Claiming Noah

by Amanda Ortlepp

  The doctor wrote something illegible on her prescription pad, then tore off the sheet and handed it to Catriona. ‘Get this filled. It’s a prescription for antidepressants.’

  She must have made a face because the doctor said, ‘Don’t get caught up in the stigma of antidepressants, they’re just a way to balance your levels until you don’t need them any more. You’d be surprised how many people take them.’

  Catriona studied the prescription for a moment and then folded it into thirds and put it in a side pocket of her handbag.

  ‘Have you joined a mothers’ group?’ the doctor asked.

  Catriona grimaced, thinking about stories her friends had told her of their mothers’ groups, where the conversation rarely strayed from birth stories and bodily functions. They had described to her the barely concealed hostility some women displayed when comparing which stage of development their babies had reached. Competitive mothers weren’t something she wanted to deal with right now.

  ‘I’d rather swallow razor blades,’ she said.

  The doctor laughed as if it wasn’t the first time someone had said that to her. ‘They’re not that bad. I highly recommend you join one. You need some support. It might help you to be around other mothers.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘You should. You’ll find that the other mothers are going through exactly the same things you are. It’ll help you to be able to talk to people other than your husband.’

  Catriona started to get up from the chair, relieved that the appointment was over, but then she remembered something the doctor had said and sat back down. ‘What’s the third type? You said there was the baby blues and postnatal depression. What’s the third one?’

  ‘A condition called postpartum psychosis, or puerperal psychosis. It’s rare, it only affects about one or two in every thousand mothers.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a severe form of depression, usually involving hallucinations and a desire by the mother to harm either themselves or the baby. The treatment methods are more extreme.’

  Catriona felt her hands shake. She wedged them under her thighs so the doctor wouldn’t notice. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Hospitalisation, usually. And antipsychotic medication.’ The doctor studied Catriona’s face for a few seconds. ‘Are you sure you haven’t had thoughts about harming yourself or your baby?’

  Yes, she had. But how could she admit that to the doctor? How could she tell her that every time she walked past the stairs carrying Sebastian she imagined throwing him to the bottom? Or, if not Sebastian, herself. What would the doctor think of her if she admitted to something that horrible?

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good, that’s a good sign. Try the antidepressants and join a mothers’ group. I’m sure you’ll notice an improvement soon.’

  Catriona wanted to rush from the room and leave Sebastian behind, but instead she smiled at the doctor, thanked her, and manoeuvred the pram through the door and down the hallway. As she drove home she planned the conversation she would have with James so he believed her when she said she had things under control.

  7

  CATRIONA

  Wednesday, 18 April 2012

  The hospital where Catriona had given birth to Sebastian gave her the contact details of a local mothers’ group, and when she called, a woman named Rochelle told her they were all meeting at a nearby park later that month. She sounded pleasant on the phone, so Catriona decided to go along, even if it was just to prove to James and her doctor that mothers’ groups were nothing more than an uncomfortable gathering of women who had little in common beyond the fact they had recently had a baby.

  At least it gave Catriona a reason to leave the house. She hadn’t gone outside in days. She was convinced the antidepressants the doctor had prescribed were causing hallucinations. The person she thought she had seen walking towards the nursery the day James found her wasn’t a one-off. It was now a daily occurrence, sometimes even two or three times a day. At first she went hurrying after the person, determined to find someone, but she never did. She knew James didn’t see them. They usually appeared when he was at work, but once a figure had lingered on the stairs while James was tying up his sneakers by the front door, preparing to go for a run.

  ‘Look over there!’ Catriona called out, holding Sebastian in one arm and gesturing towards the stairs with the other. The person on the stairs waited patiently, an elbow resting on the banister, their face a blur of features so that Catriona couldn’t tell whether they were male or female.

  James’s gaze followed the direction of Catriona’s pointed finger. ‘What? What am I looking at?’

  Catriona watched him take in the stairs, the landing, the hallway that led to the bottom step. His expression didn’t change.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, turning her back. ‘I thought I saw a mouse.’

  After a while, it stopped feeling strange to share a house with people James couldn’t see. She grew used to their presence but became increasingly agitated about not understanding why they were there. Sometimes they spoke to her, but despite how much she strained to hear them, their voices were always too quiet for her to understand what they were saying. Then a few days before the mothers’ group meeting, the voices started to grow louder, and clearer. They whispered to her that she was a bad mother, that James was scheming to take Sebastian away from her. She turned the television volume up high and stuffed plugs into her ears to silence their voices, but she couldn’t block them out. They were trapped inside her mind.

  On the Thursday the mothers’ group was due to meet Catriona spent more than an hour doing her hair and make-up, something she hadn’t done since Sebastian was born. She didn’t want the other mothers to think she wasn’t capable of looking after both herself and her baby.

  The park was empty except for a group of women and prams taking up a long wooden table. Catriona’s heart started to race but she forced herself to smile and walk towards the group.

  ‘You must be Catriona.’ This came from an attractive woman wearing a pink jumper that matched the one worn by the baby lying in a pram next to her.

  ‘Yes. Hi.’

