Playing Nice

by Delaney, JP

  There was no mention anywhere of what it was like in British private hospitals.

  The thing that immediately jumped out at me, though, was that the decision to swap the children back or not was largely a matter of age. If they were over three when the switch was discovered, they usually ended up staying with their existing families. If they were twelve months or less, they were usually returned to their birth parents.

  But two? Two years and two weeks, to be precise? That seemed to be a terrifyingly gray area.

  Don Maguire’s words came back to me. There’s certainly no automatic requirement for the family courts to get involved. It’s best for the parents to work out a solution between themselves.

  If we couldn’t work something out, did that mean a court would have to decide? Would Theo’s fate ultimately rest with some dry legal bureaucrat? The very thought made my blood run cold.

  * * *

  —

  ALL OF THIS I explained, or rather babbled, to Maddie when she was barely through the door.

  “But is that what this man was suggesting?” she asked, getting straight to the most important point as usual. “Does he really think we should swap them back?”

  “He didn’t say. But neither did he say we shouldn’t.” In fact, now that I thought about it, Miles Lambert had said remarkably little. “He was pretty vague.”

  “Perhaps he knew it would be a lot to take in and didn’t want you to feel he was railroading you,” she pointed out. “What was he like?”

  “He seemed all right,” I admitted. “That is, as all right as it’s possible to be when you’re breaking news like that. Said he knew what a terrible shock it must be—it affected him the same way, when he found out.”

  “Well, that’s something. But how did he find out? I mean, what made him look at his child in the first place and think, That’s not my son?”

  I thought back. “He didn’t say that, either.”

  “And he really didn’t give you any clue as to which way they’re thinking?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t feeling any better as time passed since our encounter. “But he took a picture of Theo, to show his wife. And he left us one of David.”

  “Can I see?”

  I went and got the photograph. I saw Maddie’s face change as she looked at it—first with surprise, and then involuntarily softening around the eyes.

  “He looks just like you, doesn’t he?” I said gently.

  “A bit. And he’s the spitting image of Robin at that age.” I didn’t really know Maddie’s brothers, who were all in Australia. Robin, the youngest, was the one she missed most. She took a deep breath. “Wow. I guess this is real, isn’t it?”

  My laptop pinged. Automatically, I turned toward it. It was a notification from LinkedIn, which I still had open. Miles Lambert wants to join your network.

  I showed Maddie. “Should I accept?”

  “Why not? Whatever happens next, we’ll need to be in touch.”

  I clicked ACCEPT. Moments later, a message pinged into my inbox.

  Pete,

  Thank you for talking to me today, and once again my apologies for crashing into your life with what can only have been disturbing news. I’m sure you’ll want to talk things over with Madelyn before you make any decisions, but now you and I have the initial contact out of the way, Lucy and I were wondering if the two of you would like to come and talk it over at our house—and meet David at the same time? It would be entirely up to you whether or not you bring Theo, but of course we would love to meet him too.

  This is a difficult and horrible situation, one that none of us chose or ever expected to find ourselves in. But hopefully we can work out what’s right and best for all concerned—and, particularly, for our children.

  Kind regards,

  Miles

  “It’s a good email,” Maddie said, reading over my shoulder. I could hear the relief in her voice. “It really sounds like they don’t want to pressurize us into anything.”

  “Yes,” I said uneasily. Despite the email’s agreeable tone, I had a sense that events were already starting to move, and that I wasn’t in control of them. Once we’d met David, and the Lamberts had met Theo, everything was going to become much more complicated. The train was leaving the station, and I wasn’t the one driving it.

  9

  MADDIE

  IT’S ONLY AFTER I see the email from Miles, with the reference to Lucy, that the name Lambert starts to ring a bell. There’d been twenty-one intensive care incubators in the NICU. Twenty-one sets of parents with desperately small or sick babies. Some were only on the ward a few days; some—especially those with preemies—spent months there. Most were just a blur of drawn, haggard faces. I’d gotten to know the ones whose cots were nearest, or who I happened to stand next to when I was washing out my breast pump in the sink area—talking was a way to distract yourself from the tension, to ease the permanent stress lump in the back of your throat—but there were too many, too transient, to remember them all.

  Gradually, I got used to being there. I still felt like a failure, but among all those other failures that was less crushing, somehow, than it had been back at the private hospital with the sound of healthy babies’ cries wafting into my room. The babies in the NICU almost never cried, even the older ones without tubes down their throats. Instead, they’d register distress by stretching out a jittery arm or leg, or arching their back, or even just sneezing. You got ridiculously attuned to those signs in your baby, because any of them might herald the onset of an “episode”—the nurses’ euphemism for a near-death experience, when the alarms went off and Theo’s heart or breathing would have to be restarted.

  Watching my baby so obsessively changed how I felt about him. I felt—not love, exactly, definitely not that, but an overwhelming, painful feeling of responsibility. I’d already let him down once. I mustn’t let him down again.

