Into My Arms (21 page)

‘Of course, Kirra’s such a good little swimmer, isn’t she?’ continued Lila without pausing. ‘How many races has she won so far? And how’s your boy—Ben? Is he still enjoying Melbourne? The big city gets them all, doesn’t it? I bet you hardly see him anymore!’

Mary wanted intensely to be home again, sitting on the couch and gazing out across the hills, the front door locked securely behind her. She looked at Kirra, who was waiting in the marshalling area for her next race; just then, Kirra glanced towards her and waved.

It was the first time she had left the house in weeks. Months, really. She had done some shopping before Christmas, a quick nervous dash into town that yielded inappropriate presents and a parking ticket, but she hadn’t ventured out since. There hadn’t been much need. Frank seemed happy to pick up the groceries or take Kirra wherever she needed to go; her own friends could phone if they wanted to speak with her. They had at first, though lately the calls had dropped off. That suited her too. She wanted to avoid questions like Lila’s; questions that lacked an answer. How was Ben? She had no idea.

Lila rose to her feet, rebuffed by Mary’s silence, and set off in search of other quarry. Mary shaded her eyes with the program and gazed resolutely towards the pool. Four girls bobbed like ducks in the water, awaiting the start of their backstroke race. But Mary no longer perceived the scene before her, her mind drifting into the past, as it so often did these days, examining it, trying to work out where she had gone wrong. If Frank had had his way they would never have had Ben. Perhaps he’d been right after all, Mary thought, then immediately castigated herself. How could it be wrong to bring a child into the world? God understood, she was sure of it, even if her own husband didn’t. God had made Eve for a purpose—as a companion for Adam, but also to bear his sons; God had answered Rachel’s plea when she demanded of Him, ‘Give me children or I will die.’ After her own infertility was first diagnosed, Mary had sat with her bible and returned to Rachel’s story again and again. Mary’s fallopian tubes were badly scarred, possibly blocked, following years of endometriosis; Frank’s sperm count was so low the specialist had joked he could just about give them each names. For nine years they had tried to conceive without success—but so had Rachel, for longer, even, watching with the ache of empty arms as first her sister and then their servants fell pregnant by her husband. Ten. Ten sons that Jacob had sired while Rachel remained barren, but God had listened to her in the end. Sometimes at night Mary soothed herself to sleep by reciting the promise of Genesis 30:22—
And God remembered Rachel. God heeded her and unclosed her womb
. It comforted her too that when Rachel at last gave birth it was to Joseph, Jacob’s favourite child.

When their GP suggested IVF, Mary had agreed immediately. The technology was new, he had told them, but fairly successful; more to the point, it was probably the only way Mary’s eggs and Frank’s sperm could be brought together. To Mary, it seemed like an answer to prayer, but Frank wasn’t so sure. He had turned to their priest for guidance, only to learn that the Vatican condemned the practice as a ‘gravely evil act’.

Their ensuing arguments had been bitter and painful. Mary and Frank had met through church—the ironically titled St Joseph’s in Benalla—and shared a strong faith, but now it rose between them, uncompromising and austere. God said no, Frank avowed; God said to trust in Him and accept His will. God would understand, cried Mary. God hadn’t given her a womb for it to remain unfilled. Frank enquired about adoption, but there were already hundreds of couples on the list before them, and very few babies available. Mary’s insomnia grew worse and her doctor prescribed antidepressants.

Two years later, the GP rang and spoke to Mary. He told her that he’d been discussing another patient with the IVF clinic in Melbourne, and they’d mentioned something interesting. There were, it seemed, a limited number of donor embryos available for infertile couples like Frank and herself. Yes, they’d been created using the in-glass technology, but that was beside the point. What was more important, crucial even, was that they now
existed
. That they were just sitting there, alive but unwanted, and if no one used them they would most likely be discarded. ‘Talk to your husband,’ he urged Mary. ‘I’ve known Frank for years and he’s a good man, but he’s being pigheaded. I don’t know much about God, but I don’t think He wants you to keep suffering over this, not when there’s a chance of doing something about it. Tell Frank that it’s just like adoption, only earlier.’

