The Mothers

by Genevieve Gannon

  ‘I’ve got to go, Mum. I’ll call you if there are any updates.’

  She chewed the last of her bun and pulled the hood of her windcheater over her head. The unnatural light hurt her head, but she couldn’t escape the toxic guilt in the pit of her stomach.

  Thirty-five

  It was eerily warm for August. Grace stepped onto the porch, hoping for relief from the cloying air trapped inside the house, but the atmosphere outside was muggy. Rain was forecast. The clouds sat low, lurking heavily on the horizon, tinged yellow. Grace fished an elastic from her pocket and tied up her unwashed, gothic hair, feeling oppressed by the sulphurous sky pressing down on her home. The world was closing in on her.

  She heard the chug of the postman’s scooter. He was wearing aviators, like a cop, and gave her a nod as he reached into his sack. She stepped forward and took the thick envelope he held out for her. The top left corner bore the seal of the NSW Supreme Court.

  She glanced furtively up and down the street, checking for nosy onlookers, then hurried back inside.

  ‘Dan,’ she called, as she pulled a wad of paper from the envelope. ‘Come quickly.’

  ‘What is it?’ He appeared in the hallway with Sam in his arms.

  ‘More legal documents.’

  He looked at their son. ‘Those lawyers must be getting impatient.’

  ‘This isn’t from Empona’s lawyers.’ Grace showed him the legal crest.

  He stared at it a moment. ‘Oh God.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a statement of claim.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ She flipped open to the first page, which was filled with dense legalese.

  Dan didn’t answer. He was transfixed. The name was staring at him. Priya Laghari. It was her.

  The letters swam before Grace’s eyes. She could only see one word. Custody. The egg supplier wanted custody of their son. Phrases jumped out at Grace. The woman wanted Sam to live with her. She was seeking exclusive parental rights. It said Grace and Dan were ‘genetic strangers’ to Sam, though of course it didn’t say Sam, it called him ‘the child’. The document called for restitution. She wanted him for her own.

  Dan squeezed Grace’s shoulder.

  ‘This can’t be real,’ she said. But she knew it was.

  Grace’s breathing slowed. Her heart felt too big for her chest. It was happening. They were coming for Sam.

  ‘Elliott said to come in right away,’ Dan said, the phone still in his hand.

  ‘Mum will be here in a few minutes,’ Grace replied, as she packed their legal documents into Dan’s satchel.

  ‘Should we tell her?’ Dan asked.

  ‘Why upset her?’

  ‘Maybe it will be good for you to talk to her about it.’

  Grace shook her head. ‘Let’s keep it to ourselves for as long as possible.’

  He nodded and smoothed his hand down Sam’s back. ‘I’ll take this one upstairs and see if he’ll go down.’

  Fiona arrived bundled up in a scarf and matching gloves. ‘Those clouds are eerie,’ she said.

  ‘Mum, it’s not even that cold.’ Grace helped Fiona unwind the yards of coloured wool from her neck.

  ‘The last thing I want is to get a cold and pass it on to the baby,’ Fiona said. ‘Has something happened? You look upset. Why did you need me to come in such a hurry?’

  ‘It’s nothing.’ Grace turned away, pretending to busy herself with Dan’s satchel.

  ‘It doesn’t look like nothing.’

  ‘Really, it’s not worth getting upset over.’

  When Grace was little, there was no catastrophe her mother couldn’t fix, but she feared Fiona would be undone by the threat that had come into their lives. As if reading her mind, Fiona said: ‘Grace. I am your mother. You don’t need to protect me. That’s my job.’

  Grace sighed. ‘Sit down, Mum. I don’t really know how to say this.’ Her lip started to tremble.

  Fiona put her hand on Grace’s cheek. ‘Grace.’ She held her daughter’s face. ‘Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.’ Grace closed her eyes, not wanting to inflict her pain on her mother. ‘Tell me, Gracie,’ Fiona said. ‘Let me help.’

  Grace drew a breath. ‘A woman is trying to take Sam from us.’

  There was a long pause before Fiona said: ‘What do you mean take Sam?’

  ‘She wants custody of him.’

  Fiona furrowed her brow. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘She says he’s legally her son.’ The words sounded so melodramatic, so ridiculous, that for a moment Grace felt comforted—this couldn’t really be happening.

