Six days after her baby was taken from her body and placed in the humidicrib, his artificial uterus, Julia is back at home. They hadn’t wanted her sleeping in the chair beside the humidicrib at the hospital, and she hadn’t been able to face another night in the maternity ward, surrounded by the sound of healthy new babies crying for their mother’s milk. It is surreal to be back in the outside world, as though someone has turned the lights up before the end of a movie. She thinks of her baby still in neonatal intensive care, where the drama is not yet over.
She stares at a Polaroid image of her son to stimulate the oxytocin-driven let-down reflex, which will start the flow of milk, and she holds the plastic pump in position, ready to draw the life-giving fluid from her breasts. The release of hormones feels like someone is pouring warm treacle down the back of her head and neck. She imagines the milk flowing into her full breasts and then into the mouth of her baby. The visualisation works. To start with, the milk appears thick and yellowish in the sterilised bottle attached to the pump. After a while, it thins out to a bluish white.
She sips on a weak coffee and assures herself it won’t harm her baby. Caffeine is given intravenously to the infants in the nursery to stimulate their breathing, she was told just yesterday by a nurse, so a small amount in her breastmilk will be of little consequence. Perhaps it could even help. When Julia asked what other drugs her child might be given, the list was long: steroids, antibiotics, surfactants to clear his lungs and, if necessary, morphine for pain.
‘It’s a wonder they don’t come out of here as addicts,’ Julia had said.
‘It’s a wonder some of them come out of here at all,’ the nurse had replied, and then, as if sensing the harshness of her words, continued. ‘They’re such little miracles, every one of them. I’ve often thought that these babies have fought more battles just to make it into the world than many of us face in a lifetime.’
Last night, Julia’s first night at home, she woke with a sense of dread. She phoned the hospital, to check that everything was all right. It wasn’t. Only moments before, the paediatrician had been called to investigate a sudden drop in her son’s oxygen levels. When she arrived, her baby boy was blue and being ventilated with a hand pump. The sight of so many medical staff around the humidicrib had sent her into a terrified spin. The intense concentration on the paediatrician’s face said it all. A nurse took Julia by the arms and backed her away to the waiting room. There was nothing she could do, and no room for her anyway at the bedside. In those few minutes, while she sat staring at a wall poster of a smiling breastfeeding mother, her son would either live or die. Life on a knife edge. Just when she had thought he was out of the woods, he was back in them again, and it was darker in there than ever. She had been warned that this was the nature of such extreme prematurity: no guarantees, just sudden turns.
The nurse told her afterwards that one of the tubes into her son’s lungs had been too deep, blocking the supply of oxygen, a relatively common occurrence. The tube had been repositioned quickly, and a brain scan showed there was no damage. By then it was four in the morning and Julia steadied herself with a warm, sugary tea and a cream biscuit before going to see her baby.
He appeared peaceful again, although a deep furrow persisted on his tiny brow. How she longed to hold him to her, to feed him, and rock him and sing him a lullaby. How she longed to be held and rocked and sung to herself.
‘Would you like some tostados, Julia?’ her mother calls out from the kitchen. She’d arrived two days ago to mind María and to help with the cooking and washing. But her presence in the house, while an enormous help and support, has left Julia feeling more dependent and less strong, as if she is a child again. For reasons Julia doesn’t understand, the maternal sympathy and concern seem to magnify her own anxieties rather than reduce them.
‘When I get back,’ Julia answers.
‘When can I visit my baby brother?’ María hollers, bursting into Julia’s bedroom.
‘Soon, sweetheart. When he’s a bit stronger,’ Julia replies, deciding to hold María off for a few more days. To protect her, in case the worst should happen. Who knows if it’s the right decision.
Julia places the expressed milk in a small esky containing a freezer brick and prepares to take it to the hospital. Only tiny amounts of breastmilk have been given to her son so far, and her supply in the nursery freezer is becoming embarrassingly large. The nurses have assured her she should keep bringing it in: ‘It’s too precious to waste. He’ll use it. You’ll see.’
Julia opens the door to the nursery and washes her hands automatically at the basin. The routine has become second nature. A curtain is drawn around one of the other humidicribs and Julia can hear a woman crying. The voice of the paediatrician is soft and low, comforting. A sick feeling pervades Julia’s stomach and she notices that her hands are shaking as she dries them on a paper towel. The curtain is drawn back and a mother and father are handed a small bundle of baby wrapped in a tiny hospital blanket. Julia sees the dead infant’s face buried into its mother’s neck. The tubes have been removed but the baby is ghost white. The tearful parents are shown to a private room at the side of the intensive care area. Their baby, born only a few days ago, and smaller than her own, has died. It’s all over. All their hopes, dreams and fears.
