IT WAS EARLY SPRING AT Thomas Street when I started hearing voices in the night, or one voice, a child’s voice, crying, softly enough to be wind through a window crack on the front veranda. It was not Otis; he was at the other end of the house and the voice was older, sadder. Seven, I would have said if forced to testify. The child was seven and alone in suffering. If I sat up or got out of bed and concentrated on them, the cries receded to nothing. I had to focus on something else and they returned in the back of my mind.
David reminded me that it had been a bad year. I was overwrought. But he didn’t argue when I suggested we move from the front bedroom. I told him I couldn’t stand to sleep near the veranda. He didn’t even ask why.
You must understand I am not a believer, not even an agnostic. I would call spirits nonsense to their faces, would walk out of a séance, ignore a psychic. But there was something in the house, I felt sure now.
The people who lived at Thomas Street before us were a Catholic family, five children, a mother, father and two uncles who slept on the veranda. Devout, the neighbours on the near side said. I asked the woman who lived over the back, who’d lived there her whole life, if it was possible that ours had been an unhappy house. Yes, she said, it had. She would not say more despite my prompting and offering of tea, just changed the subject whenever I raised it.
I told Louise the whole story of what had happened in my young life, the guilt I was now feeling. I told Louise because she had been with me since the start and I needed her help. Before I told her, I worried she would judge me harshly. Once again, she did not. ‘How could they?’ she said. ‘How could they do that to you?’
I told her sometimes I thought my life wasn’t worth going on with. She sent me flowers and a card. You’re going to pull through this, she wrote. You will, and David and Otis and I will make sure you do.
Louise started visiting more often, sitting with me, with Otis. She never once suggested I shouldn’t be the mother of a child, even though it was something I was becoming certain of. I was frightened that if people knew what was happening in our house, if they knew how I would fall apart and not manage, they would come and take Otis away from me. It was for a time my biggest fear, that I would lose Otis too.
I told Louise, ‘You kept your child, I gave mine to strangers.’
Like me, Louise had fallen pregnant unintentionally as a young woman. Her circumstances were completely different, as she reminded me. She and her baby’s father, Gerard, were going to marry sometime anyway. It just sped things up. But it was still the truth. She held on to her baby. I gave mine to strangers.
My friend Louise stayed with me through all of the years I was of no use to the world. At times we lost contact—my fault, not hers—and our values don’t always mesh on things. She invested everything in four children and a house needing renovation and cars and life in private schools. I invested in a career of sorts and at any rate could not cope with too much time around her children, around her babies. When their son Josh had his twenty-first, I couldn’t bear to go. I wrote him a letter I never sent.
Dear Josh,
I was sorry to be away for your coming of age. It’s a milestone for you I’d have loved to share in. Were you the barista? If so, I am doubly sorry to have missed the occasion.
When I was eighteen, I became pregnant. I gave the baby, a girl I named Ruth, up for adoption. She has lived a happy enough life as far as I know. I believed I was doing the only thing I could.
When Louise told me she was pregnant with you, she was not much older than I was when I was pregnant, not much older than you are now. Your mother has such courage, Josh, and such conviction. Nothing would take you away from her. She is one of the best people I know.
Your life has been a blessing for me in ways you can’t have understood. Once, when you were about two, I was sitting on the floor and you came and sat by me and put your hand on my leg like we were buddies. You just sat there. For you it was just what you did, but for me it was an acknowledgement of me as a person in your little life.
I have no advice to give you Josh, just a hope that the rest of this life will be rich and full.
He is a fine boy, Josh. They are a fine family.
For a time, I feared the presence in our house for presentiment, a future rather than past evil; evil would be done to a child of seven here, and that child was Otis. We should move away, I told David, move anywhere to make sure Otis remains safe. Even as I said it, I knew this for what it was, my poor worn-out imagination, just as I knew I would not die on the Golden Gate Bridge or be taken by a shark while swimming in the bay yet still feared them.
In my kahuna sessions with Stace, we started to feel the presence of Mary, the mother of Jesus, with us. This did not seem odd.
I asked Mary, a mother who lost a child, to intercede on my behalf, to talk to God about giving me my life back, so I could mother my son. ‘You already have your life,’ she said, smiling. ‘Look, don’t you see?’
For a while, I saw my fear of bridges as a metaphor. Terrified, I walked from pylon to pylon, experienced a measure of safety, and then set out again. But at times, it felt as if there would be no end to this, no Sausalito. It was like labour; labour that could not end in birth. After Otis was born, I wanted another child. I longed for another child. But the child I longed for was baby Ruth, who was gone. She could not be born, that is the truth. She could not be reborn. I could not atone. And so I laboured.
I was put on Earth to make one decision. I made the wrong decision. For a long time, I could not get past this.
Mary was a friend of a friend who came to the hospital after Otis was born. She had five adult children and had trained as a social worker after her kids grew up. She’d worked with teenage parents. Mary took an interest in new mothers, in me and little Otis. I put the yellow stuffed toy dragon she gave Otis in his cot with him after we got home from the hospital, along with Blue Bear, given to him by Louise. The brand of the dragon is Gund, German, and that became the dragon’s name. To me, it meant that good mothers were watching over him. The nightjars notwithstanding, surely Gund and Blue Bear, from mothers like Mary and Louise, would keep him safe.
I gave Mary a copy of the essay I’d written about birth. It was the first time I’d put in writing that I’d had a baby before Otis, and before it was published I sent it to everyone in my life who hadn’t known. I sat down with many of my friends, including Kim, and told them in person. I didn’t tell them everything, not then, but it was the beginning of telling the secret. It was terrifying, as every step on this journey has been, and it turned out all right, as every step on this journey has.
Before the essay was published, I emailed Mary and told her I’d had a baby as a teenager and I wanted to let her know before the essay came out because she’d been so kind to me when Otis was born and I’d felt dishonest not telling her the truth.
Some months later, Mary called me and we met for coffee. She told me she already knew I’d had a baby earlier in my life. I asked her how.
Her daughter in Melbourne, she said carefully, was going out with a boy, and the boy was my daughter’s cousin. My daughter had told the boy that her biological mother was from Brisbane, and she told him my name. Mary’s daughter knew my name because Mary had mentioned me.
Her daughter and this boy were about to marry, Mary said.
This was such a strange coincidence I could only believe it must have come from something beyond us.
We met again. I told Mary there would be no rules from my side about what she said or didn’t say. There would be no rules from me. I don’t believe in secrets.
Mary and I became closer. She was someone I could lean on in those months I felt so treacherous. In all the time she worked with young parents, she said, she only ever met one family where the baby might have been better off somewhere else. It felt like truth to me at a time when everyone else in my life was serving up platitudes—you did the best thing, she was better off, you made the right decision.
‘And even then,’ Mary said, ‘you’d have to be sure before you took a baby from his mother.’
It was a relief to hear someone say it.
I said, ‘Mary, I was put on Earth to make one decision. I made the wrong decision.’ I was crying, had been crying for months. Whenever I told people this, they said, ‘Of course you didn’t. You did the best thing for your baby,’ which I knew to be untrue.
Mary looked me in the eye directly, which was rare for Mary. She mostly let you slide away. ‘You made a wrong decision,’ she said. ‘You probably did. That’s okay. You’ve made others. You’ll make more.’