Mine

by Susi Fox

  Dad pauses at the doorway, his body rigid, his shoulders set in a line.

  ‘Your mother would want you to get help, you know.’

  White heat burns in my chest. Mark, my husband, is meant to be supporting me. My mother, the one who abandoned me, should be here too. As for my father, with his awkwardness and cold distance: he exemplifies everything that is wrong with my family.

  ‘But Mum left us. How much would she really care? We don’t even know where she is, right?’

  The words hit their mark. Dad turns away so I can’t see his face. His neck stiffens.

  ‘Dad? What is it? What aren’t you telling me?’

  His shoulders rise and fall.

  ‘I was at work, you know. She called me to tell me she didn’t feel well.’

  There’s a long pause. When I speak again, my voice is a child’s, quavery and uncertain.

  ‘What are you talking about? You mean the day she left? Was she sick?’

  He emits a noise like a strangled sob.

  ‘I didn’t think to call an ambulance. I rushed home. I didn’t think at all.’

  My body turns icy, my fingertips numb, like during the experiments we did in medical school, immersing our feet in freezing water to test our tolerance to pain.

  ‘An ambulance?’

  His eyes scan the ceiling.

  ‘By the time I got home, she was lying still on the mattress. She was cold. So cold.’

  I don’t understand. I don’t want to understand. He clears his throat.

  ‘I tried to warm her up. God knows, I tried …’

  Dad has always said Mum left us. She wasn’t around; never would be. She’d gone away. That’s what I’d always understood. How could I have constructed a memory of her slipping out the door into the night?

  ‘What are you saying, Dad? Did something … happen to Mum …?’

  Dad drops his head. ‘I know I should have told you. I know that.’

  ‘She’s dead?’

  ‘I’m so sorry. I’m afraid she left us both. For good.’ He brings up his hands to cover his eyes.

  A cluster of questions resounds through my brain to a dull beat. But before I can hold them back, they all tumble out.

  ‘How did she die? Why did this happen? Who else knows?’

  Dad shakes his head. He opens his mouth to speak, then clamps it shut again.

  ‘We’ll have this conversation next time, I promise. I’ll come back when things are a little more settled.’ He drops his hands from his eyes to his mouth. ‘She loved you so much, you know.’

  Blackness gathers inside me as though I’m descending towards the ocean’s depths. I stare down at the back of my hands. How similar are they to my mother’s? I will never have the chance to know. Something is breaking inside me.

  From the corner of my vision, a sliver of movement. Dad, slipping from my room without saying goodbye. I call out, but he doesn’t turn back.

  In the wan morning light filtering through the curtains, I track dust motes drifting through the air. The hardest question of all, too hard to ask but impossible to ignore: where was I, Dad, while you rushed home from work? Where the hell was I?

  Day 4, Tuesday Lunch

  I’m still feeling dazed a couple of hours later. My mother’s death, the flashbacks of Damien and my birth, have spun out my centre of gravity. As I lift the plastic lid on my meal, it slips from my grasp and clatters to the tabletop. The dried-out lasagna shudders under my knife. I crush the peas beneath my fork, forming a green pile of mush, before I replace the lid with a clang. I’m not hungry; not at all. How the hell could Dad have been keeping this from me the whole time? How could he have thought it was the right thing to do? And why is he telling me now?

  Ondine gives me a wary glance as she enters the meals area. With her hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, her glasses perched on her nose, and a white cotton blouse, she looks schoolteacher-like, almost authoritative.

  ‘I won’t stay long,’ I say. ‘Feel free to eat here, if you’d like.’

  Ondine hesitates, then slides her tray onto the table beside me. She removes the lid, then begins to push her lasagna from one side of the plate to the other. Outside, in the courtyard, a flutter of wind catches a cluster of white blossom petals from the slate, thrusting them up against the window beside us.

  ‘Any luck finding your baby?’ Ondine asks in a stilted voice.