Julia thinks she can see, amidst the profound grief, something resembling relief on the mother’s face. No more wondering if her baby will survive, or be permanently disabled from the early birth. No more rushing to the hospital at three o’clock in the morning to be told that the baby had given them a scare but that everything is again all right—for now. It’s all over. Everything but the loss, which will be there forever.
Julia feels herself holding onto the bench by the milk freezer. She is swaying. How much can people be asked to bear? How cruel can life be?
She places her newly expressed milk in a sterile freezer bag, seals it carefully and writes on the label: ‘Baby Sánchez Pereira, 10/10/02’. Beside her supply is a collection of bags carefully labelled ‘Esmeralda Brovetto Alves’. Julia recognises the name from the humidicrib that now lies bare. She wonders what will happen to the breastmilk.
Making her way to her own baby, Julia passes the room where the bereaved parents are washing and dressing their child for the first and last time.
‘He’s breathing by himself today,’ one of the nurses says to Julia, bringing her attention back to her son. ‘Some good news for us.’ The nurse discreetly wipes away a tear. It occurs to Julia that their job must be one of the hardest. Nursing tiny babies to their early graves. Perhaps the nurse questions whether there was more she could have done for little Esmeralda and her parents. ‘A good day for your first cuddle. What do you think?’
Julia is excited and nervous all at once. ‘Are you sure he’ll be all right? I don’t want to hurt him.’
‘He’ll love it.’
The baby is cautiously taken from the humidicrib with his trail of intravenous lines, and the nurse motions to place him in Julia’s arms.
‘Just let me sit down,’ Julia says, scrambling for the hospital chair. ‘All right. Ready.’
She takes the baby and holds him against her body. He wriggles his tiny legs against her stomach, this time from the outside. His little eyes are open now and he makes a small cry. It’s the sweetest sound she has ever heard. ‘Te quiero,’ she whispers, placing a kiss on his forehead. The respiratory monitors sound their alarm.
The nurse reaches for the baby. ‘Each day the cuddles will get a little longer, and he’ll get a little stronger,’ she says, promptly returning him to the humidicrib. His respiration rate returns to normal. ‘He loves his mamá. You got him all excited and he forgot to breathe.’ The nurse checks the monitors. ‘Have you decided on a name yet?’
‘No,’ Julia says, remembering to breathe herself. ‘Well, almost.’ She inhales deeply. ‘Eduardo,’ she says, her voice cracking with emotion.
‘Eduardo Sánchez Pereira. That sounds perfect,’ the nurse says, as she takes the blank name card from its slot at the end of the crib and cements the baby’s identity in black permanent ink. ‘Is Eduardo a family name?’
‘It’s the name of my husband’s best friend, and this little one’s godfather-to-be. It’s what we’d spoken about.’
‘Bueno,’ the nurse says, returning the card to its slot and then attending to the next baby.
‘Si.’ Julia feels a sense of relief. ‘Eduardo,’ she whispers, happy that her child has a name. He deserves that. Just as Esmeralda did.
Julia strokes her baby’s hand before leaving the hospital for a waiting bus. She finds a seat to herself beside a window and presses her forehead against the glass. Tears wet her cheeks—tears born of relief that her baby will probably now survive, and tears of exhaustion from nearly a fortnight of little sleep. She cries too for Esmeralda, and her parents, and the knowledge that it could so easily have been her facing that bottomless pit of grief. Julia can still see the parched and drained expression on Esmeralda’s mother’s face. Her robotic steps to the small private room. Her dead baby in her arms. Life can be so cruel. How will those parents recover from this? How will they ever trust in life again? Julia closes her eyes and tries to relax her aching muscles. Life has lost its innocence for her too, she realises. It can all change so fast.
She should count her blessings, she tells herself. Her baby is doing well. She pictures his name, newly printed, above his humidicrib. The worst is over.
The bus turns a corner and is flooded by light—the glare off the Río de la Plata. She has a son, she tells herself. She must allow herself to start believing it.