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense. How could he possibly be her son?’

  Grace felt on the brink of a hysterical chuckle. ‘Because DNA says she is. She’s his mother, biologically. At least that’s what she’s claiming. But we think she could be right. Mum, Sam isn’t related to us.’

  Fiona had grown pale. She put her hands to her temples. ‘I did wonder—’

  ‘We’ve been talking to a lawyer.’

  ‘But this is preposterous. He’s your son.’

  ‘Mum, look at him.’

  ‘Who cares about the colour of his skin. You gave birth to him. That’s the definition of a mother.’

  ‘That definition is from a time before doctors could take your eggs out and then put them back anywhere they liked. We did a test. He’s not my son. Not genetically.’

  ‘And this woman wants to raise him as her own?’

  ‘What if he is her own, in a biological sense?’ Grace needed her mother to understand the seriousness of the situation. ‘She’s demanding a DNA test.’

  Fiona looked confused and scared, but then clarity returned to her eyes and she seized Grace’s hand. ‘Take him. Take him far away from here, where they can’t reach you. Go live in Iowa. Or Bath. Or Egypt. Set up a life and live there with your son.’

  ‘Like fugitives?’

  ‘Not like fugitives—’

  ‘They’ll come after us.’

  ‘You haven’t committed a crime. It’s your name on the birth certificate.’

  ‘Running will only make it worse.’

  ‘Worse than losing him?’

  ‘We’d spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders.’

  ‘Who’s to say who is and isn’t Sam’s mother? The other woman has never even laid eyes on him.’

  Grace often daydreamed of taking Sam somewhere vast and green, like Iceland. They could settle somewhere forbidding, get some goats and cook on an open hearth. Or a remote cottage in England with a thatched roof and whitewashed walls, like something Roald Dahl would conjure up. They would adopt new names and new identities that they would slip over their old ones like masks.

  ‘We can’t do that, Mum,’ she said numbly.

  ‘This is your son.’

  Grace looked away. ‘I think about it all the time. It wouldn’t work. We could trek halfway across the world, to the most remote corner possible, only to have an email arrive in our inbox. A summons. Or, a court order made in our absence. It’s not possible to disappear anymore. Everything’s automated, networked and linked. Besides, what about you? You’d never see him.’

  ‘Well … there are greater things at stake.’ Fiona’s voice wobbled.

  In idle moments Grace found herself cataloguing what they would need if they were to run away. Bank withdrawals and credit cards were traceable, so they would have to survive on cash. In Sydney they navigated life with a host of ergonomic baby apparatuses, all of which they would have to jettison. As long as she could breastfeed they wouldn’t need much food, but that wouldn’t last forever. She could strap Sam to her chest like a marsupial, carrying only what she needed. But they wouldn’t be able to get by without nappies and wipes, rash cream, breast pads, formula, reliable medical help. She thought of all the money they had spent on a wireless thermometer to monitor his temperature while he slept, and she wanted to laugh at how naïve they had been.

  Grace could tea
ch English. Dan could freelance under a pseudonym. When she thought of the people she and Dan met when they travelled to places such as Bali and Goa, cut adrift from their own history, she realised they would fit right in. They all seemed to be people seeking a clean slate.

  Grace shook herself from her reverie when she saw Fiona watching her with a funny look on her face.

  ‘You could do it,’ she said.

  Dan entered with Sam, freshly changed. He passed him to Fiona.

  ‘There was no chance he was sleeping while Grandma Fiona was in the house,’ he said.

  Fiona took him, her smile shot with sadness as she cuddled her grandson.

  ‘We’d better go,’ Grace said, leaning down and kissing Sam. ‘We won’t be long.’

  ‘Grace,’ Fiona said, ‘I want you to think about what I said.’

  Grace nodded.

  She already had thought about it. Oh yes. She had thought about it a lot.

  Elliott frowned as he scanned the statement of claim. Grace and Dan had read through it a dozen times. The baby was the result of an embryo, it said, made from an ovum belonging to Priya Laghari and a donor whom she selected and paid. The ovum had been inseminated by the Empona clinic at her request and her expense.

  ‘This is our son, not some dispute over a fence on a property boundary,’ Dan said. ‘If all she cares about is money I’ll pay her ten grand a year for the rest of her life to leave us alone.’

