stronger. He looked at us anxiously, a little dull-eyed, as if he’d just woken up.
“Hi,” I said, stepping forward and shaking his little hand gently by the wrist. “I’m Pete.”
“And I’m Maddie.” Maddie reached toward him eagerly with both hands, as if to take him, and David shrank back.
“He’s quite a shy little chap, I’m afraid.” Miles squatted down, still holding David, so David was in Theo’s eyeline. “We weren’t allowed to have other children around at all until a couple of months ago—he’s still very immunosuppressed. You’re just about the first visitors who Lucy hasn’t made scrub their arms with alcohol gel.”
“Theo,” I began, meaning to prompt him to say hello, but Theo had already stepped forward. Being at nursery had made him confident with other children, and now he held up his hand dramatically, thrusting the bag of chocolate buttons at David for inspection like a policeman’s badge. “Ho!” he said proudly. David stared at him, uncomprehending.
“He’s not allowed chocolate, I’m afraid,” Lucy said.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said apologetically. “I thought, since it was a special occasion…”
“It’s not that. He can’t digest it. He has a reflux condition that’s triggered by any kind of fat. When he gets an attack he has to go straight back on oxygen, which he hates.”
“I’ll take that, Theo,” I said quickly, plucking the bag from his hand. He rounded on me, his eyes expressing his outrage, but I’d already pocketed it. I was probably going to make his own snatching problem worse by grabbing it like that, I reflected, but it wasn’t the moment to worry about that. “Why don’t you ask David to show you some of his toys?” I added.
Miles gently set David down. He was unsteady on his feet, teetering wide-legged like a baby. From the bulkiness of his trousers, it was clear he was still wearing a regular nappy rather than pull-ups or pants.
“Michaela?” Miles called.
“Yes, Mr. Lambert?” A girl of about twenty appeared in the doorway. She, too, was blond, although her hair had black showing at the roots. She sounded Eastern European.
“Could you take David, and show Theo where to find some toys?”
“Of course. Come with me, Theo, they’re all in here.”
“What toys do you like, David?” Maddie asked gently as Michaela picked him up. He didn’t reply, although his head turned toward her curiously. With a stab of horror I realized he hadn’t understood the question.
He was brain-damaged. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise—the possibility had been drummed into us in the NICU, over and over. But week by week, as Theo had thrived and prematurity slowly lost its grip, we’d started taking normality for granted. Forgetting just how lucky we’d been.
Or rather, how lucky Theo had been. Because—I now realized—the doctor who’d told Maddie how poorly our son was, and how he might not survive that initial episode of oxygen starvation unscathed, had been right. The child he had been talking about was David, and his mind was clearly impaired.
“David’s not very chatty,” Lucy said nervously. “He’s not nearly so advanced as Theo.”
I looked at her, aghast. Was it possible she didn’t know? Or was she just using a euphemistic understatement for her son’s condition? The latter, I decided. It must be. She would have spent the last two years talking to doctors on an almost daily basis.
But then I remembered how, even in the NICU, the doctors had always shrugged and said, We just can’t tell the future. It’s impossible to make a long-term prognosis until around the third birthday.
Either way, I reflected, this was going to make the conversation we’d come here to have a whole lot more difficult.
14
MADDIE
LUCY POURS US ALL tea, and then we stand and watch the children through the doorway of the playroom. They don’t play together. David sits on the floor with a baby gym, repetitively spinning the plastic animals around and around the pole, while Theo stomps around, pulling things off shelves and inspecting them. Eventually Michaela finds him a wooden train and he settles down to make it crash into mountains that he constructs from piles of Duplo, while she scurries around picking up the pieces.
I can’t stop looking at David. My son. When I’d first seen him in Miles’s arms and reached for him, it hadn’t even been a conscious gesture. And although he’d shrunk back, my hands had briefly made contact with his ribs. The memory of that touch seems to linger in the ends of my fingers, like the