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