Ghosts by Daylight (13 page)

She calmly explained what was happening to the baby: ‘He’s very early and he has
glare
– liquid – in his lungs.’ Then seeing my alarm, she added: ‘He’s going to be fine.’

Everything seemed mysterious and unavailable to me: the lists of instructions, the medicines, the jabs Luca was getting in his tiny hand that made me flinch – even the first bath that the fat nurse with dyed hair gave him, plunking him down into a basin like a chicken. Bruno stood by her side, lifting out the slippery baby with no apprehension at all. ‘Hold him, darling, hold him.’

‘No, I’ll drop him. I can’t do it.’

‘Yes, you can,’ he told me soothingly. ‘You can do it.’ Gingerly, he handed me our son. ‘See? He’s so good. He hardly cries at all.’

The paediatrician, sensing something was wrong with me, sent in another nurse. This one was blonde and young and she tried to talk to me about
les bébé blues
. ‘It’s normal to cry all the time,’ she said gently. Then she asked if I wanted or needed antidepressants, and gave me a prescription for birth control, which seemed utterly strange to me, given that I was still raw from childbirth.

The light box sessions, which also seemed strange to me, increased because the
jaunisse
was not going away. In the same way that he had banished me from the Côte d’Ivoire to protect me, Bruno sent me away finally as he could not stand my pacing and hand-wringing.

He sat alone with the baby for hours, holding his tiny finger through a hole in the glass. He filmed it once, too, with a camera and a night-lens and when I look at this eerie greenish film now, I am amazed at the ease Bruno had with a sick baby. He speaks to him gently in French, he laughs with him, he tells him this is what it will be like when he is older and lies on the beach. Bruno seemed, unlike me, utterly comfortable with parenthood. I felt guiltily relieved that at least one of us could cope with it.

‘But you are so competent,’ my friends in London, anxiously calling me to check in, said. ‘Why is this disturbing you so much?’

‘Because it’s not me,’ I said. ‘It’s not my life any more. What if I drop him? Accidentally drop him out of the window?’

‘You won’t,’ said one of my friends, the mother of two. She added, laughing: ‘You sound like a madwoman. Why would you drop him out of a window?’

‘I don’t know, I just keep thinking that.’

I lay in bed and watched the news of Haiti collapsing and I felt something like a failed state myself. Nothing I believed about motherhood was what it really felt like. I was frightened to hold the baby close. The doctors told me not to breastfeed because he was too premature, but I was not happy with the decision. The fat nurse came in and half-heartedly tried to squeeze my breast into the baby’s mouth for about five minutes before saying, ‘It doesn’t work. Stick to the bottle.’

In a sense, this was not the end of the world. A few days before I left for the first round in the hospital – the isolation ward – I met a friend, a literary agent, who was also having a baby, her second. She had gained 7 kilos – the baby plus an additional 3. She was not drinking hot chocolate as I was, but mineral water. She was still working, and she was wearing high heels. She was beautiful, utterly composed and calm. ‘Are you breastfeeding?’ I asked her.

‘No way,’ she said. ‘It takes all your time, you can’t be separated from the baby, and I need to get back to work. And,’ she added, ‘you can’t sleep.’ That was the thing that convinced me.

At that point, I had not slept – because of the cough – for two months. I thought of sleep, returning to my normal size, and how much I yearned for it. I left the café, and my half-finished hot chocolate, and walked home to Bruno. He was asleep on the sofa with the lights and the television still on. I had exhausted him with my endless problems, my endless needs.

‘I’m not breastfeeding,’ I said. ‘I need to sleep and if I breastfeed, I can’t sleep.’

He looked surprised and then said, ‘Whatever. No big deal. It’s your choice.’ My mother-in-law, it turned out, had not breast-fed, neither had the few other French women I knew.

The head nurse reassured me I was doing the right thing: the baby was too delicate.

‘It’s better for him if you use formula,’ she said. ‘And anyway, it ruins your breast tissue.’ She smiled slyly. ‘Your husband will be happier.’

