Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

Lucien looked away, and Eva realized too late how tactless she’d been. She wasn’t sure whether it was the prospect of never being reunited with his guinea pig or the realization that the world would keep turning as he sat in a cell day after day but she noticed his hand, the smallest two fingers gnarled with old scar tissue, trembling where it rested on the table before he saw her looking and stuffed it into his pocket.

*

Short of time, the remainder of the visit had been businesslike. Lucien had given her the phone numbers of his landlord and his neighbour and a list of things he needed her to do, and then a bell had rung and they’d briefly embraced before being herded towards their respective doors at opposite ends of the visiting room, one leading into the bowels of the prison, the other to light and freedom. Outside the gate she’d found herself gulping the treacly London air into her lungs as though the odour of cheap disinfectant and desperation that hung heavy inside the prison had slowly been suffocating her. She couldn’t imagine breathing that air for another hour, let alone weeks and months and years.

And then, a descent into darkness. It began with Sylvie’s voice on the phone, crying and afraid, something’s wrong, please come. Then the rush to the hospital in the middle of the night, Julian’s hands taut on the wheel as they ran red lights. The nervous wait outside the doors of the maternity unit, an hour of agonized not-knowing until they were taken through to a cubicle, where Sylvie, face white and pinched, ramblingly told them how the baby had been distressed so they’d done a caesarean, lifting the limp creature from her belly as she watched and immediately rushing her away to the ICU, that Robert had gone with her, and that she’d heard someone say something about oxygen deprivation and, oh God, is the baby okay, is the baby okay, won’t someone please tell me that the baby’s going to be okay?

The maternity unit seemed in chaos. Eva sat with Sylvie while Julian went to find a doctor, eventually returning with an exhausted-looking consultant in scrubs who quietly explained that the baby was being cared for on the neonatal unit, that she was stable and the father was with her, and they would take Sylvie there in a few hours, once she’d had a chance to recover from the operation and could get into a wheelchair. Would the baby be okay? When the consultant had left they still didn’t know.

Sylvie was sinking in and out of consciousness, and eventually Eva sent Julian home and got into bed beside her for the several hours it took Robert to return, pale and shaking. A midwife followed and removed Sylvie’s catheter before loading her into a wheelchair and pushing her through the strip-lit corridors, Eva beside her, to the neonatal ICU and up to the incubator where a tiny baby lay on her front wearing just a nappy, bent legs tucked up beneath her, body covered in leads and monitor pads, a breathing mask over her face.

There in the early morning light, in the antiseptic- and plastic-scented hospital unit, Sylvie’s world stopped turning and for an incalculable moment, the beeping monitors and whooshing breathing apparatus fell still. The universe shrank to a single point, a bright speck of life within the incubator in front of her, and when the world started up again it was the same and yet completely and irrevocably changed.

*

Later Sylvie would tell Eva that it had been like looking up and seeing the sky for the first time, something vast and silent that had been there all along, like noticing a truth so huge that it was almost impossible to widen your perspective enough to actually see it.

‘And what was it, this truth?’ asked Eva in frustration, but all Sylvie could say was, ‘Love’, and though she tried she wasn’t able to explain any better.

*

A moment of brightness, and then the plummet into night. Sylvie chose a name, Allegra, and sat beside the incubator for all her waking hours, often singing, occasionally crying, but as quietly as possible so as not to distress the baby. Sometimes Allegra was well enough to be held, sometimes not.

Would the baby be okay? That depended on what you meant by okay, because being okay was now a much more elastic concept than it had previously been.

The baby in the next incubator died suddenly in the night two weeks after Allegra had arrived. Sylvie and Eva held each other and wept silently as his parents, their previously shining, hopeful faces now collapsing in on themselves like dying stars, had returned to the unit in the morning to collect their son’s belongings: a tiny hat, the paper teddy with his name, Miles, and birthweight that had been stuck to the end of his incubator.

Robert told Eva to take as much time off as she needed; he’d hold the fort. Of course, this meant that he’d be in the office all hours covering her work as well as his own while she was with Sylvie in the hospital, but that was probably best for everyone anyway.

Every evening Julian collected Eva and Sylvie and drove them home, arriving each time with snacks, magazines, bags of baby clothes and nappies. Sylvie had been kicked off the maternity ward after a few days; they needed the bed and couldn’t house every parent with a baby in the hospital. Didn’t she know that London maternity wards were overcrowded and in crisis? She’d been lucky to be allowed to stay as long as she had.

Julian picked up Sylvie’s washing as they dropped her off at home at night and brought it back cleaned and ironed, smilingly waving away her tearful thanks. Eva watched him, touching her ring finger with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. She couldn’t hope to meet a man with a better heart beating in his chest, she thought to herself. Next time he asked, she’d say yes.

*

Slowly, slowly, over the weeks, Allegra’s monitors were removed until finally, three months after she’d been born, she was ready to go home. It was such a relief to leave the hospital with her, even with a feeding tube and oxygen canister, away from the horror and tragedy and the inhuman need to inure yourself to it just to survive. Yet the future was uncertain and full of its own terrors.

Cerebral palsy, the doctors said, but they were reluctant to make too many predictions. She’d definitely have some cognitive impairment, and some loss of control over one side of her body. Beyond that it was hard to say, though when Sylvie asked straight out whether she’d ever live independently the neonatal doctor said gently that it was unlikely.

*

When a few weeks later Robert had to go to New York, Eva stayed over, ending up in the double bed with Sylvie, who lay rigid and sleepless, checking the cot beside her every few minutes to make sure Allegra was still breathing. Late in the night she heard Sylvie whisper something into the darkness so quietly that Eva, who was half asleep, wondered if she had dreamt it.

‘Don’t leave me, will you?’

Eva rolled over. ‘What are you talking about? It’s bloody 2 a.m. I’m not going anywhere till morning.’

‘That’s not what I meant. Please don’t leave me to cope with this alone. I love her so much, but I don’t know if I can do this on my own.’

Eva was properly awake now. ‘I’ll never leave you, you idiot,’ she promised in a fierce whisper. ‘I swear you won’t have to do this on your own, whatever happens.’

‘Robert’s not going to last much longer. We both know it. He won’t even look at her, hardly touches her. It’s like she disgusts him. We both do. Even when he’s here, he comes in at ten at night, sleeps in the other room, leaves again at six.’

‘Fuck him. He’ll be here or he won’t. We’ll do it without him. Between the two of us we’ll love her as much as any child was ever loved. Twice as much.’