For a minute she’d been tempted to go ahead without even mentioning it to Frank; to forge his signature, to concoct an excuse for a trip to the city, to plead, if necessary, a miraculous conception. But then she remembered Rachel, who had had no such option, who had had to trust in her God, and she mustered the courage to raise it with Frank. He hadn’t been encouraging, but finally he’d given in.

Maybe his own longing got the better of him; maybe he simply couldn’t bear to watch her wasting away with want. ‘Just one trial,’ he’d admonished. ‘If God wants it, it will work. And you’re to go to confession if it does, and tell Father that it was all your idea.’ Mary had agreed to the conditions, embracing him tearily, then rung their GP to arrange a referral to the clinic. Six weeks later she went to Melbourne for the day.

She had known it would work; had felt it in her bones. Before the procedure, her gynaecologist had called her over to a stainless-steel bench at the side of the operating theatre and invited her to view her unborn child.

‘What do you mean?’ she’d asked, confused.

‘Go on—look,’ he’d said, gesturing towards a microscope, gleeful in his powers. ‘That’s your embryo. I was just checking it before we start. It looks fantastic.’

Frank would have declined the invitation, she knew; he would not want to see for himself the ways that technology was usurping God’s role. She pressed her eye against the lens and peered through the darkness until the blastocyst swam into focus. A line of scripture came into her head and she murmured it, like a prayer, under her breath. ‘I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb; before you were born I set you apart.’

‘What’s that?’ asked the doctor.

‘Nothing,’ Mary said. ‘It looks like frog spawn, doesn’t it?’

He laughed. ‘More beautiful than that.’

But Mary thought frog spawn
was
beautiful. She saw it sometimes floating like tiny, intricate glasshouses on the edges of the dam in the top paddock at Tatong. Frog spawn meant that the dam was alive, that spring was coming. It caught the sunshine and sparkled like jewels.

When Ben was born she had wanted to name him Joseph, but Frank demurred. ‘A Mary and a Joseph? In one family?’ he’d said, rolling his eyes, but he accepted her next choice, Benjamin, after Rachel’s second and final child. And he’d doted on the boy from the minute he first held him. In those first few months Mary knew that Frank still felt guilty about how Ben had come to them, that they’d disobeyed the church, but as their son grew his remorse had receded. Ben was a loving, sunny child. How could you reproach yourself over a toddler who tried to help you with the milking, whose face lit up when he saw you each day? The end result that was Ben justified the means they had gone to. He made their lives over. He redeemed their sin.

And God must have agreed, Mary had thought thirteen years later, or why would he have given them Kirra? Their second miracle child was born when Mary, like Rachel, should have been past the possibility of conception; when Frank should have been contemplating retirement, not rattles. Kirra, said the GP, was a menopause baby. Mary’s ovaries were having a last frantic roll of the dice, throwing out so many eggs that one of them had made it through her damaged tubes. Mary nodded politely at her GP’s explanation, but inwardly scoffed. That still didn’t account for Frank’s depleted sperm count, or the fact that they’d probably only made love once in the previous four months. Could they have beaten so many odds? It seemed unlikely, particularly after two decades of infertility. No, Mary knew it wasn’t a fluke. God had granted them Kirra because He thought they’d done a good job with Ben; because He didn’t hold the IVF against them. They hadn’t been lucky, they’d been vindicated.

The loudspeaker crackled, startling Mary back to the present as it announced the final event of the carnival, the girls’ open four-hundred-metre freestyle. Kirra had done well in her other races, but this, Mary knew, was the one she really wanted to win, the one she had trained for. Eight long laps of the fifty-metre pool, up and back and up again while her lungs burned and her limbs fatigued. She watched while her daughter stretched behind the blocks, smaller and younger than all the other competitors. Kirra lowered her goggles, pressing them hard against the bridge of her nose to create a seal, then climbed onto her block, bent down and calmly waited for the gun.

She must miss Ben, Mary thought dully as Kirra arrowed neatly into the water. Of course she must, even if she didn’t talk about it. Because of the age gap, they’d never gone through any of the normal sibling rivalry or petty squabbles. Ben had finished school in the same year Kirra started it. He had always encouraged her, and she had always adored him.

