The Other Child (22 page)

Their baby is like an unexpected visitor, bringing sudden lightness and relief to a troubled house. They gaze at her through the glass sides of the incubator. She has a pointed chin and fingernails as delicate as petals; her movements are slow and otherworldly; pencilled blue veins pulse beneath her skin; her eyelashes have not yet developed; there is an oxygen tube in her nose, sticky sensors on her chest and belly and foot and she has to lie on a heated pad – but she is whole and miraculously healthy, all her organs function, she breathes on her own and her plum-sized heart keeps perfect time.

Tess feels as if her body has been flipped inside out and torn from front to back, but she is oddly calm. The light coming through the slatted blinds is crystalline, as if minute particles of frost are suspended inside it, sharpening all the edges and brightening the air.

‘She’s amazing.’ Greg sounds hoarse. ‘We’re unbelievably lucky; just look at her, she’s a great size, nice and pink, her lungs are in amazing shape, all her reflexes are good, the cord gases were all normal. My God, we’re lucky, Tess; she’s going to be OK, she really is.’ He sounds as if he is trying to reassure himself, to pin down this mind-blowing experience and talk his way onto safer, more medical ground. His hair is sticking up and his face looks pale behind a dark wash of stubble. He is, she supposes, in some kind of shock.

Perhaps watching her in the rear-view mirror as she gave birth five weeks early in the back of his speeding car was more disturbing than actually doing it. For her there was no time for fear because the baby was coming and the force of that was far bigger than anything her conscious mind could come up with. But Greg would have had all sorts of frightening medical scenarios running through his head as he sped through the snow.

The machines monitoring the baby’s heartbeat and oxygen levels beep constantly. Greg is sitting on a high-backed chair with one leg crooked. Anyone glancing at them now would think that they were the perfect new family.

She needs Joe. Joe has to meet his sister and she needs to hold onto him and reassure herself that he is OK. It must have been so frightening for him to be woken in the night by Josh, a virtual stranger, and taken across the road to the Schechters’. She had not prepared him for this – she’d assumed that there was still at least a month in which to have these practical conversations. Suddenly she remembers the panic she felt in the kitchen when Greg came at her. Birthing hormones must have skewed her mind, triggering the deep, primitive urge to flee.

She looks down at her baby again. The neonatologist, a woman with cropped hair and a strange, soft accent, has explained about oxygenation levels and blood sugar, about the possibility of unsteady breathing patterns, the risk of jaundice, the need to express milk until a stronger sucking reflex develops. She also explained that they would need to stay in Special Care until Christmas Eve, as it was against hospital policy to release a baby before a gestational age of thirty-six weeks. Greg says he will fix things so he can be at home before and after school with Joe. At least in Massachusetts the schools are open right up to Christmas Eve.

Nurses come and go, checking and rechecking vital signs – in both her and the baby. But she feels oddly well, perfectly alert.

‘Can you go and get Joe when he wakes up?’

‘Of course,’ Greg nods. ‘Absolutely.’ She has a feeling that he would do anything she asked of him right now – except, perhaps, tell her the truth.

‘I don’t want him going to school today.’

‘No, of course not, he should be here with us – I’ll go get him.’ He glances at his watch. ‘It’s almost 6.30; you want me to call Sandra? I’m sure they’ll be up by now.’

‘OK.’

He reaches for her hand. ‘Tess,’ his voice wavers, ‘you were incredible. You really were.’

The birth is like the memory of a drunken night out – flashbulb scenes, extreme sensations, odd smells, interspersed with periods of blankness. She remembers Josh helping her up, after she was sick, then Greg saying something about ‘pre-term’ and ‘transition’ and Josh, somewhere further off, talking on the phone: ‘Her husband’s bringing her in by car – they can be there in ten, twelve minutes.’

She remembers the smell of the leather seats in Greg’s car and shouting at him about Joe – and Greg saying Joe was with the Schechters, that he was fine, not to worry, he was safe. Then the hospital car park: on her hands and knees on the backseat, the urge to push overwhelming, feeling the baby’s head between her legs – and paramedics everywhere, suddenly, bitter air sweeping into the car with all the doors flung open, and thinking Greg had gone and then realizing that the arms around her, holding her up, were his, that she was on her back now, with Greg supporting her torso.

