps from Toby when Ursula taps my shoulder.
‘You need to keep him warm.’ She places the blanket over him, then checks the watch hanging from her breast pocket on a silver chain. ‘Lunchtime.’ She raps me on the back. ‘Good luck.’
