Playing Nice

Looking back, I think I’d already decided to keep it and was just looking for some kind of justification. Telling work was awkward, of course—I’d been in my new job less than four months, and now here I was, announcing I’d be taking a year off—but they were grown up enough to realize that, since they had no choice in the matter, they might as well sound pleased for me and emphasize that the position would still be there when I came back.

In short, it looked like everything was working out ridiculously well. But the gods had other ideas.

I was twenty-seven weeks when Pete and I went to Andy and Keith’s wedding. If you can’t let your hair down at a gay wedding, when can you? Later, I’d torture myself about that. Was it the glass of champagne I allowed myself with the speeches? The exuberant dancing to Aretha Franklin and Madonna on the packed dance floor afterward? (I still can’t hear “Respect” without flinching.) The tumble I took on my way back from the ladies’, tripping over that marquee rope in the dark? The consultant told me it probably wasn’t any of those, but since he couldn’t say what did cause it, how could he be sure?

Next morning I had a terrible headache, which I put down to the glass of champagne now I wasn’t used to it. But I also realized I hadn’t felt the baby move for a while, and when I threw up it somehow felt different from my first-trimester morning sickness. So—since it was a Sunday, and we had a private hospital in Harley Street on tap, staffed by experienced midwives we could go and see anytime we liked—Pete suggested we get the baby checked out, then have brunch on Marylebone High Street.

As it turned out, that brunch plan saved our baby’s life.

“I’m just going to do a quick scan” turned into “I’m just going to get the doctor to take a look” and then suddenly a red cord I’d barely noticed in the corner of the room was being pulled and I was surrounded by people. Someone shouted, “Prep for theater.” I was bombarded with questions even as they were stripping me of my jewelry—I never did get my Vietnamese bracelet back—and putting in a catheter. Someone else was measuring my legs for stockings, of all things, and Pete was being told to scrub and change into a gown if he wanted to be present at the emergency C-section they were about to perform because of my sudden-onset preeclampsia. I was given an injection to help the baby’s lungs and a drip to help with something else, I never caught what. And then a surgeon appeared, took one look at the trace, and said just one word: “Now.” After that it was a blur of corridors and faces and gabbled explanations. There was no time for an epidural, another doctor told me. Seconds later, I was unconscious.

I came around in the recovery room to silence. No crying baby, no Pete, just the bleep of a machine. And a doctor looking down at me.

“Your baby’s alive,” he said. “A baby boy.”

Thank God. “Can I see him?” I managed to say.

The doctor—I think he was a doctor; he was just a pair of anonymous eyes over a surgical mask—shook his head. “He’s gone straight to the NICU in a specialist ambulance. He’s very small and very poorly.”

NICU, pronounced nick-you. It meant nothing to me at the time, but I was soon to become all too familiar with the different levels of emergency infant care. A neonatal intensive care unit was the very highest.

“Poorly? What with?”

“Babies who are that premature struggle to breathe unaided. He’ll probably be put on a ventilator to help his lungs.” He paused. “It’s possible he might have hypoxia.”

“What’s that? Is it fatal? Is he going to live?”

All I can remember about this man, who I’d never seen before and would never see again, is his kind brown eyes, even though he politely pulled down his surgical mask before he said gently, “It’s when the baby’s brain is starved of oxygen. But the NICU at St. Alexander’s is the best place for him, and it’s very close. If anyone can help him, they can.”

I stared at him, horrified. I was just realizing that, far from being a great place to have a baby, this smart hotel-like clinic was actually completely ill equipped to deal with an emergency like mine.

Everything had gone wrong. I had an overwhelming feeling of having failed my baby. I was meant to be keeping him safe inside me for another thirteen weeks, for God’s sake. I was his life-support system. And instead, my body had rejected him, spat him out into a world he wasn’t ready for.

“Where’s Pete?” I croaked.

“Your husband will have gone with the baby. I’m sorry—there was no time for goodbyes.”

I don’t need to say goodbye to Pete, I wanted to say, and anyway we’re not married. But then I realized. The doctor meant goodbye to the baby. The first time I saw my son, he’d be dead and cold.

I began to weep, tears running down my face even as the doctor checked my womb at the other end; tears of rage and regret and loss for the tiny person who’d been inside me and who was going to die before his own mother had even held him.

7

MADDIE

I COME OUT OF the Underground at Willesden Green with a million questions churning around my head, so I call Pete again as I walk the last quarter mile to our house.

“The thing is, I just don’t believe two babies could get mixed up like that in the NICU,” I tell him. “Theo was in an incubator the whole time, attached to all those lines. And he had an electronic tag on his leg. It just couldn’t have happened.”

“Miles said something about it not being St. Alexander’s he’s suing, it’s the private hospital where his wife gave birth. So maybe that could explain it.”

That seems more possible. If two very premature babies arrived at St. Alexander’s at the same time, perhaps they got mixed up before the tags were even put on. This might be real, after all.

“But weren’t you with him the whole time? Hang on, I’m at the front door.”

Pete opens the door, lowering his phone as he does so. “Not all the time. There were so many people working on him—getting the tubes in, taking blood…And later, they found me a room to sleep in. I didn’t even notice when the tag appeared on his leg.”

He gnaws his lip, his eyes haunted. I know what he’s thinking. “You had to sleep sometimes, Pete. We were there for weeks.”

“I keep wondering though—how come I didn’t notice? How could our baby have been switched with a different one and I didn’t spot it?”

“Because the truth is, none of them looked like babies to begin with,” I say flatly.

Pete glances at me. He still doesn’t like to talk about my reaction to the NICU. “But you sensed it, Mads,” he says quietly. “You felt no maternal attachment to Theo. You even wondered out loud if he was really our baby. On some level, you knew.”

I hesitate, then shake my head. “I didn’t have trouble bonding with him because he wasn’t ours. It was because he was nothing like the baby I’d always imagined having. They all were. I’d have felt the same about any baby in that place. They—they disgusted me, somehow.”

At least, that’s what I’ve always told myself. Along with You’re a terrible mother and There’s something wrong with you. But now, despite what I’ve just said to Pete, I can’t help wondering—had I known something else was wrong, all along?

* * *

—

MY FIRST IMAGE OF my baby was a grainy shot taken on Pete’s phone that he sent while I was still in the recovery room. Blurry, taken over the shoulder of a nurse or doctor, it showed a small pale shape in an incubator, a Christmas tree of tubes and valves attached to a tiny body. There was what looked like bubble wrap encasing his chest, with more tubes coming out of it—I found out later that the doctors had been freezing him, deliberately causing hypothermia to reduce any swelling in his brain. Yet more tubes were taped to his nose. He looked scrawny and sick and barely human.

When I was nine, my parents had a litter from the family Labrador, Maya. Five were born alive and well, but then there was a long gap, so long we’d have thought she was finished if she hadn’t so obviously been in distress. Finally, one last puppy popped out—a tiny, hairless fledgling of a thing. It soon became clear it wasn’t strong enough to haul itself through the scrum of other puppies for one of Maya’s teats, and for her part she never seemed to nudge it into position as she did the others. I kept pulling other puppies off the best teat and putting the runt to it, trying to get it to suck, but it just couldn’t get the idea. Two days later, it died.

When I saw that picture on my phone, I was even more convinced that by the time I joined Pete at St. Alexander’s, our baby would be dead. The doctor’s words kept spinning around my brain. He’s very poorly.

I was still looking at the picture when Pete called. “I’ve stepped outside—they don’t allow phone conversations in the NICU,” he said breathlessly. “I just wanted to check you got the photo.”

“I got it.”

“Are you okay?”