She remembers looking up at his face and thinking that he did not look like someone who had witnessed childbirth countless times: he was barely holding it together. She wanted to reassure him that it was going to be fine, but then she had to push again and the rest of the baby came out – she reached down to lift the tiny, limp body and suddenly there were people everywhere in scrubs and someone said, ‘It’s a girl!’ and gloved hands whisked her baby out of her arms – strangers – and a man in a mask with an African accent of some kind was introducing himself as an OB/GYN, peering between her legs. Then hands lifted her onto a gurney and there were bright lights flashing overhead and Greg was gripping her hand, saying, ‘It’s OK, she’s going to be OK, they’re just checking her over – she needs a little oxygen, everything’s going to be OK’ – and panic bloomed in her chest because someone else had her baby: she couldn’t see her baby among all these strangers in scrubs.

She feels her throat and chest tighten and looks down into the incubator. There are thin wires snaking from the swaddling. She will never let anyone take her baby from her again.

‘I need to call Nell.’

‘Sure. You want to call her right now?’

‘I’ll call her when you go for Joe.’

The rims of Greg’s eyes are red. She looks down and realizes that she is wearing a gown with teddy bears on it. She has no idea where her clothes went. Her whole body throbs.

‘My God, Tess,’ he says. ‘She’s . . .’ But he can’t find the words. ‘We have a daughter.’

They look at each other and start to laugh, and she realizes that in all these months she has never actually allowed herself to imagine this baby as either girl or boy. It has been a genderless, separate being. And now its position in the world is staked out. She is a she – daughter, sister.

‘She has such dark hair,’ she says. ‘Joe only had a blond fuzz.’

‘That’ll be the Italian genes.’

For a moment all the unanswered questions close back in and swing between them. They stop laughing, and stare at each other.

‘We haven’t even talked properly about names.’ Greg looks away first.

‘We haven’t talked about anything.’

‘I know. Do you want to? Do you want me to—’

‘No, God, no – not now, but . . .’

‘Later, then.’

‘Yes.’ She looks down at their baby again. ‘I’d like to call her Lily.’ The process of choosing a name must have been going on somewhere in her subconscious because this feels like a solid and well-considered decision.

‘Lillian? After your mother?’

‘After my mother but not Lillian, just Lily.’

‘Lily – Lily – you mentioned that before. Actually, I love Lily, it’s beautiful.’

‘Then she’s Lily? Lily Harding Gallo?’

‘She is.’ Greg looks slightly dazed, as if he cannot quite take in that she is real, his daughter – let alone that she has his name, Lily Gallo.

‘Do you want your mother’s name too though?’ she asks. ‘Natalia’s beautiful. It could be her middle name. Lily Natalia?’

He frowns. ‘No, no, I don’t think so. No.’

‘Really?’

‘Really – no.’ He looks away. ‘No.’

‘OK, then. Maybe Joe should be involved in choosing her middle name anyway.’

‘Good idea.’ He looks back at her and grins. ‘Lily Ronaldina. It has a certain . . .’

They both laugh again and she feels a powerful ball of well-being dilate from her heart, push through her veins, filling her with strength.
Everything will be OK
. She looks down at Lily.
You are safe. I will keep you safe
.

*

The icy River Charles flashes past as they speed along Storrow Drive. It is Christmas Eve and they have broken out of the cocoon of the Special Care Unit at last. For three days she has longed to get out – Christmas Day in the hospital would have been tough for Joe – but now the city feels vast and perilous, no place for a frail newborn.

She knows that they have to talk. A speeding car feels like the wrong place, but she can’t bring Lily home without first understanding how Greg is connected to Sarah Bannister, Carlo Novak and Alex – and why he has tried to conceal it from her.

She looks over her shoulder. Lily is dwarfed by the car seat, chin to chest, a little pink gnome. She looks closely to check that Lily’s chest is rising and falling evenly. The responsibility of bringing her home feels overwhelming, suddenly. In the context of the other Special Care babies, Lily seemed relatively big and healthy, but now, in the real world, she feels incredibly tiny and exposed.

