The Secret Daughter (22 page)

So, I stayed in the office that morning and I was sweating on news of the birth. June was always terribly lax with her paperwork and so I tried to complete records from past placements while I waited, but I could barely concentrate. Just before lunch the phone rang, and after a quiet conversation, June turned to me and shook her head.

‘Not looking good for Liliana W.’

‘Not looking good?’ I repeated blankly.

‘Too lazy even to push, apparently. They’re talking about taking her to theatre.’

I left the office, ignoring the alarmed call June threw after me, and I ran across the road towards the delivery suites. As soon as I pushed open the swinging doors I could that she was in serious trouble.

They had tied her to the bed. Her wrists were caught in thick leather restraints, the edges bloodied and bruised from endless hours of straining to be free. Lilly was lying on her back, completely sunken into the mattress, and the obstetrician was between her legs with forceps. Several people were shouting at her to push, and there was a second doctor pushing at the bump of her belly.

Lilly’s eyes were open but vacant – she was staring toward the window. Her lips were so dry that they had cracked, and there was a smudge of dried blood down her chin.

We’d shared some great chats during Lilly’s time in the home. I’d come to admire her, and I felt certain that beneath all of the difficulty of her current situation, she was strong enough to go on and forge a great future for herself. I’d intended to remind her of that strength when she was adjusting to life without her baby. When I saw her on the bed, I knew that I couldn’t wait that long.

I unstrapped her hands, leant over her on the bed and forced her to look at me. Her eyes were glazed – God only knows what drugs they’d pumped into her. I had learned that it was standard practice for the medical staff to sedate the maternity home girls during their labours. Easier on everyone, June had told me once, but whatever drug it was they gave those girls it didn’t seem to make it easier on
them.
They were still in pain, just less able to protest or to ask for help – or to push, which meant forceps became standard practice and the girls had then to deal with the aftermath of a much more traumatic birth.

I shook Lilly a little bit, but when she failed to respond I shook her harder and then I shouted at her, until I felt she’d focussed sufficiently to be aware that I was there. I knew that she’d snapped out of her stupor enough to recognise me when those big brown eyes swam in tears.

‘You can do this, Lilly,’ I told her, and she shook her head and moaned, and I squeezed her hand as hard as I could. She whimpered and I looked to the doctors at the foot of the bed. ‘Are you going to do the caesarean? Surely this has dragged on too long?’

‘It
has
dragged on too long,’ one of the midwives muttered behind me. ‘The baby’s heart rate is dipping, there’s no time. We have to get it out
now
. . . or . . .’

I was suddenly aware of the beeping in the room, and of the unstable rhythm that was driving every action like the beat under a song. The heartbeat was too fast, and then it was too slow, and like everyone else in the room, I started to panic.

‘Come on, Liliana! For God’s sake, push!’ the doctor shouted, and I grabbed Lilly’s shoulders and pressed my face right up against hers.

‘I can’t do it,’ she whispered to me. I could hear from the rough edges to her voice that she’d been screaming, maybe for days. ‘I just can’t.’

‘We’ll do it together,’ I whispered back. I held her eye contact, and I took a breath in. ‘Push with me, okay, Lilly? Let’s do it for a count of ten, together. You’ve got this. I
know
you have.’

She nodded at me, and her hands fumbled for my shoulders. We counted to ten together, over and over again, Lilly’s hoarse voice a desperate cry at each number, but she did it – she bloody
did
it, even after all of those hours. She brought her baby into the world like that – her eyes locked on mine, her hands on my shoulders and mine on hers. It was a few minutes later that the baby slid free and the tension in the room eased with the sound of the baby’s weak but determined protest at the cold air. Lilly collapsed onto the bed, but then she immediately pulled herself up, bolt upright into a sitting position.

I could almost see a shadow of joy cross her face as she stared at her baby. It was fleeting, but there was a definite hint of it there in the flash of light that I saw in her eyes. They took the baby straight out as they always did, and I wondered if Lilly realised how lucky she was that they’d been too distracted with the tension of the last moments of her labour to remember to block her view with a pillow, as they were supposed to.

