But two? Two years and two weeks, to be precise? That seemed to be a terrifyingly gray area.
Don Maguire’s words came back to me. There’s certainly no automatic requirement for the family courts to get involved. It’s best for the parents to work out a solution between themselves.
If we couldn’t work something out, did that mean a court would have to decide? Would Theo’s fate ultimately rest with some dry legal bureaucrat? The very thought made my blood run cold.
* * *
—
ALL OF THIS I explained, or rather babbled, to Maddie when she was barely through the door.
“But is that what this man was suggesting?” she asked, getting straight to the most important point as usual. “Does he really think we should swap them back?”
“He didn’t say. But neither did he say we shouldn’t.” In fact, now that I thought about it, Miles Lambert had said remarkably little. “He was pretty vague.”
“Perhaps he knew it would be a lot to take in and didn’t want you to feel he was railroading you,” she pointed out. “What was he like?”
“He seemed all right,” I admitted. “That is, as all right as it’s possible to be when you’re breaking news like that. Said he knew what a terrible shock it must be—it affected him the same way, when he found out.”
“Well, that’s something. But how did he find out? I mean, what made him look at his child in the first place and think, That’s not my son?”
I thought back. “He didn’t say that, either.”
“And he really didn’t give you any clue as to which way they’re thinking?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t feeling any better as time passed since our encounter. “But he took a picture of Theo, to show his wife. And he left us one of David.”
“Can I see?”
I went and got the photograph. I saw Maddie’s face change as she looked at it—first with surprise, and then involuntarily softening around the eyes.
“He looks just like you, doesn’t he?” I said gently.
“A bit. And he’s the spitting image of Robin at that age.” I didn’t really know Maddie’s brothers, who were all in Australia. Robin, the youngest, was the one she missed most. She took a deep breath. “Wow. I guess this is real, isn’t it?”
My laptop pinged. Automatically, I turned toward it. It was a notification from LinkedIn, which I still had open. Miles Lambert wants to join your network.
I showed Maddie. “Should I accept?”
“Why not? Whatever happens next, we’ll need to be in touch.”
I clicked ACCEPT. Moments later, a message pinged into my inbox.
Pete,
Thank you for talking to me today, and once again my apologies for crashing into your life with what can only have been disturbing news. I’m sure you’ll want to talk things over with Madelyn before you make any decisions, but now you and I have the initial contact out of the way, Lucy and I were wondering if the two of you would like to come and talk it over at our house—and meet David at the same time? It would be entirely up to you whether or not you bring Theo, but of course we would love to meet him too.
This is a difficult and horrible situation, one that none of us chose or ever expected to find ourselves in. But hopefully we can work out what’s right and best for all concerned—and, particularly, for our children.
Kind regards,
Miles
“It’s a good email,” Maddie said, reading over my shoulder. I could hear the relief in her voice. “It really sounds like they don’t want to pressurize us into anything.”
“Yes,” I said uneasily. Despite the email’s agreeable tone, I had a sense that events were already starting to move, and that I wasn’t in control of them. Once we’d met David, and the Lamberts had met Theo, everything was going to become much more complicated. The train was leaving the station, and I wasn’t the one driving it.
9
MADDIE
IT’S ONLY AFTER I see the email from Miles, with the reference to Lucy, that the name Lambert starts to ring a bell. There’d been twenty-one intensive care incubators in the NICU. Twenty-one sets of parents with desperately small or sick babies. Some were only on the ward a few days; some—especially those with preemies—spent months there. Most were just a blur of drawn, haggard faces. I’d gotten to know the ones whose cots were nearest, or who I happened to stand next to when I was washing out my breast pump in the sink area—talking was a way to distract yourself from the tension, to ease the permanent stress lump in the back of your throat—but there were too many, too transient, to remember them all.
Gradually, I got used to being there. I still felt like a failure, but among all those other failures that was less crushing, somehow, than it had been back at the private hospital with the sound of healthy babies’ cries wafting into my room. The babies in the NICU almost never cried, even the older ones without tubes down their throats. Instead, they’d register distress by stretching out a jittery arm or leg, or arching their back, or even just sneezing. You got ridiculously attuned to those signs in your baby, because any of them might herald the onset of an “episode”—the nurses’ euphemism for a near-death experience, when the alarms went off and Theo’s heart or breathing would have to be restarted.
Watching my baby so obsessively changed how I felt about him. I felt—not love, exactly, definitely not that, but an overwhelming, painful feeling of responsibility. I’d already let him down once. I mustn’t let him down again.
The skin-to-skin, or “kangaroo care” as the nurses sometimes called it, helped, too. The first time Bronagh—the Irish nurse, who turned out to not be as bad as I’d thought once I got used to her breezy manner—suggested it, I was dubious. It seemed madness to move this tiny, vulnerable being out of his lifesaving incubator and onto the same stomach that had failed him once already. But Bronagh wasn’t going to take no for an answer, so while Pete drew the screens, I pulled off my top and Bronagh carefully lowered Theo, complete with all his tangles of lines and wires, onto my chest, like a collapsed puppet.
“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.