  The skin-to-skin, or “kangaroo care” as the nurses sometimes called it, helped, too. The first time Bronagh—the Irish nurse, who turned out to not be as bad as I’d thought once I got used to her breezy manner—suggested it, I was dubious. It seemed madness to move this tiny, vulnerable being out of his lifesaving incubator and onto the same stomach that had failed him once already. But Bronagh wasn’t going to take no for an answer, so while Pete drew the screens, I pulled off my top and Bronagh carefully lowered Theo, complete with all his tangles of lines and wires, onto my chest, like a collapsed puppet.

  “You can see if he might latch on to your breast now, if you like,” she added when he was settled.

  Breastfeed? Really? I was terrified just holding him. He was so tiny—three pounds when he was born, and still under five pounds three weeks later. I knew how babies should feel—plump and squeezy and pinchable. By comparison Theo felt as light as a blown egg. But I obediently pushed up my bra and steered his tiny head toward my nipple. Tiny toothless gums, soft as a little fish’s, mouthed at me. Then, abruptly, they fastened on. A pop, a bubble, and suddenly euphoria was flowing out of me into him. He spluttered once, gasped, then went back to sucking.

  “He’s doing it,” Pete breathed. Then: “Mads, look at the stats.”

  I looked over at the monitor. Theo’s heart rate was falling. “Is he all right?” I said anxiously.

  “All right? He’s just settling down for a nice drink and a sleep,” Bronagh said. “Welcome to your new favorite place, Theo.”

  That was when it first sank in that the doctor at the other hospital might have been wrong. This baby might be destined to live.

  * * *

  —

  I FIRST NOTICED LUCY because she seemed so out of place. She was very well groomed, for one thing, with long blond hair that was either natural or so expertly dyed it must have been done professionally. The cut also looked like it had been done at an expensive salon, a lovely feather-ed
ged fringe that reminded me of a show horse’s mane. Her clothes were impeccable—in all the time we were in the NICU, I never saw her turn up in a fleece or tracksuit bottoms, as other mothers did. She wore white linen blouses, little jackets or cashmere cardigans, jeans that showed off her slender legs. She was probably around the same age as me, but somehow seemed older.

  One day, we were both in the sink area. She was rinsing breast milk syringes, while I was washing bottles and teats. She glanced across and said, “That looks like a really distant dream.” Her voice had that slight drawl posh English people have, so really came out like rarely. But her smile was friendly, and I could tell she was just breaking the ice, not actually complaining.

  “You’ll get there,” I replied, trying to be encouraging.

  Her smile slipped. “I’m not sure we will, actually. The doctors want to talk to us about discontinuing care.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said immediately. Everyone on the ward knew what discontinuing care meant. There’d been an instance just a few days before, a lovely Indian couple who brought in homemade Keralan food for the nurses and whose baby girl had been a micro-preemie—less than eight hundred grams. She’d fought off infection after infection, but each one had left her progressively weaker. She’d already been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, was partially blind, and had never come off a full ventilator. When the doctors did their rounds, they’d confer over her crib in low, quiet voices. Afterward, the mother would be in tears, and sometimes the father, too. And then a day came when the parents simply looked exhausted and defeated, and the whole apparatus—incubator, ventilator, vital signs monitor, and all the connecting tubes—was unplugged and wheeled out of the NICU. They were being taken to a private room, someone said, where they could hold their baby while she died. All of us, even the nurses, were quiet for the rest of that day.

  “Well, it’s one of those things, I suppose, isn’t it,” Lucy said. Which might, on the face of it, seem like a completely inadequate response to her child’s possible death, but I understood. Everyone in the NICU had to hold themselves together somehow. Some did it by sobbing and wailing, some wept quietly, others did it by bottling up. I was a bottler-upper myself, and so, it seemed, was Lucy.

  Talking with Lucy about our babies, we soon realized they’d been admitted on the same day—which meant, of course, that they shared a birthday, although David had been a little further on than Theo, at twenty-nine weeks. But where Theo had progressed, David had been the opposite. Doctors were using the acronym FTT about him, Lucy said—failure to thrive.

  I felt a mixture of emotions. That was one of the strange things about the NICU—friends were always texting to say It must be terrible or It’s incredible how strong you’re being, but in fact, because you were surrounded by so many people who were even worse off than you, most of the time you actually felt quite lucky. So I looked at this sleek, well-bred woman who was desperately trying to be stoic and British about the fact that her child might die, and felt both pity and relief—relief that my baby’s health had taken a different path.

  After that, Lucy and I smiled and nodded when we saw each other, and once she came over when Theo was having skin-on-skin feeding time. She watched for a while, looking down at him fondly. “He looks so contented, doesn’t he?” she commented. “Like a dog curled up in his favorite chair. I’m Lucy, by the way.”

  “I’m Maddie.” We’d told each other our babies’ names, but not our own—slipping into the ways of parenthood already. “And that’s my partner, Pete,” I added, nodding in his direction.

  “Oh, I’ve seen Pete. So good with the baby. All the nurses say so.”

  “We call him Saint Peter,” I said drily. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about the way everyone on the NICU now officially adored Pete, or the way he’d so instantly bonded with Theo. I was getting there—or at least, I was slowly becoming more confident about my ability to feed him—but I still didn’t worship him unconditionally, the way Pete clearly did. “What about you? Is your partner here?”