  ‘I’m Rochelle, we spoke on the phone.’ Rochelle craned her neck so she could see into Catriona’s pram. ‘And who is this little one?’

  ‘His name’s Sebastian.’

  ‘He’s a cutie. Look at all that hair!’

  Catriona sat at the end of the table and positioned Sebastian’s pram next to her, grateful that he was asleep so she wouldn’t have to feed him a bottle in front of everyone. She listened without contributing to the conversation as the women spoke about their pregnancies, babies and husbands. Rochelle told the women about the trouble she had experienced getting her daughter to breast-feed, and how much it had upset her. Catriona started to think that maybe her doctor was right; maybe being around other mothers was what she needed. But then the conversation turned to the women’s birth stories.

  ‘Twenty-three hours and then a natural birth,’ said Rebecca, a heavy-set woman with dark hair pulled back in a severe part. ‘No drugs.’

  All the women except Catriona gasped or offered her their congratulations, as if she had just swum the English Channel.

  ‘Planned C-section,’ said another woman, Nadia. ‘Not by choice, of course. I’m not too posh to push or anything like that. The doctor said Ronan’s huge head wasn’t going to fit through my pelvis without tearing me open.’ Catriona stared at Nadia, stunned that she could talk about it so casually. She glanced around the table, but the other women didn’t seem put off.

  Rochelle nodded at Nadia and murmured her approval. ‘You made the right choice. I had to have an episiotomy with Ruby. The scar’s taking ages to heal. It still hurts when I sit down.’

  ‘What about you, Catriona?’ the fourth woman, a redhead named Naomi, asked as she attached her baby to her nipple without even looking at what she was doing. To Catriona’s amazement, the baby started sucking immediatel
y.

  ‘What about what?’ Catriona asked, not able to take her gaze away from Naomi’s breast.

  ‘Tell us about how you had Sebastian.’

  ‘Why?’

  The four women exchanged a glance before Nadia spoke. ‘Well . . . we’re just curious, that’s all.’

  ‘I had a caesarean,’ Catriona said.

  ‘A planned one?’ asked Rebecca.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, it was an emergency caesar?’ Rochelle asked.

  ‘I guess so.’

  Nadia stroked the downy hair of the baby cradled in the crook of her arm. Ronan, supposedly. The one with the head too big for her pelvis. ‘Did you go into labour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That must have been terrible, you poor thing,’ Nadia said. ‘Going through labour and then ending up with a C-section after all. Were you in labour long?’

  ‘I don’t know. Long enough. Is there anywhere to get a coffee around here?’

  Catriona left Sebastian in his pram by the table and walked over to a small kiosk at the corner of the park. The milk in her coffee tasted burned, but Catriona drank it anyway. She wished there was a way she could grab Sebastian and take him home without having to speak to the women again, but she knew that was impossible.

  Naomi smiled at her as she sat back down. ‘How’s the coffee?’

  ‘It’s decaf,’ Catriona said immediately. It wasn’t.

  ‘Of course, I wasn’t . . . I didn’t mean anything.’

  Catriona felt like they were all staring at her, judging her. None of them was drinking coffee. As soon as she left the table they would probably call child services, who would come to take Sebastian away from her. Maybe they had already called. She had seen Nadia on the phone while she was ordering her coffee. She glanced around the park, looking for the people who had come to take Sebastian away, but she couldn’t see anyone.

  ‘So, you’re breast-feeding, then?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Catriona said, turning back to look at her.

  ‘How are you finding it? It’s getting a bit easier for me now, but it was so painful in the beginning. My nipples cracked and bled horribly.’

  That was it. There was no way she was going to engage in nipple talk with this bunch of women.

  ‘It’s going great. Wonderful. Most joyous experience of my life. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Sebastian and I have to be somewhere.’

  • • •

  Catriona found herself driving forty minutes north to a secluded lookout near Newport beach. Hers was the only car parked by the fenced-off lookout at the edge of a sheer cliff. She fed Sebastian his bottle in the back of the car while he was strapped into his seat. The milk was cold because she had nowhere to heat it up, but Sebastian didn’t seem to mind.

  After he finished his bottle Catriona closed the car door, leaving him inside, and walked to the edge of the lookout. She looked down to the ocean; the drop must have been at least a hundred metres. She imagined her body falling through the air, maybe turning in a full rotation or two, before she crashed on to the boulders in the ocean at the base of the cliff. The fence was only waist-height, it would be so easy. And it would all be over in a matter of seconds. She shivered despite the sun warming her arms through the sleeves of her jumper and glanced back at Sebastian, still nestled in his car seat. He would be so much better off without her. They all would. James would be able to take care of Sebastian by himself. Maybe he’d even remarry, and Catriona was sure that woman, whoever she was, would be a much better mother to Sebastian than she could ever be. She was such a burden on them all. James, her parents, her friends. None of them deserved the misery she imposed on them.