Then she sank, all the way back down and into the pillows, and she no longer seemed too young to be pregnant and I felt sick with guilt at even thinking the words
luck
and
Lilly
in the same breath, given what was happening to her. Now Lilly seemed old and withered, dried out and worn, and she closed her eyes and I waited for her to cry.

‘Good girl, Lilly,’ I whispered, but she turned her head away from me, back towards the window. I took her hand again, and she gave my fingers a weak squeeze, and then her hand went limp and I thought for a second she’d passed out. ‘Lilly?’

She shook her head a little, and I realised that she needed a moment to retreat into herself. I released her hand and stepped back from the bed, feeling awkward and uncomfortable. The mood in the room had shifted all the way back from panic to business-as-usual as the doctors prepared for the placenta and the nurses calmly discussed their weekend.

I backed out of the room, and as soon as I was in the corridor I realised that I felt almost sea-sick – nauseous from the shock of it all. There was no time to find a bathroom – I was lucky to find a rubbish bin, and I crouched over it and vomited again and again.

‘Are you all right?’ One of the junior nurses came to my aid, and when the moment had passed and I was leaning against the wall recovering, she nodded towards my stomach. ‘Are you . . .’

I shook my head, hastily – almost violently, and then I started to cry.

‘Oh, I’m sorry—’

‘Don’t be,’ I said, too harshly, and then I felt bad all over again from the way the young nurse’s face fell. ‘I’m sorry, it’s been a rough morning. I’m okay now, thank you for helping me.’

I pulled myself up and walked down toward the bathroom. I washed my face, then rinsed my mouth, and stared at myself in the mirror. So many times in my five months at the maternity home, I’d felt as though I had hit rock bottom, but surely there would be no worse day than this one.

I walked to the nursery, where the midwife was wrapping Lilly’s baby. There were dark bruises on either side of the child’s head, a strangely bright purple against her otherwise raspberry red skin.

‘It’s a girl?’ I asked softly.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know why she was stuck?’

‘She wasn’t in the right position, she came out wrong side up, always makes things more difficult. Maybe if they’d let her go a few more weeks, until the baby was ready to be born, it would have been an easier arrival. It’s done now, anyway. We can’t very well put her back in.’

‘But she’s okay?’

‘She’s fine, although I daresay another few minutes and the story might have ended differently.’

I sighed and stared down at the baby. She was resting, quite peacefully, as if she’d already overcome the trauma of her birth and could now enjoy a nap. I didn’t generally let myself touch the newborns, they seemed too small and fragile.

But there was something different about this baby. I felt almost as if I’d participated in her birth. I touched her cheek with the pad of my finger.

‘Got a home for this one yet?’ the midwife asked me briskly. I sighed and shook my head.

‘We placed a few babies over the last few weeks, I don’t have any families waiting.’

‘Off to an institution then? It doesn’t seem right sometimes, we put these mothers through all of
that
, and the babe ends up without a family anyway.’

‘It doesn’t seem right,’ I repeated, and then I felt all hot and sickly again so I withdrew my hand from the baby’s face. ‘I’ll come by later to see how they’re getting on.’

I walked outside, and the cold spring air hit me, easing the nausea and draining the heat from my cheeks.

I’d been at the home for five months, and for that entire time I’d been fighting with an ever-growing protest inside myself. Most nights, when I tumbled into bed, I could barely believe that I’d survived another day. At times I’d almost dissociated from the work I was doing. Maybe the only way I could continue was to compartmentalise my work and my private life, and to pretend altogether that I wasn’t taking any part at all in what was happening in the maternity home.