At her apartment door, she sits on the step, taking a few moments before going inside. A blur of cars and buses rush by as they have always done. People are living their lives. Can’t they see how radically hers has changed? That she has been to hell and back with these trips into the hospital, hoping with every inch of herself that her baby will survive? That little Eduardo’s life has been balanced on the thinnest of blades? An old woman bustles past, blotting her wet eyes with a handkerchief. At her side, being dragged along by the hand, is a small boy. Julia wonders for a moment what their family’s story is. Perhaps they have just visited the boy’s mother in hospital, or perhaps the boy has been orphaned and is now his grandmother’s charge. She turns her attention to a man of about her own age. His hair is prematurely white and the skin under his eyes unusually dark. Perhaps he too has been dealt a raw hand and survived. It occurs to Julia that she is not alone, but closer to humanity than she has ever been. She has been awakened to the precariousness of life, and that knowledge, she realises, is a gift.
She thinks how much she and Carlos wanted this baby, and how difficult it had been to conceive. She remembers the pain of endometriosis as a teenager and the doctor’s warning, in her early twenties, not to delay having children. In ten years of marriage, even without contraception, she still only fell pregnant four times, and two of those pregnancies had ended in miscarriage. The multiple pregnancies have somehow eased the pain of endometriosis, but left the ache of lost babies in its place. It’s a miracle that little Eduardo had been born at all.
Julia opens the apartment door and is greeted by her mother’s voice.
‘I’ve made you a chivito.’
She enters the lounge room in time to see her mother smack the steak sandwich piled high with cheese, bacon, tomato and lettuce on the table.
‘I thought you’d be hungry. And there are empanadas too.’
María is playing on the lounge-room floor with some Barbies on loan from Sofía. She runs to Julia and gives her a tight hug around the legs, before returning to the dolls.
‘How’s the baby?’ Julia’s mother asks guardedly.
‘He’s doing well. I held him today.’
‘Praise God!’ She clasps her hands together in thanks, and in the same moment tells Julia that she has run out of ingredients for a batch of fried biscuits. ‘The mixture is half ready in the fridge if you feel like going out and buying some more eggs.’
‘Madre, just leave me for a moment. I need to have a warm shower. I’m exhausted.’
‘But your lunch?’
Julia closes the bathroom door and eyes the bathtub. In another week she’ll be able to have a soak in there without causing problems to the caesarean scar. It seems like an eternity away. She undresses, inspecting the wound, which is just starting to heal, and thanks God that her baby has, so far, been blessed with life. She turns on the shower taps and steps under the stream of water, letting it wash away days of tension from her body.
When she finally emerges, Julia puts on Carlos’s dressing gown and goes straight to her computer, hoping for a message from her husband. As she scans down the emails, she is surprised to see a second message from the Australian woman, Margaret Bates, which she opens.
Dear Julia,
Perhaps I am the last person you want to hear from, but I felt I had to contact you.
You have no doubt been told that your husband’s boat has been apprehended and is on its way now to Australia. Thankfully the chase is over, but I do hope that he is returned safely to you soon.
I have also heard that you have had your baby prematurely and I just wanted to let you know that there are people on the other side of the world who are feeling for you, and sending you all our positive thoughts.
I didn’t know you were pregnant when I emailed you previously. If there is anything at all that I can do to assist you at this troubling time, please let me know. Please excuse me for seeming so bold, but I know how precious children are, having lost my only son, and feel enormously for what you must be going through.
Kind regards,
Margie Bates
Julia is again confronted but warmed by the concern from the other side of the world. It’s more than her best friend, also on the other side of the world, has offered. Perhaps there is something Margie Bates can do. She sends an email back, pleased that she made an effort with English classes at university:
Dear Margie,
Thank you for your kind letter. My son, although born thirteen weeks early, is now doing well. It has been a daily struggle for us, but we are surviving.
The greatest gift at the moment would be to have my husband home. According to the authorities here, there is no record of his boat fishing in Australian waters. I do not know what influence you have, but if there is any chance of convincing the Australian authorities to try my husband here in Uruguay, that would be the best help you could give.
Regards,
Julia Pereira de Sánchez
Julia presses the send button and watches the message disappear from the screen. When she looks up, she sees her mother in front of her, the uneaten chivito on a plate in her hand.
‘It’s cold. After all the trouble I went to to make it.’
‘Sorry, Mamá. I’ll have it now.’ Julia gives her mother an apologetic hug and sits down at the table to eat.
María migrates up from the floor to sit beside her, walking the Barbies around on the table top as if it was a catwalk. ‘Has our baby got a name yet?’
‘Si.’ Julia kisses María on the forehead, leaving behind a smudge of cold bacon grease. ‘I meant to tell you. It’s Eduardo.’
‘Like Uncle Eduardo?’
‘Just like that, si.’ Julia says, reaching over to wipe her daughter’s face clean.