She then gave me small round yellow pills to dry up the milk. I popped one in my mouth while she was watching, but instictively spit it out after she left, like a patient interned in a mental hospital. I decided the minute they released me from the hospital, I was going to do it, whether or not they approved.

It wasn’t just that response that changed my mind. I began to realise that I was missing out.

My editor phoned from London, and I told her.

‘Oh no . . .’ Gill said. ‘Listen . . . you have to try . . . you’ll miss out on the experience.’

My friend Sam called. ‘Did he latch on?’ Why was I being asked this by a man, I wondered, and one of my most macho friends, a man I had crouched under fire with in Afghanistan? Why was even he judging me for not breastfeeding? ‘Because they’re like lambs when they’re born . . . they do it naturally,’ he continued.

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’m not breastfeeding. It’s not really part of the culture here.’

Crushing silence. ‘Oh.’

I hung up the phone and felt worse.

I was missing the experience of motherhood, and I was not sure why. Somehow it was racing past me like a wild horse and I was unable to grab the reins and jump on. Yet everyone else was able to. Passing the other rooms of other mothers, I peeked in and saw them bouncing their tiny babies between their knees. They were feeding them with little bottles of formula with confidence and with no tortured feelings that they were a failure for not breastfeeding. Huge families, small children carrying balloons, grandparents with beaming smiles, husbands opening bottles of champagne surrounded them.

Only an Indian woman who had a room at the end of the hall looked as lost as I did. Her skinny, worried husband had asked the nurses to push a cot into the room so that he could sleep next to his wife. Bruno stayed as long as he could, but I was in Paris, not London. I did not have many visitors.

‘Don’t leave me alone here,’ I begged him the first night. ‘Please don’t leave me alone.’

‘But you’re not alone!’ he said, pointing to the glass box where the baby slept. ‘There’s this little creature here!’

Two days after giving birth, on Valentine’s Day he brought me champagne and small pastries filled with creamed chicken and smoked salmon, caviar, and blinis, and roses and chocolates. He stayed with me and told me how much he loved me, and held the baby and fell asleep in the chair with him.

At 10 p.m., he got up to leave. I felt, as I always felt when I was left alone with the baby, in a general state of alarm. Bruno took my hand as he was leaving, ‘You’re going to be a great mother. Just do what you feel is right. You won’t do anything wrong.’

‘There’s so much I could do wrong . . . the wrong amount of formula, I don’t know how to mix it, how to sterilize the bottles, I could drop him in the bath, I might stand too close to the window . . .’

‘Not the window again. You’ll be fine.’ He went back to Paris. ‘I’ve got to sleep, baby, I’ve got to sleep. I feel like I’m going to collapse.’ He had been awake for thirty-six hours, sitting by me while I slept.

After he left, I picked up the baby and I stared at him hard. He had slanted eyes, like his father, and his fingers were long and slender, like mine, but they were still tiny. If I squeezed them, they would break. He had white dots on his nose, that the nurse explained had something to do with coming into contact with the air when he came out of me, into the world. All he did was sleep.

I put him back in the glass box that was his crib, and sat at the edge of the bed, watching him. The crazy thoughts came back into my head.
What if he chokes? How do I feed him? How do I change him?

The nurse, the fat one who was friendly and had a suburban accent, arrived and took him away. ‘You need to sleep,’ she said, looking at my chart. ‘You’re overwrought.’ She gave me a huge blue pill, which was some kind of sedative, and took the quiet baby to the nursery. This time I did not fight the pill or hide it in the crook of my bed. I gulped it down with water, not caring if it was Thorazine or Prozac or something stronger. I just wanted the anxiety, the fear and the sense of dread to go away.

She wheeled the baby away down the hall in his glass box, the creaky wheels making annoying noises.
They’re taking my baby away
, I thought dimly through the drug haze,
and I don’t even care
.

I did not sleep right away, but lay on top of the sheets, stoned from the medication. The room was dark except for the blue light of the TV: five French channels and CNN. I watched the crisis in Haiti growing and saw a crowd of photographers in Port-au-Prince, and caught the back of the head of someone I knew well in the crowd: Tyler. I smiled, thinking of a long trip to Somalia we had taken for a magazine article. The trip when Bruno phoned and said, ‘Let’s get married. Let’s have a baby.’