In Special Care, she and Greg had made a list of all the things they needed for Lily, and then Greg and Joe went to the mall. They bought the car seat, a Moses basket, an electric breast pump, a white wooden cot and a baby sleeping bag covered in stars, packs of cotton sheets and muslins, Babygros and nappy- – diaper- – changing things.

‘Everything,’ Greg said when they came back, ‘is at home and waiting for you.’

Joe held up a monochrome mobile. ‘Right now she can only see black and white,’ he explained, looking serious. ‘Her brain needs to develop more before she can see colours.’

She realized, then, that they didn’t even have a Christmas tree. ‘We have to get one!’ It suddenly seemed vital.

Joe opened his mouth, then looked up at Greg.

‘A Christmas tree,’ Greg said, ‘is the last thing you should be worrying about.’

Joe nodded, bravely.

She opened her mouth to argue, but then the nurse came over.

‘Greg,’ she says now, ‘we’ve got to talk before we get home. I can’t go home with it all hanging over us like this.’

His elbows stiffen against the wheel. ‘OK . . .’

‘So – I need to know who Carlo Novak is.’

He indicates and pulls into the fast lane. ‘My cousin.’

‘Your
cousin
? You had a cousin? Then Nell was right.’ Greg’s chin jerks in and she realizes that it has not occurred to him, until now, that she will have talked to Nell about any of this.

‘How could you not tell me that you had a cousin?’ She tries to straighten this fact in her mind. ‘There’s a picture of him from the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and it looked so much like you, I thought it
was
you.’

He nods. ‘I know. Everyone used to say that.’

‘You couldn’t look
that
similar.’

‘Well, we did. Our parents were siblings – all four of them: the Gallo brothers married the Novak sisters. Carlo and I shared all four grandparents, so we did look a lot alike, particularly in photos. Even our mothers would sometimes struggle to tell us apart in an old photo. But there was a three-year age gap, and we were slightly different builds and there was a couple of inches height difference, not to mention some fairly major personality traits. But in a photo I guess none of that was obvious.’

She thinks about the picture. It is true that the camera will love certain lines and angles of a face, it will bring out likenesses that are much less obvious in the flesh. If Greg and Carlo had matching bone structures, then they really could look almost identical in a photograph, or even perhaps in a thirty-year-old memory. She feels the tendons in her neck release slightly.

‘This is why Alex Kingman mixed you up then?’

He glances at her and looks back at the road. He is driving too fast.

‘I went to see Alex,’ she says. ‘I found him online. He’s convinced that you are Carlo Novak and that you almost killed him when you were students.’

‘You saw Alex Kingman?’

‘He was giving a lecture at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I spoke to him afterwards.’

‘Jesus, Tess.’ He looks genuinely rattled. ‘When did you do this?’

‘The other night. I didn’t go to see the photography exhibition, I went there instead.’

‘You lied to me?’

‘I was going to tell you only you got back so late that night, and then I tried to tell you again the next night and you got back late again – remember – you wouldn’t talk to me? You said you couldn’t think straight.’

He opens his mouth to argue, but stops himself, perhaps realizing the irony of accusing her of evasion and lies.

‘How on earth did you find Alex Kingman?’

‘He’s a partner in a Boston landscape architecture firm; he’s easy to find.’

‘But he could have been anyone, Tess. You know nothing about him. I wish you’d told me first.’

‘Really? Well, I wish you’d told me about your cousin. And I wish
you
hadn’t lied about Alex. You went back out to find him while I was sleeping in the hotel room. He says you threatened him in an alley.’

‘Oh, come on! That’s bullshit. He was waiting in the lobby when I went for my run.
He
accosted
me
. He was very aggressive. I just told him to leave us alone.’

‘So why didn’t you tell me about it then?’

‘I didn’t want to make things anymore stressful – you’d had a bad enough day as it was and I just wanted us to have a nice time together.’

‘He told me this long story about a cave dive, years and years ago in Florida. He said he could never forget your face because you tried to drown him – thinking you were your cousin, presumably.’

Greg’s jaw stiffens and tiny beads of sweat glisten on his hairline. ‘Nobody tried to drown that man.’ He changes lanes again, cutting in front of someone, then accelerating up close to the bumper of a BMW.