  Elliott read on: ‘If the embryo had been implanted in his biological mother, as planned, the child Sadavir Sabad Laghari would grow up in his natural family, with a mother, aunt and cousins to whom he has biological, familial and cultural ties.’

  ‘Sadavir,’ Grace spat. ‘She doesn’t even know him.’

  ‘The DNA results may prove otherwise,’ Elliott replied.

  ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ said Dan.

  The lawyer grimaced. ‘It’s not great. If this ends up as a full-blown custody battle it could get really ugly.’

  ‘But I gave birth to him,’ Grace said. ‘This is insane! You know this is insane, right?’

  ‘There’s no legal precedent for something like this in Australia,’ Elliott replied.

  ‘Fuck,’ Dan said, under his breath.

  Grace grabbed his arm. ‘We need to take that offer from Empona so we’ve got the money to fight for custody of Sam.’

  ‘No. Turn down the Empona money. Sue them,’ Elliott said.

  ‘But how can we afford to fight a big clinic?’ said Dan. ‘They could drag it out for years. If we just take the settlement, we can be confident we’ll be able to fight the custody battle.’

  ‘If they settle with you, they’ll settle with her, and both of you will end up giving all the money to lawyers. Forget about the cost, we can work out a payment plan. Empona is liable.’

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ said Dan, pressing his fingers into his eye sockets. ‘What other options do we have?’

  ‘We don’t really have any other options than to mount a defence against her claim.’

  ‘Can’t we circumvent it somehow? Shut it down? Discredit it?’ Grace said. ‘Would the court even hear her case? What proof could she possibly have?’

  ‘A custody battle can’t be the only option,’ said Dan.

  ‘You’re not going to like this,’ Elliott said, ‘but you could agree to relinquish custody on the condition that you are granted visitation rights. That way you could still at least see Sam.’

  ‘What? No!’ Grace leapt of her chair. ‘Are you suggesting we just hand him over without a fight?’

  Elliott held up his hands defensively. ‘It’s just one option. I want you to hear all your options.’

  ‘Well, consider that one struck from the list,’ she said. ‘We’ll just have to go into that courtroom and plead our case. Hopefully the judge will see sense.’

  They stopped at the supermarket on the way home to pick up some ready meals and supplies for Sam. Grace was putting the regular box of nappies into her trolley when she saw a travel pack. Easy to store and carry, the label boasted, inspiring in Grace an image of herself walking up a steep hill with Sam strapped to her front and a pack on her back. She pictured herself changing Sam in a roadside hotel along a stretch of unpaved highway in Katherine, the dirt turning the white rubber soles of her shoes red. She imagined the sun on her pale skin as she breastfed him in the beer garden of a deserted pub while she picked chips from a plate.

  Fiona’s words echoed in her mind—Take him far away from here, where they can’t reach you—and her mind began to race. She could put Sam in the car and just drive. They could head to Darwin. Take a circuitous route, up through the middle of the red flat land, maybe hole up on a cattle station for a few months. Feed him fresh milk. Pay cash for everything. How much money could they liquidate if they needed to, she wondered. What could they sell? Once they got to the Cape they could hire a boat, pretend they were going on a cruise, disappear. Border Patrol were too busy trying to keep people out of the country; surely they wouldn’t waste their time trying to keep Australians in.

  They could sail into international waters. Chart a course to Asia. Keep going north. Carry Sam on their backs. Disappear into the Himalayas. An antipodean Von Trapp family in miniature.

  But, she thought, standing in the fluoro light of the supermarket aisle, what of everything she wanted for him? School, safety, friends, a yard to run around in, a puppy to love, Christmas with Grandma Fiona stirring brandy sauce made from her own grandmother’s recipe. If they ran, where could he be normal? How would they provide for him?

  The only option was to stay and fight, she thought, as she stared at the nappies. And despite this decision, she found herself picking up the travel pack and dropping it into the trolley, barely registering the thought in the back of her mind: it never hurts to be prepared.

  Thirty-six

  The large grandfather clock in Estelle’s office ticked loudly. The room had an Oxbridge air of oak and dusty leather, like a dean’s private quarters. If the goal was to intimidate, it was working on the Laghari sisters. The lawyer gave a phlegmy cough, reached for her Marlboros, flicked the wheel on her lighter and fired up a cigarette.