Kirra turned second at the end of the first lap, right on the shoulder of a girl at least three years older than herself. It had been terrible telling her about Ben after that night before Christmas, fifteen months ago now. Frank had stayed away, and it had fallen to Mary to go over the same details she had just thrashed out with her son: the years of infertility, the hopelessness, the donor embryo. Kirra listened to her, mouth agape, becoming visibly more agitated, but rather than understanding how Mary had felt she appeared to be infected by Ben’s hysteria, his anger, and by a ridiculous terror—or so Mary had thought at the time—that she might never see him again. ‘But why?’ she’d kept screaming, so loudly that tiny Spud had run away and hidden under the bed. ‘Why didn’t you tell him? Tell us?’

And how Mary wished she had. She’d wished it every single day since Ben had walked out; every single hour. It had been fear that had stopped her, the ludicrous dread that Ben might think she was less his mother because he wasn’t her blood. And it
was
ludicrous, she understood that now—she had never loved him less because they didn’t share genes, so why should he in return? It was easy to see that in hindsight, yet every time she’d opened her mouth to tell him the truth she’d felt a sudden churning panic at the thought of his reaction, of the way he would look at her. After a while she consoled herself with the thought that it didn’t matter anyway. Ben was their child, hers and Frank’s, in all the ways that counted. She had carried him, nursed him; together, she and Frank had brought him up. Their names were on his birth certificate. Anything else was unimportant, so why even bother speaking about it? Mary thought occasionally about his donor parents, but really, she told herself, they were immaterial. They must have had enough children, she reasoned. They had given up the embryo; they were hardly going to come looking for a child, a boy, a man . . . Why, then, should she tell him?

But what she hadn’t anticipated was this chance in ten million, this bolt from the blue.
Skye
. It was an unusual name, and not easily forgotten. Mary remembered when Ben had first mentioned her, during one of their regular Sunday evening phone calls. Usually he was the first to hang up—there always seemed to be marking or lesson planning to be done—but that night he’d gone on and on: Skye this, Skye that. When she finally replaced the receiver she’d turned to Frank and exclaimed, ‘I think Ben’s met the one!’

What an awful trick that she wasn’t the one; that instead she was his sister. When Kirra, sobbing, had fetched Frank in from the paddocks after Ben had stormed out he had suddenly seemed ten years older. Lowering himself into his usual chair at the kitchen table, Frank had slumped in his seat and buried his face in his hands. ‘It’s my fault,’ he’d moaned, the words full of self-loathing. ‘I should never have agreed to any of it. We disobeyed God, and this is His punishment.’ At the time Mary had been in too much shock to answer, but she couldn’t believe God would be so cruel. The embryo that was Ben probably would have been left to die if they hadn’t taken it. Why would God have allowed him to be created, simply to be flushed away? It didn’t make sense. She had saved him,
they’d
saved him! And even if they were being punished, why would God take it out on Skye? What had she done to deserve it? Mary thought again of this girl she’d never met. What had happened to her? Were she and Ben still seeing each other? Were they in love, maybe even married? But they couldn’t be, she realised. They were brother and sister. It would be like Ben marrying Kirra . . . except that that
would
be permissible, because Ben and Kirra weren’t actually related, despite being reared together. Mary’s head throbbed. It was all too confusing, and it wasn’t important. The details didn’t matter, only what she had lost.

Kirra was leading the field as they turned into the final fifty metres. Mary wished Ben was there to see it, and felt her heart contract inside her. The ache of loss was like the ache of infertility, only worse, if that were possible, because now she had been robbed of something real, not simply something she wanted. Kirra was swimming hard, her arms churning wildly, but on either side her competitors were catching up. Mary watched in dismay as first one girl passed her, and then another. Valiantly, Kirra held out for third, but Mary knew it wasn’t enough. Just that morning Kirra had told her that only the first two went through to the district finals, where she had hoped to compete. In the pool Kirra was shaking the other girls’ hands, biting her lip to stop herself from crying. It was so unfair, Mary thought. She’d had it in the bag for all that distance, all that time, right up until the dying seconds. Didn’t that count for anything? Kirra heaved herself out of the water and Mary knew she should go to her, comfort her, but she felt so tired. She wasn’t sure that she had it in her.