  Lucy shook her head. “He has one of those ridiculously high-pressure jobs where if he steps away from his emails for ten minutes, he’ll get fired. He’ll come after work, I expect.”

  Later, I saw a good-looking young man in a suit standing by David’s incubator. He was resting one hand on the clear cover, almost as if he were stroking it in place of the baby. The fingers of his other hand were curled around a BlackBerry.

  On another occasion, I happened to go past David’s cot on the way to the toilet. The nurses in the NICU gave out little printed cards to mark every milestone: Today I had cuddles with Daddy, Today I was fed by Mummy, Today I moved to an open cot. Theo’s incubator was by now festooned with these cards. I was struck by how bare David’s was by comparison.

  Then I saw that the arterial line in David’s ankle looked wrong. There was fluid seeping through the bandage, and his toes were white. He must have dislodged it when he moved.

  One of the reasons Pete was so effective in the NICU was that he was constantly asking questions—his journalistic training coming into play. So I knew that a dislodged arterial line could cause circulation problems, and was one of the few emergencies that might not trigger an alarm. I went to the nearest nurse, who was doing something for the baby in the next incubator. “Excuse me—I think David Lambert’s line might have come loose.”

  The nurse gave me a brief, uninterested glance. “I’ll take a look shortly.”

  “I think you should look now,” I insisted. “His toes have gone a different color.”

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” she said testily. Her manner was far removed from Bronagh’s cheery competence. Her name tag said PAULA.

  I went back and took another look. David’s toes were now dark purple. “I’m pulling the alarm,” I said. I reached for the red cord by David’s incubator, and the piercing sound of the crash alarm filled the ward. Paula swore as she stopped what she was doing and hurried over.

  As if from nowhere, doctors appeared. “What’s going on?” one demanded.

  “This woman pulled the cord,” Paula said sulkily.

  “His line is loose,” I pointed out.

  The doctor looked down. “So it is. We’ll soon have that sorted. And thank you,” he added, as they got to work.

  10

  PETE

  I LOOKED AT MY watch. It was already eleven thirty, and I had to collect Theo at noon. Normal life had to continue, if only for his sake. I took a deep breath. “So I’ll reply to Miles saying we’ll go?”

  Maddie nodded. “I guess. But we should get our own position clear beforehand. In our heads, I mean. We need to know what we’re trying to achieve.”

  “Which is what?” I said helplessly.

  Maddie looked at me. “Pete…The fact is, of the two of us, you’re closer to Theo. No—” She stopped my protests with a shake of her head. “Let’s be honest. We both love him to bits, but it’s you who spends your whole day with him. So tell me what your instincts are saying to you right now.”

  “If there is a decision to be made, it’s a joint decision. It’s got to be.”

  “Of course. But you go first. Tell me what you really think.”

  “Well…” I tried to marshal my thoughts. Just like Don Maguire’s use of the word solution earlier, the word decision seemed to open up a great void beneath my feet. “It’s a shock, of course, so I may not be thinking very straight. But I suppose—if we’re really being honest—my gut instinct is that I don’t think paternity and genetics are all that important. Not compared with love. If Theo was adopted, would we love him any less? Of course not. Minding whether someone is your flesh and blood—what they are, as opposed to who they are—it’s so Victorian, isn’t it? Or even older. Neanderthal. And then there’s Theo. What would it do to him to suddenly be told, Oh, we picked up the wrong kid at the hospital by mistake, out you
go? However nice Miles and Lucy turn out to be, it would shatter him.” At the thought of telling Theo he wasn’t our birth son, let alone that we were abandoning him for another child who was, my throat started to thicken and I had to pause. “I’m not doing it, Mads. I’m not breaking up this family.” I stared at her defiantly. “So that’s my view, and I’m pretty bloody wedded to it, actually.”

  In reply, she stepped forward and kissed me.

  “And that is why I love you, Pete Riley,” she said quietly. “Because of that.” She prodded the approximate location of my heart.

  “So you agree?”

  “Of course I agree. That is, I suppose I’ve got a whole bunch of emotions. When you showed me that photograph of David, just for a moment, I—” She shook her head. “But no, you’re right. Absolutely. The overwhelming question here is, what’s best for Theo? And the answer is—obviously—for him to go on being brought up by the best dad in the world.”

  “And the best mum. Do you think the Lamberts will see it that way, though?”

  “I don’t see why not. After all, they’ve had longer to think it through, and now that you’ve said it, it’s pretty obvious. Actually, I think that may be what Miles is hinting at in his email—that bit about putting the children’s interests first? He says he’s not trying to jump us into anything, but he’s clear that whatever we do, we should do by agreement, and for the children. That can only lead you to one conclusion really, can’t it? That we stay as we are. For their sake.”

  I nodded. “Maybe we don’t have to make it as binary as swap or no swap anyway. We’re civilized people in a civilized society, for God’s sake. Maybe we can be part of each other’s lives some other way.” I snapped my fingers as an idea hit me. “We’re always saying it’s a shame most of Theo’s cousins are in Australia. Why can’t Theo and David be honorary cousins?”