The Pull of Your Hand

The sun caresses my face with soft, late-afternoon rays, and the unruly brambles offer the last of their inky blackberries, still plump with end-of-summer rain. I put one in my mouth and bitter-sweet sunshine explodes against my tongue. A robin eyes me from a fence, head on one side, querying crumbs.

But the dark river skulks past, exuding a dank winter smell. It saw what I did, and I’m not forgiven. It hosted the aftermath; the police cars, divers and curious public, pecking for information like crows on bones.

From under a tendril of ivy, I pick up a tiny plastic fragment, part of a face. The ‘Missing’ now missing. The grief comes tunnelling through time, surging through my body, a lightning strike of pain, buckling my knees and stopping my breath.

‘Are you alright?’

A tall, weathered man offers me a wrinkled hand as his spaniel sniffs my feet, but as I look up, the kindness in his face contorts with suspicion.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No, and I’m fine, thank you.’

I get back to my feet and move on, but the poster has opened a wormhole in my brain.

The same river path, but pitch black. The wind throwing freezing rain into my face. Chilled, my body slowing down, losing strength. Not caring. Life just pain. Drain it away.

I held something in my hand. A tiny blue glove. Just one. All I had left. The years of consultations, injections, scans, procedures, invasive prodding and poking, sex on schedule, the blinding optimism, and the crashing falls. Hope leaking away in a crimson flood, time after time. Then the two blue lines, not daring to invest, to plan.

But he had his own plans. My stomach swelled, and slowly, tentatively, I reached out for the gift. We built the cot, bought the onesies, put out the bunting for the arrival of a dream.

Then the first, glazed, honey-sweet impossible days, our lives bent to his needs. In return he gave us everything we ever wanted. The rainbow pot of gold, sleeping in a moses basket by our bed.

When the morning screaming and vomiting started, I told myself it was normal, but knew better. I was trained for it, after all. When the seizures started, my tiny scrap of human shaken from inside by some malignant force, I couldn’t look away anymore. The dream had turned sour, rotting around the edges.

High-grade astrocytoma. You almost looked proud, your son’s first top score, but six years of medical school gave those words the power to destroy me. The panic attack that wouldn’t stop. The disbelief, helplessness, inability to get off this slide to utter annihilation.

We were there for him through the worst days, holding his hand as they poisoned and radiated him, as he lay on a drip, screaming, or worse, comatose, but the last day was the worst.

We were allowed to dress him, photograph him, take casts of his hands and feet. Our dream turned to cold clay hollows. The funeral, hugs and hot, melded tears as our friends took the pain and held it with us. For a day or two. Then they went back to their jobs and their lives. And their kids. We went back to the empty moses basket.

They said it was too soon. That I should have taken longer, but what was I supposed to do? Sit at home staring at the space where he wasn’t, listening to the silence he no longer filled?

I went back to the surgery and measured bumps, took blood pressures, dispensed prescriptions. An automation. A head without a heart. Then he came in. Older than our boy, limp and cold after a seizure, and I saw the scans and his dull grey eyes and knew. I couldn’t dispense death the way it had been dispensed to me.

I walked out into that dark, freezing, sleety night. Away from the scared, helpless, hopeful faces. The crying scraps of humanity needing me to save them when I couldn’t.

I walked to the river path, then beside it for miles. Away from the loss, pain, grief and shame. Soaked, frozen, numb, dead inside. I slithered through the mud, vicious brambles leaving bloody trails on my hands.

At the stile where our road meets the river, I stopped, unable to return to the unbearable loss. The dark, oily snake of water slithered swiftly and silently past, offering an anaesthetic, a release. Just one step would have done it. I’ve never been much of a swimmer.

But some almost extinguished flame of hope made me step in a different direction. Into a cold, numb unknown.

I don’t know how long I walked. One foot in front of another, across bridges, roads, stiles, footpaths, further than ever before. When my phone rang, I threw it in the river. Kept walking as the light came up. Away from the river, then back to it. Light then dark then light again. Until I couldn’t go on, and saw a sign for a B&B. I checked in with a dozy hooded youth, entered a sticky, smoke-stinking room and fell into the deepest, blackest sleep of my life. All the days, weeks, months of sleep I had lost to panic, worry and pain, reclaimed in a velvet void.

When I washed up on the shores of sleep, I was like a body without a name. Without my phone, no way of knowing the time or day.

I turned on the small TV, hanging lopsided in the corner, and lay staring. Divers, cordons, police. ‘Missing paediatrician.’ You were there, appealing for help. What was I thinking? How could I have created more pain? I wasn’t thinking at all, of course, I was barely surviving. But now it needed to stop.

I went to the lobby and made the call. To the police, not you. I was alive and well, just didn’t want to be found.

I went back and floated in the dark limbo of the sticky bedroom, staring at the tiny TV. Babies with twiglike arms, eyes too big for their skeletal bodies. The thought lit me, like a match struck in a dark tunnel. I can help. I can bring babies back from the brink, but not here. Not in this world of loss.

They accepted me in a flash. Like winning a lottery of expertise. Within two days, I was on a plane to a crisis that dwarfed mine to insignificance.

I sent you a letter, to explain. Told you not to find me. Not to look. As far as I know, you never did. It wouldn’t have been too hard, after all.

I lost myself in a sea of need, so many tiny bodies needing such basic supplies. Some didn’t make it of course, but mostly their strength returned, their smiles arriving like little sunbeams. Each baby saved, a new thread tying me to life, preventing me from being swept away. Month after month. Mouth after hungry mouth. After a year, the flood of need slowed, then stopped. Our small community broke camp and moved on.

It was only then I realised what I had done. How can I explain why I left you alone? His loss was like a channel opening up between us. I didn’t dare reach out to you, for fear of falling in.

But now can stay afloat.

So, as the sun’s rays weaken and fade, I reach the rotting stile where our road meets the river path. Back at the spot I walked out of my life. The rusted barbed wire reaches treacherously for my coat as I climb over and walk away from the river, as the evening lights flicker on. Living rooms briefly lighted tableaus before curtains wrap them into privacy.

Number two, four, six, then I see our tree, its leaves turning red. For a moment I fear you’re gone, but there you are, in your favourite chair, the hard lines of your face relaxed, softened. The crisis swept back in time.

The house is changed too. The photos gone, new pictures on the walls, cushions on the sofa. Since when did you care about cushions? Then she walks in. A face from your office Christmas party. Me, big and cumbersome with pregnancy. She, glossy, grinning, groomed. She leans down now, to kiss you.

I am bent over, struggling for breath, I think I might die, right there, but there’s more. A sound, faint but familiar. She leaves, then returns carrying a baby and you take and jiggle him, laughing. The Daddy you always wanted to be. Ours was too frail to jiggle.

All strands tethering me to life snap simultaneously. There’s a deep relief, as though I was carrying the pain for you all along, and now I can let go. I turn and head back toward the river.

Then I feel it in my pocket. A tiny glove. A little hand in mine, leading me back to life.