  I shake my head. Amid my father’s disclosure, I’d briefly forgotten my mission. I straighten my back. My mother is long gone. Part of me had always known I would never meet her again; in fact, until recently, I had never had a desire to. All my father’s revelation has done is confirm that belief. My own baby is my priority now.

  ‘How’s your son?’

  Ondine shrugs and drops her head. I rest my fork onto the plate.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Stupidly, I’ve forgotten she doesn’t have him in her care. An image of Gabriel, his bright-blue eyes and pale skin, floats into my vision: my purpose, my love. ‘You know, it doesn’t matter how long it takes if you get him back in the end.’

  She sniffs. ‘I don’t know if I even want to see him.’ She hangs her head. ‘I’m so worried what I might do.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Zach, my husband, won’t speak to me anymore. He says I’m a monster.’

  ‘Whatever you did, it can’t be that bad.’

  At the table, Ondine is silent.

  ‘We’ve all done things that could be considered monstrous,’ I say. What I did with Damien, for example; what I’m always trying to forget. ‘Ondine, you’re not a monster.’

  She stares at the apple tree in the courtyard, its branches floundering in the wind.

  ‘Everyone else thinks I am,’ she mutters.

  I take a chocolate freckle from the bag she proffers.

  ‘I was a childcare worker,’ she continues. ‘I looked after so many children. I don’t ever want to do that work again. Here, I’m safe. If I stay in the unit for good, I’m not a risk to anyone.’

  The chocolate crunches between my teeth. I shift my chair closer to her.

  ‘Do you think you might feel better when you get your son back?’

  She looks down at the unpalatable meal before her.

  ‘He was screaming so much. I thought he was unhappy. I thought I was doing the right thing.’ She stops, her mouth agape.

  I don’t need to know what she’s done. I’ve heard every possible variant of her story during my medical training. ‘You’re human,’ I say. ‘Babies are stressful. Whatever happened, I’m sure your husband will forgive you one day.’

  Ondine clamps her mouth shut.

  I could tell her, or I could stay silent. There’s an impulse to share my news with someone who might understand. Bec is supportive, but she’s not here beside me. Telling my father was pointless. There’s no way Ondine could have anything to do with the baby swap; she feels like a safe confidante. And she is one of the only people, apart from Bec, who hasn’t judged me for anything. Plucking another freckle from the bag, I suck at it, allowing the hundreds and thousands to fall away as the chocolate dissolves on the roof my mouth. Ondine, more than anyone, might understand.

  ‘I’ve found my son,’ I say softly, swallowing hard at the molten chocolate coating my mouth.

  She stares, eyes wide. ‘Wow.’

  ‘Do you believe me?’ Whether she does or not, it’s a relief to confide in her.

  She places her palms flat on her thighs.

  ‘I don’t know what to believe these days. But that’s great news. What’s he like?’

  ‘He’s so beautiful. And I’m going to get him back, one way or another.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ she says with a sad smile. ‘I wish there was some way I could help. Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ I say, placing my hand on her bony arm. ‘I think you’ve got enough going on right now. I know our babies will come back to us. One day, one way or another, we’ll both
have our babies in our arms.’

  Four Years Earlier

  MARK

  We’d been trying to get pregnant for five years when Sash suggested we attend marriage counselling. I resisted. There was nothing wrong with our marriage, I was certain of it; at least nothing that a beach holiday and some romps in a hotel – or a baby – wouldn’t fix. Sash wouldn’t budge. She had already made the appointment and she insisted I come with her.

  We only saw the first counsellor once. Serenity. She had floaty sleeves in a material Sash later identified as chiffon. There were a few crystals on her desk. Sash sat slumped in the wooden chair in the lavender-infused air. When Sash said we timed intercourse around ovulation, Serenity flicked back her sleeves.

  ‘So … have the two of you tried having sex just for the fun of it?’

  I sat up straighter and winked at Sash. She glared back.

  ‘Clearly she doesn’t understand infertility,’ Sash later said in the car on the way home. ‘Who has sex just for the fun of it when it needs to be timed? We have to try someone else.’