That was my old life. I dimly wondered how quickly I could get to the Caribbean, to Haiti, if I had to. In the old days, I would have gotten my passport from my bottom drawer, taken my summer clothes, then gone to the airport and bought a ticket. A flight to Miami from Paris was nine hours, then . . . Wait! I was a mother! I was not going anywhere for a while.

And I was still so weak, and not used to being weak. I could barely walk from the after-effects of the epidural. I was sure the pretty Italian anaesthiologist had overdosed me, and I was grateful for her mistake. I had not felt a thing. My friend in London was horrified: ‘You mean you did not want to feel the pushing?’

‘No. Why should I?’ I’d had broken bones before, I told her. I don’t need to know what pain is. And the big blue pill did not put me to sleep, but it seemed to mellow me, as if my anxieties were wrapped in cotton wool.

Someone brought dinner, an older woman who spoke incomprehensible French. She smelled bad and had ugly mousy brown hair, which seemed glued to her scalp. She muttered as she arranged the dishes of watery mashed potatoes and a flattened chicken breast and carrots floating in margarine. She seemed disturbed in some way, her movements violent. She frightened me, like one of the main characters in the big Beatrix Potter book someone had given me for Luca. A giant rat.

‘I can’t eat,’ I told her, and asked for tea. She looked startled, interrupted from her muttering.

‘Tea? No tea.’ She left, still talking to herself. Someone else came in and said under no circumstances should I get out of bed because I would fall.

‘You’re wobbly,’ they said. ‘But at least you don’t have stitches. The professor is a genius. You are lucky.’ Someone came in with another giant pill, this one green, and a glass of water. Someone else gave me an injection. I know I should have asked what they were for, but the truth was I did not care. The hours floated, the baby cared for by strangers in a nursery down the hall.

‘Now you really must sleep,’ said the night nurse. And I did.

Sometime during the night the green pill wore off and I woke up. I was sore and the place where my drip was connected to my arm ached. I heard a baby crying, several in fact, in unison, but I instinctively knew that it was not my baby. I got out of bed, sliding the IV drip still attached to my arm along with me down the hall as though I was leading a dog on a lead. I found the nursery and looked for my baby. But they all looked alike, these strange creatures: small, wrinkled, dressed in too-large jumpsuits, topped off with either blue or pink knitted caps. Some were screaming and some had masses of black hair. Did my baby have hair? I had only seen him for a few hours. Was he the baby in the second cot? I peered at the name card which said, ‘
Caresse-moi
, but only with your eyes.’ No, that baby was called Adam. The next one was a girl called Chloe. Then there was a Gary – a decidedly un-French name – and a Roman.

Then I saw my baby. All the other babies were lying down, but mine was sitting up in a kind of chair, because he had fluid in his lungs. The nurse had called it
glare
but no one could translate for me. I had called a French friend in London in desperation. ‘
Glare
,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I’m not sure there is a word in English. It’s a kind of thick thing in your throat . . . let me think . . . yes, phlegm! That’s the word: phlegm!’

My baby was sitting up and was not crying. In fact, he was remarkably still, quiet, calm. Later, everyone would tell me how ‘
sage
’ he was. This baby was slightly cross-eyed and seemed to be staring at his fingers; his lips were pursed slightly, as if he was whistling. While the other infants howled and screeched around him, he seemed utterly content and quiet. It was my Luca.

And then, at that second, I fell in love with my baby. He was really, really mine, and he was alive. He had lived. He had survived. We both had. I asked the nurse if I could hold him. She handed him to me. He cuddled near my broken collarbone, the one I had broken twice when I was eighteen, and instinctively found the broken bone that stuck up, as though he wanted to make it feel better. He nuzzled into my skin as though he wanted to go back inside me. He reminded me of a small chicken, a capon. For weeks after, Bruno and I called him the capon.