CG: You couldn’t have known. And you must have been exhausted. All those weeks –
RS: You’re right. We were. But it was still no excuse. One of us should have been there.
AF: [pause]
And that was 21st December 1997.
RS: [nods]
AF: But you didn’t tell anyone. Your family, friends –
RS: [shaking her head]
It wasn’t like it is now. No WhatsApp or putting a running commentary of your life online. We hadn’t even sent anyone any pictures – not with him in an incubator with all those horrible tubes. And then he was dead and we were going to have to call people and tell them and we just couldn’t face it. Not straight away. It was too raw.
AF: And two days later? The 23rd?
RS: [takes a deep breath]
It was raining. I remember. Just sheeting down like the whole world was drowning. But it was suffocating in the house – I couldn’t breathe – all that stuff everywhere you looked about Christmas and the miracle of birth and ‘Away in a Manger’ – I just couldn’t deal with it. I had to get out. So I walked. I can’t remember – hours – in the mud and the cold, feeling the water just running down my face. Miles and miles till I could barely stand up. By the time I got home it was dark. And the lights were on and there was this lovely smell – tea, and toast, and warm milk, and there was David and he was holding a baby in his arms – a tiny baby, making these little mewling noises, and I thought – I really thought – that I had gone mad. That I was hallucinating – I wanted this so much and it had been taken from me and my mind had broken –
[breaks down]
AF: [silence]
What did your husband say – about the baby?
RS: He wouldn’t tell me anything. He said it was best I didn’t know. That I couldn’t be blamed if I didn’t know.
AF: Nothing else – nothing at all?
RS: He said that the baby was ours now. That we were rescuing him. That was his word. Rescuing.
AF: Do you know where your husband had been that day? Had he been out?
RS: I don’t know.
AF: You didn’t ask?
RS: No, I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.
CG: And you had already registered the birth of Noah?
RS: Yes, David had, just after he was born.
CG: And applied for a passport for him? Because you knew you were going back to the US that January?
RS: [nods]
Every single day before we left I sat at home waiting for the knock at the door. For someone like you to come looking for him – to take him back. But no one ever came. And when we went to the airport to go home I was so terrified I thought I was going to pass out but still no one said anything, and when we arrived back at JFK no one said anything, and when we got home everyone simply accepted that he was our son and they were just happy for us, happy that he had pulled through. And then more weeks went by and went by and eventually we realised that no one was ever going to say anything, because no one was looking for him. And I started to believe what David had said. We had rescued him. No one was looking because nobody cared. Nobody except us. We loved him. And he loved us.
AF: [silence]
But then he found out.
* * *
21 August 2017, 7.45 a.m.
175 Toussaint Street, Brooklyn Heights, NY 11201
She never saw it coming. Perhaps she should have. But all those years of make-believe and disavowal can layer on a cocoon, erode your watchfulness. So when it did come, she was utterly unprepared. No speech carefully rehearsed, no easy explanation ready to hand. Just sharp words breaking into a fitful day-sleep full of phantoms.
‘Mom, can I talk to you?’
When she opens her eyes, he’s standing there. Her son. Her kind, thoughtful, considerate son. But he looks none of those things now. There’s a frown across his dark-blue eyes.
She struggles upright. There’s an ache in her neck where she’s lain crookedly. This sofa was never designed for sleep. Just as her bed was never designed for hours of waking. Her days are all the wrong way round.
‘What’s the matter?’ she says groggily, checking her watch.
‘This,’ he says, holding out something. ‘As in, what the hell is it?’
It’s a piece of paper. No – not paper. A photograph. There’s a rush of bitterness in her mouth. She knows exactly what it is. Buried, like the memories, all these years, but like those memories, never lost. She wasn’t supposed to keep it; she promised David she’d destroyed them all, and he’d held her as she sobbed and said he knew how hard it was but it was the only way, the only safe way, because he’d looked into the future and seen a day like this, seen the abyss it would open up in their lives.
‘Where did you get it?’ she says. Faux-naif. Buying time.
Noah’s frown has deepened. ‘In that box of yours. In your underwear drawer. As if you didn’t know.’
‘What on earth were you doing in there?’
‘Just answer the question, Mom.’
He’s been talking, lately, about going to law school. On this showing, perhaps he should.
‘It’s a picture of you, sweetheart. In the hospital.’
The one David took the day the hospital moved their baby to the general ward. The first day they were allowed to hold him properly, after all those dreadful weeks when they thought they’d lose him. Their miracle son. Doing so well. Putting on weight, his little cheeks rounding out –
‘It can’t be,’ he says.
‘Why not?’
‘Because of this.’
A second photograph. And this has no secret history. It’s the one they took, After. The one they had no choice but take because they’d promised everyone back home that they would send a photo and there was no excuse any more because he was out of the hospital and home for Christmas – their first Christmas as a family …
That tiny sitting room in Edgbaston she always hated, Noah on her lap, David’s arm around her. And yes, looking at it now, perhaps his grip is a little tight, perhaps the smiles are a little stiff, but no one back then thought that was odd because everyone knew what they’d been through.
Or thought they did.
‘It doesn’t add up,’ he says, stubborn now, pointing again at the first picture. ‘Look.’
She doesn’t need to. She knows what he’s talking about. That bright strawberry mark on her son’s brow. The one they told her would fade over time; the one she never even began to fret about because it was so trivial, so inconsequential, compared to everything else they were dealing with.
She swallows.
He’s watching her face. ‘I googled them – those birthmark things. It can take years for them to fade.’ He holds up the other picture. ‘But here, two months later, max, and it’s gone. There’s nothing there at all. It’s as if it was never there.’
He’s still staring at her, waiting for her to deny it – waiting for some sort of explanation. But nothing comes.
‘It’s not me, is it? The kid in the hospital. It’s Noah, but it’s not me.’
She looks up at him, expecting anger, fury, incomprehension. But his eyes are full of tears.