Grae had trapped me, you see. In typical Graeme Baxter fashion, he’d waltzed in the door to our quaint home in Balmain after work one day, with a bottle of champagne and a devilish grin, and announced that he’d accepted a transfer to the finance department in the health service at Orange. That was shocking enough, but then he told me that as a bonus he’d convinced them to employ me too. He felt we needed a change of scenery after the sadness and struggle of the previous few years, and so he’d gone ahead and arranged one.

I didn’t realise until I arrived for my first day at work that he’d forgotten to mention the part about my position being based in the maternity home, working with the adoption service. I’d just assumed I would be working in elder care, as I had been since I graduated university. We had just suffered the loss of our seventh pregnancy and there was no way . . . absolutely
no
way in hell that I’d have knowingly accepted a job working with miserably pregnant teenagers.

But I should have known. Grae had long since given up on the idea of a baby of our own. He had well and truly passed the limit of his tolerance for the waiting and the longing and the momentary joy before the pain started all over again, but I was so
sure
that we just needed more time. Miracles happened every day, I’d seen them myself in my fifteen odd years as a social worker at the nursing home. How many times had we called family and clergy to farewell a deathly elderly patient, only to have that patient up and walking the corridors within days or even hours? I had always felt so sure that sooner or later, we’d conceive and a pregnancy would stick somehow and all of the heartache would have been worthwhile.

Besides which, I was the one who had to struggle through the miscarriages, and if
I
was willing to keep going, who was
he
to suggest otherwise?

He was
Graeme
, that’s who. My strong-willed, too-charming-for-his-own-good, increasingly arrogant husband. And after a few rounds of me pleading if we could
just give it one more shot
before looking into adoption, when his prompting and questioning and demanding became unbearable, I shifted my delaying tactics and told him that I just
loved
working and wanted to
hang in there
just a little longer before we committed to a ready-made baby. And perhaps there was some truth to all of that at the nursing home, where I felt that I was making a difference.

But then he manipulated me into a position where I had to stare my infertility in the face every single damned day. I was a fish out of water in the maternity home, working in a team of only two social workers, alongside June Sullivan who believed so passionately in our work. From my first day, I felt sure that I was walking the halls with a mortified expression on my face, and no amount of professionalism could hide my disdain.

It wasn’t that I had anything against adoption. I could see that there were situations where it was a useful tool for helping young women who weren’t ready for motherhood, helping babies who otherwise wouldn’t have had a suitable home, and helping families who were infertile.

Of course, I did not think of
myself
as infertile, maybe just fertility
challenged
, and I felt quite
certain that adoption was not for us . . . at least, not yet. I didn’t just want a baby, I wanted
our
baby . . . I wanted the whole package – the morning sickness, the stretch marks, the birth, the bliss of looking down at my body and seeing our marriage extended in the most natural of ways. I wanted to raise our child without the complication of knowing that she had some other family out there . . . missing her and loving her and worst of all, missing
out
on her. Besides which, I was equally certain that any one of those girls in the home could raise their own child if they were given the right support. It felt beyond evil to convince them otherwise.

Grae, on the other hand, thought that this system of baby-farming was brilliant and he could never understand my struggle with it. At first, when I came home from work upset and conflicted, he found ways to be supportive. He’d give me back rubs and pour me wine and tell me to
hang in there
. He’d soliloquise on the virtues of adoption for teenage mothers, repeating all of the lies that I heard June tell every day . . . conveniently forgetting that I was seeing the human face of the theory and that I understood much better than he the actual reality of it.

When I was really upset, he’d remind me how generous the hospital was to find me a position so that we could move and have this
great opportunity
. He quickly became good friends with the general manager at the hospital, and reminded me again and again that the maternity home was a great source of pride to the upper echelons of the health service. When I first suggested I might need to resign, Graeme was so horrified about how offensive this might be to his colleagues that for a brief moment or two, I abandoned the idea altogether.

I was conflicted, and always uncertain about my own opinion, especially in something this serious, because Graeme was just not often
wrong
about things. Life had taught me, again and again, that when Grae and I disagreed, it was usually because he knew a little more about the subject than I did.