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