  By this stage, Sash had moved onto tablets to help her ovulate. I could tell she was stressed about the failing fertility treatment. I understood how hard it was for her. It was hard for me too, though. I have to admit, when she would glance up from her piss test and declare today was ‘one of the days’, it did tend to make sex feel mechanical. But I always tried my hardest to play along.

  Sash suggested a second marriage counsellor, a dour-faced, balding man in a pastel-coloured room. Wilfred dissected our childhoods in minutiae, drawing tenuous connections between childhood trauma and infertility.

  ‘Load of bullshit,’ Sash said as we emerged onto the street. ‘Was he seriously blaming our parents for us not getting pregnant?’

  ‘It wasn’t about blame, Sash. It was about understanding.’

  ‘Then why wasn’t he making any sense?’

  Wilfred was no good either, according to Sash. Too old. Too Freudian. Too analytical. Frankly, I thought that might be exactly what Sash needed.

  Finally the fertility specialists suggested we start intrauterine insemination: injecting my sperm through Sash’s cervix into her womb. I gave my consent in the end. It was as invasive as I could tolerate. I wasn’t prepared to put her life at risk from IVF. I’d read about the possible complications in the booklet from the clinic. General anaesthetic. A needle piercing the wall of her vagina over and over again, potentially causing haemorrhage and infection. Risk of her ovaries being hyperstimulated. Clots in her legs and lungs.

  I never told Sash why I refused to go ahead with IVF. She was so desperate for a baby by the end that she would have pretended the risks were minimal and dismissed my concerns. I agreed with her about one thing – a baby would have been nice. But having Sash as my wife trumped a baby by far. I’d already lost Simon. I wasn’t prepared to risk losing Sash, too. Eventually, after failed cycle upon cycle saw Sash collapsing into tears, I insisted we stop trying. It was natural or nothing, I said. I didn’t tell her I was afraid she might die, that going any further might kill her. Sash hadn’t lost a sibling. She would never have understood.

  That’s when we started seeing the third counsellor, Kate. She welcomed us into her office with a compassionate smile. The room was wood-panelled and laced with the scent of freshly brewed coffee – we could have been in a café.

  Sash laid the bones of our relationship before Kate, and described how much we both wanted a baby. And how, according to Sash, we’d stopped talking about the important stuff long ago.

  After listening to my side of the story, Kate reinforced my idea that our marriage, rather than a baby, was the priority. That, with time and effort, we could make our marriage whole. Sash slunk down further in her chair. It appeared she didn’t like hearing that. It was odd, I suppose – Sash was the one who had dragged me there.

  I had the script for our next counselling session with Kate written out in my head. Sash and I could start to map out our futures together, child-free. My café dream had been discouraged by my parents years ago. ‘You need to provide a stable income for your wife and future children,’ Dad had insisted, and Mum had agreed. Not that Sash needed me to provide for her, of course. But I’d seen Mum and Dad’s point, and let go of my café dream for the time being. I knew the food industry was tough, with no guarantees of success. I didn’t want Sash to think she had to rush back to work after a baby in order to support all of us. I didn’t love the restaurant where I was working – the menu was conservative, staid and bland – but at least I brought in a steady, reasonable income, enough to feel like I was contributing.

  I never discussed my decision to let go of the dream with Sash. She seemed so excited about me running a café, I let her believe it was about to happen any day. Frankly, it was a relief to see her smile about anything. But now, with a child-free future on the cards, I finally felt free to pursue my longstanding café goal. I also hoped our future plans would involve overseas travel, expansion of the veggie garden, four-wheel-drive trips around Australia. Things we’d been putting off for a long time while we’d been waiting for a baby to join our family.

  Beyond that, though, I wanted to use our counselling sessions to discuss Sash’s dark side. Her obsession with getting pregnant. Her black moods around the time of the inquest, which she still refused to discuss, even years later. The stuff her father had told me about what had happened to her mum, which he hadn’t even told Sash. I thought she had a right to know the whole truth.