  She clenched the wooden fence with both hands and leaned forward. The waves crashed in a spectacular fashion against each other and the cliff, like the crescendo of an orchestra at the end of a performance. She closed her eyes and inhaled the briny smell of the ocean. Without opening her eyes she stepped up on to the bottom rung of the fence and swung one leg over the top of the fence, followed by the other. She stayed in that position for a minute, sitting on the fence with her eyes closed and her hands tightly gripping the wood beneath her before she shifted her weight and let herself drop to the ground on the ocean-side of the fence. Her feet grappled for a second to find a firm footing in the loose gravel. Catriona opened her eyes and surveyed the ocean from her new vantage point. Now there was nothing standing between her and a way out. All she had to do was let go of the fence and take two steps forward. Then it would all be over.

  The sound of Sebastian’s sharp, pained cry carried over the noise of the waves crashing below her. Catriona looked back at the car. Sebastian’s face had turned red and his fists were flailing about. She watched him for a minute, trying to decide what to do. Finally she sighed, cast one last longing glance at the ocean, and climbed back over the fence.

  Halfway to the car, she heard a voice speaking to her as clearly as if there was someone standing next to her. She looked around for the source of the voice, but she and Sebastian were alone at the lookout. As the voice spoke to Catriona, explaining what had to be done, she felt a sense of calm settle over her. After eleven weeks of uncertainty, she now knew the right thing to do.

  • • •

  ‘Where have you been?’ James asked as Catriona walked in the front door later that evening, carrying Sebastian in his baby capsule. ‘I’ve been worried about you. Why haven’t you answered my calls?’

  Catriona reached into the capsule and moved the blanket away from Sebastian’s face. He had fallen asleep in the car after they left the lookout. She had meandered through back streets, going nowhere in particular, until he woke up and she reluctantly turned the car towards home. She had no idea what time it was.

  ‘We went for a drive,’ she said to James.

  ‘Well, it’s time for his bath. Do you want me to do it?’

  ‘No, I’ll do it.’

  ‘We’ll do it together.’

  ‘I’m perfectly capable of giving our son a bath. Why don’t you make dinner?’

  ‘All right. What do you want?’

  ‘You haven’t made that lasagne of yours for a while,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we have that?’

  ‘It takes ages to make.’

  ‘I know. But we’re not in any hurry, are we? I don’t mind if we don’t eat for a while.’

  After James disappeared into the kitchen, Catriona unstrapped Sebastian from his capsule and carried him up the stairs to the bathroom. They washed Sebastian in a plastic cradle that sat in the bath and held him in a reclined position with his head above the water. James had done the research and told Catriona it was the safest way to bathe a baby who couldn’t yet hold up its head.

  Catriona undressed Sebastian, took off his nappy, and laid him on the mat while she filled the bath. She smiled at him, tickling a spot on his neck that always made him squirm, and laughed as he flailed his legs in response. She tested the water temperature, making sure it wasn’t too hot, and turned off the taps when the water level reached halfway up the bath cradle.

  Normally at this point she would have laid out Sebastian’s jumpsuit and a clean nappy on the bathroom floor, to dress him straight after his bath so he wouldn’t get cold. But she wouldn’t need to do that tonight.

  She placed Sebastian in the bath, keeping his head and neck supported until he was lying in the cradle. Sebastian loved having a bath and would usually kick his legs in the water, sending splashes all over Catriona and covering the bathroom floor in a slick of water. But tonight he lay still, not taking his eyes from his mother. She knew he was waiting for her to do what she needed to do.

  It all made sense now: the voices, the messages, the people she had seen that nobody else could. She wasn’t going crazy; they had been trying to tell her what she needed to do to protect her family. Sebastian wasn’t supposed to be born. She wasn’t meant to have children. For a while she thought she had changed her mind, but now she realised that was only an i
llusion. She knew people thought she was a bad mother, and she knew they were right. Sebastian didn’t deserve to have a mother like her. But she knew she could turn it around, that there was one thing she could do to make herself a good mother. It was the best thing for Sebastian, for her, for James. For all of them.

  Sebastian agreed with her. She had explained it to him while she was driving home and he had listened patiently. It was obvious to her that he had understood every word. And his smile when she finished her explanation had confirmed that he understood the sacrifice they both had to make.

  First she took a cloth, added a pump of soap, and washed every inch of Sebastian’s skin, taking particular care to get into the creases of his chubby thighs. With the tip of her finger she gently removed the mucus that had collected in the corner of his eyes, and she rubbed baby shampoo through his hair before rinsing it clean. Then she rinsed out the washcloth in the bath water, wrung it dry and laid it over the rim of the bath. He was clean now. He was ready.

  She leaned into the bath and kissed Sebastian’s forehead, allowing her lips to linger against his skin as she inhaled his soapy scent.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered.

  Then with one hand she applied pressure to the back of the bath cradle and slowly tipped it backwards so Sebastian slid head-first under the water.

  Catriona watched as a stream of bubbles escaped from Sebastian’s mouth and travelled to the surface of the water. He kicked his legs once, twice, sending a spray of water into the air and wetting Catriona’s jumper, but then his legs relaxed against the bottom of the bath. His gaze remained fixed on Catriona’s and she smiled at the image of her son floating peacefully underwater like a hairless seal pup.

  The sound of footsteps in the hallway shocked Catriona and broke her out of her trance. She looked towards the closed bathroom door.