  ‘The Ardens are yet to respond,’ she said, taking a deep, dramatic drag.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Viv asked.

  Estelle blew a gust of smoke across the desk. ‘I’m more concerned about our case. We need evidence you are Sam’s biological mother. What else do you have apart from that little piece of paper from the clinic?’

  ‘What else do you need?’ Priya asked. ‘This couple had a transfer right after me. I didn’t have a baby. They did.’

  ‘That’s not enough to sue for custody. Not successfully.’

  ‘Can’t the courts order a DNA test?’ Viv asked.

  ‘He looks exactly like I did when I was little,’ said Priya.

  Estelle pointed her cigarette at Priya. ‘I’ve never heard of a court ordering a DNA test on a couple’s baby by request of a third party. You’d need something convincing to show there was a good reason for going through with it.’

  ‘If you could only see him …’ Priya began. ‘I wrote to them explaining what had happened. They ignored me. Don’t you think if they had nothing to hide they’d tell me?’

  More smoke fumed from Estelle’s nostrils. ‘You writing a letter to them adds nothing to your case.’

  Viv pulled Priya’s phone out of her handbag and found the photo from Grace Arden’s Facebook page. Grace had posted it two months earlier, and since removed it, but Priya had had the good sense to save a screenshot of it before it disappeared.

  ‘It’s not a good shot,’ she said, showing it to Estelle. ‘But look, he looks just like Priya.’

  Estelle put her glasses on and squinted at the screen. ‘This doesn’t prove anything. It’s just a blurry tuft of hair and a hand.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Priya said. ‘It’s the only photo of the baby. Doesn’t that strike you as strange? They’re hi
ding him.’

  ‘And you say a doctor from the clinic told you about this?’

  Priya nodded. ‘I didn’t even know about the baby until she came to me.’

  ‘Okay. The first thing we have to do is track down that doctor. You’ve got to get her to agree to give evidence that there was a mix-up.’

  Priya nodded. ‘I don’t know where she is. But I’ll find her.’

  ‘Getting doctors to testify against other doctors is notoriously difficult,’ Estelle said.

  ‘Can’t we force her?’ asked Viv. ‘I mean, not force her, but, you know, get a warrant or a subpoena. This is a serious matter.’

  ‘On what grounds?’ Estelle asked. ‘So far you’ve given me half a schedule and a screenshot of someone else’s Facebook account.’ She turned to Priya. ‘Go to her. Convince her to testify. I want to win this for you. We’ll get you your son and then we’ll go after the clinic. But we need proof.’

  Priya stayed up all night searching the internet for leads on Doctor Li. It appeared she had left Empona. Her details were no longer listed on their website, but there was no information about where she had gone. A lot had been written about Doctor Li before the mix-up. She’d been profiled and interviewed by everyone from medical journals to glossy women’s magazines (‘In 2016, the stork wears stilettos and drinks three cappuccinos a day,’ The Australian Women’s Weekly gushed). But the publicity seemed to stop abruptly once the baby—Priya’s baby—had been born. Ashley Li had a Facebook page but had never posted anything, and only had thirty-six friends.

  Priya woke slumped over her desk with a crick in her neck and three missed calls from her office. She rang to explain she had gastro, then, dejected, she went downstairs to get her mail and discovered a hand-addressed envelope in her letterbox. She quickly ripped it open and removed a single sheet of paper.

  Dear Priya,

  You may have been wondering where this letter has been. It was more than six weeks ago that you first wrote to me and my wife, Grace. The letter was gracious and fair and now I write to you, knowing I failed to match your rational approach. When I read your letter I panicked, forgive me. I couldn’t believe it could be true, though in my heart I suspected it was. I never showed it to my wife. She had been through so much, I couldn’t bear to do it to her. I didn’t mean to conceal the truth from you forever. I just wanted to give her a little time to regain her strength. I thought about you every day. The guilt ate away at me. Each hour I’d say to myself: Just one more day and I’ll reach out to this woman. This good and decent woman who has shown such honour under pressure. I have finally found the strength to do it now and I implore you, call off the lawsuit and let us sit down and discuss the plan you originally proposed. Your plan was fair and, I believe, in the best interest of our son. He is, I’m sure you’ll agree, the most important thing in this whole wretched mess.