There are flashes of doctors, eyes and frown lines above surgical masks. At one point Greg is looming over me, a surgical mask clamped over his mouth, but his eyes are recognisable as they peer into mine, tears dripping from his lashes.
There is pain, both physical and emotional, raw, open and searing, then retreating to a dull, throbbing ache.
Then a tiny baby is placed in my arms, all mottled and pink with the tiniest hands and feet I have ever seen. Out of all of it, this image is clear and crisp, as though I am looking down on myself. I can feel the weight of him, barely there, in my arms. I can smell the blood iron on his skin. I can taste the sweat on my lips. His hands are splayed and I expect them to flail at me in anger at being ejected from safety so brutally, but the hands are motionless.
There is not a sound in the room except for the beep of machines. Everyone is standing around me, watching, waiting like a held breath.
Then a sob escapes from Greg and I am dropped back into my body and I realise that while Greg and I are crying, the baby is not.
His tiny hands are still. His eyes are closed. His heart is not beating.
*
We named him Archie.
He was my last baby. The twelfth pregnancy.
He was the boy who breathed.
Just once.
Then no more.
9
Maddie felt raw. The scan photos and cards lay spread out in front of them on the kitchen counter. All twelve children, all named. Seven boys and five girls.
Every single one remembered and mourned.
‘Fuck,’ Jade said poetically.
She’d kept quiet while Maddie talked, getting up only to refill their wineglasses and then to open another bottle when they’d emptied the first.
She didn’t ask questions or push for details. She just listened – and for that Maddie was grateful. Her face was unreadable. Maddie couldn’t tell if Jade felt pity, sadness or anything at all. Maddie supposed not everyone would find this as heart-breaking as she had. Perhaps Jade would think it all a lucky escape, would wonder why Maddie had persevered for so long. She knew Jade struggled with Ben, after all.
Jade got to her feet, grabbed her cigarettes from her handbag and disappeared through the door to the garden.
Maddie put her head in her hands for a moment, feeling wrung out, her mouth cloying from the wine and words. This was the first time she had ever sat and detailed all of it, said the words out loud from start to finish. It made it all so much more tangible again. She hadn’t even discussed it as plainly with Greg before – but then, he’d been there with her and it had seemed fruitless for her to talk to him so candidly about how she felt each and every time they lost another one.
And a loss was exactly what it was. Maddie had no idea where those tiny souls had gone or why they’d been taken. They were indeed lost to her, not even leaving behind a memory she could hold onto.
Just gone.
Therapists and counsellors had offered her advice in the past, saying things like it was God’s way, that maybe He needed them for a higher purpose, that they were angels looking down on her, and she had wanted to rant that it wasn’t fair. Why did He get to choose who He wanted? Why couldn’t He let her just have one of them?
She took a breath and gathered together all of the scans and cards into a neat pile again before carefully tying them with the ribbon. She tucked them back into the tissue paper and replaced the lid. She rested her hand on the box for a moment, then went to find Jade.
The air outside was crisp, the evening having set in on them without them realising. Jade was standing with her back to the door, a cloud of smoke around her head as she pulled hard on the cigarette.
Maddie came to stand next to her and handed her her wine.
They stood in silence, staring out at the sky. It was a clear night, the moon full and open. Maddie thought she could just make out a face in it if she squinted.
‘It sucks… what you’ve been through,’ Jade said.
‘Yeah, I guess it does,’ Maddie replied.
Jade was quiet again and Maddie watched the end of her cigarette glow an angry orange as she took drag after drag, like a warning sign flashing on and off.
‘I get it – why you haven’t wanted to talk about it much.’
Maddie nodded, although she doubted if Jade noticed in the dark. Maddie drank her wine and folded her arms around herself.
‘What happened afterwards? You know, after Archie?’
Maddie thought back to those long months afterwards, but it was like one eternal white canvas of nothingness in her mind. She couldn’t remember actually being present for any given moment.
‘I went to bed. Because I was so tired of it all, you know? I felt like every tiny shred of life and joy had been stripped from the bones of me. So I pulled the covers up over my head and stayed there. For a long time.’ She paused, thinking back to that time, that emptiness. ‘Greg came and went. But he had a focus, a distraction. He had the business to throw himself into – and he made a lot of money that year. Of course, I wasn’t spending it on IVF treatments as quickly as he was making it, like in previous years, but he was also so much more single-minded. We never discussed it, but we both knew that Archie would be our last.’ Her voice broke as she said his name. It still had a way of taking her breath away.
Maddie looked out at the moon again. ‘I was operating on autopilot every day, doing very little, saying even less. And then one day, Greg had left the radio on in the kitchen when he left for work and I was making a cup of tea, not really listening to it, but it was an interview with an artist, who was talking about his depression and how one day he had an epiphany of sorts. He said that he had opened his bedroom curtains for the first time in a week and the sun had shone through the window and he realised that although there had been clouds there before, on that day the sky was back – and that actually the sky had never gone away in the first place. It was just that he couldn’t see it.’ She sipped on her wine, thinking back to that day. ‘That made sense to me. How grief and depression are a little bit like that. Sometimes you can’t see past the thing that is holding you down, stopping you from wanting to take your next breath, but that doesn’t mean that thing will always be as suffocating or as big and powerful. You just have to hold on and wait it out in a way. He said that running had diminished his depression in his head, weakened it enough for him to push back at it. So I packed a bag and went to the swimming pool. It was the first time I’d left the house in weeks. But I had this urge to swim, to pull myself through the water, stretch myself out and feel weightless for a while, let myself float. After being hunched by the weight of my grief for so long, it felt liberating to reach out and pull myself forward. I started feeling like I was swimming away from the depression and then after a while I felt like I was actually swimming towards a future for myself.’
She wasn’t sure if she was making any sense to Jade, but it made sense to her.
‘So when did Gemma appear?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t paying much attention. She had worked for us for years and, thinking back now, I think their affair began before I was pregnant with Archie.’
‘What a dick.’
‘Yes – and no. I wasn’t there for a lot of our marriage. But finding out about Gemma being pregnant helped in a weird way. A baby – any baby – helped to fill the void. And Greg has been amazing at letting me spend time with Jemima, as have you with Ben.’