  The day before our second appointment with Kate, Sash confronted me after work. She told me she had cancelled the counselling. I stared at her glowing face, her rosy cheeks, so like the Sash I had fallen in love with all those years ago.

  She was pregnant for the third time. My breath evaporated like steam. We never saw Kate again.

  My mum had hinted for years that Sash wasn’t the best choice for a wife. When Mum heard about Rose leaving, she became concerned that maybe Rose’s instabilities were heritable. Wouldn’t Sash be at risk of abandoning her family, too? I refused to listen. Sash had always seemed stable enough to me. And I believed I could support Sash through anything. In sickness and in health – that’s what I’d promised.

  When Sash declared our baby wasn’t ours, I’ll admit I found it hard to believe, but for a time I gave her the benefit of the doubt. It was only as Dr Niles confronted me outside Sash’s hospital room, to explain that she was certain Sash was suffering from postnatal psychosis, that my chest compressed like a wrung-out sponge. Finally, it hit me; Sasha wasn’t anywhere near okay. Of course I cared about her. Deeply. We’d been a team for so long. I wanted her to get better. But, with Dr Niles’ steely glare set on me, I realised in that moment that what I cared about more was Toby. And myself.

  Day 4, Tuesday Late Afternoon

  ‘Stop here, Mark.’

  A mass of headstones stands before us, backlit by the setting sun. Mark pulls the car to a stop at the back of the cemetery. I’ve been granted a few hours leave from the mother–baby unit and, with the DNA tests in need of posting, I’ve suggested a drive. Mark initially acquiesced, but now he’s staring at me, incredulous.

  ‘Why here, Sash?’

  ‘I need to stretch my legs. Get some fresh air.’

  ‘Behind a cemetery?’ He squints at me.

  The closest Express Post box to the hospital is just outside the cemetery gates, on the main road out of town. It isn’t visible from the car park on the opposite side. In this relatively small town, I can’t think of any other place where I can post a package without Mark seeing me. I know a shortcut through the graveyard. Mark won’t follow me; he can’t stand cemeteries. And he won’t have a clue what I’m up to. He might be suspicious, but I’m now down to last resorts.

  ‘Just give me five minutes. Please.’

  ‘Should I be worried about you, Sash?’

  ‘I need some time. Dad told me some stuff about Mum.’

  His neck jerks back. ‘What
did he tell you?’

  ‘I think he was telling me she’s dead.’

  ‘Oh, Sash …’ His head droops to the steering wheel.

  ‘I’m okay. I just … need a few moments in a place where I can get a sense of her.’

  I ease myself out of the car and close the door before he can say anything more.

  Stones crunch under my shoes as I curve along the cemetery path in a wide arc. Has Mark known about Mum this whole time? What else is he hiding from me?

  A shimmering word catches my eye, inscribed on a headstone: Rose. It’s my mother’s name carved into the white marble in a silvery, gothic font. I check – it’s not her grave. Until this morning I hadn’t even realised she had one. My fingers, clutching my handbag, start to tremble. My mother, dead? I suppose a small part of me has always wanted to see her. Confront her. Demand to know why she left. Now it sounds like I will never have that chance. I try to stuff the visions of her pale face to the back of my mind. I have more pressing issues at hand.

  I’m about to keep walking when I notice the word Tobias carved into the same marble headstone. I trace the names and dates. It’s a family from long ago.

  Rose Jane. Deceased aged 6 weeks. 3/1/1866.

  Theodore Thomas. Deceased aged 2 months. 8/12/1866.

  Beloved children of Mary Agatha and Tobias Matthew. Forever at peace.

  But how could they have known their babies were truly at peace? And what about these parents, long dead – how did they bear such a loss?

  The first dead baby I saw had translucent skin shedding from its muscles, fingers and toes still fused together, eyes not yet open. I knew, then, what I was fighting for, and what I was fighting against. How hard nature could be, how unforgiving. The baby’s parents were farmers, familiar with death. They were stoic enough to bear the loss. I couldn’t have been that strong.