Playing Nice

“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-edged 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.”