Lingering Shadows

Although she did not know it, Giles blamed himself for not being there with her when she went into labour. At the back of his mind lay the feeling that somehow, if he had been, things might have been different.

It had shocked him when he arrived at the hospital to see how ill Lucy looked. He had been so desperately afraid then that he might lose her that for a moment he had actually forgotten their child.

Their child. His heart ached with the weight of his love for Nicholas. A love he couldn’t find the words to express, especially not to Lucy.

Nicholas’s birth had changed her completely. The girl who had so fiercely resented her pregnancy had become a sad-eyed, haunted woman who seemed barely aware that anyone other than her child existed. She seemed to have distanced herself from him completely. When he touched her she winced away from him. He could see in her eyes now her anger and bitterness.

‘Giles, please. I must be with him … I must.’

Her voice had started to rise, panic flooding her as the need inside her fought against her physical weakness, her inability to get up and go to her child.

Tears filled her eyes. She didn’t want to cry, she wanted to scream, to rage, to vent her anger and her fear, to somehow make them understand that she must be with her child, but already a nurse was hurrying towards her bed, holding her wrist, telling her firmly that she must not upset herself.

She tried to fight off the drug they gave her, forcing her weighted eyelids not to drop, focusing bitterly on Giles’s blurring face as she lost her battle.

She woke up abruptly hours later, her heart pounding, her mouth dry. It was just gone two o’clock, and she knew immediately why she was awake.

She heard the door to the ward open quietly and saw the nurse coming in, heading for the small curtained area at the end of the ward. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t; the pain was too great for that.

Giles. Where was Giles? Why wasn’t he here with her? Didn’t he care?

Outside the premature-baby unit, Giles leaned back in his chair, blinking his eyes rapidly. He couldn’t believe it was over. They had told him to go home after they had given Lucy the sleeping drug but he hadn’t been able to do so. He could still see the way she had pleaded with them to let her be with Nicholas.

Had she known? He shuddered, weighed down by his sense of guilt and failure, and the ache of loss. Their child, their son … his son. Born and now dead.

He stayed until a doctor gently insisted that he must leave; that he must go home and rest because Lucy would need him when she woke up and was told the news.

Giles wanted to tell her how much he wanted to hold his child … how much he wanted to lift him from his cradle of plastic and metal—after all, they could not save him now—and hold him against his body, flesh to flesh, father to child. That he wanted to pour out to him all the love he felt for him, but he just could not find the words, and so instead he nodded and stumbled out of the hospital into the cold of the pre-dawn summer morning.

They would not wake Lucy until nine, they told him kindly. That would give him time to have a brief rest and get back to be with her.

It was not his fault, nor the hospital’s, that Lucy did not need to be wakened.

She waited until the nurses changed shift. There was a new nurse, a trainee, the ward was busy, and it was easy for Lucy to convince the girl that she could manage to get to the bathroom unaided.

It took her a long time to make her way to the prem unit. She was still very weak. They hadn’t told her just how much blood she had lost or just how much danger she had actually been in, and Lucy assumed that it was the drug they had given her that made her feel so unsteady.

The nurse in charge of the unit didn’t see her until it was too late. The tubes had been removed from the incubator and Nicholas had been dressed in a set of minute doll’s clothes, a white knitted romper suit embroidered with teddy bears in pale blue and yellow.

The mother of another premature baby had given the clothes to the hospital, and the nurse, who knew that she should have the strength to detach herself from her emotions, had cried a little as she dressed him in them.

She saw Lucy and knew immediately that there was no need to tell her anything, and she marvelled, not for the first time, at the power of maternal love. Silently she settled Lucy with Nicholas in her arms and then went to her office to ring Lucy’s ward.

His body felt soft and warm so that it was almost possible for Lucy to believe that he was simply asleep. She touched his face. His skin felt so soft. He looked like Giles. She was sure of it. It was only when she kissed him that her control broke, her body racked by the shudders of pain that ached through her.

By the time Giles arrived they had sedated her, and, what with his concern over her and the arrangements for the funeral she insisted on holding, it never occurred to Giles to tell her how he had watched over Nicholas for her, or that he had been with him when he died.

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