Take good care of my baby

[Content warning for baby loss, medical trauma, hospital visit, minor accidental injury to a child.]

Hayley blinks, and the forbidding grey building in front of her shifts. Gone are the late daffodils in planters by the doors, gone are the scudding clouds in the sapphire blue sky. In their place is the darkness of the dead hours of the night and a chilling breeze that ruffles her hair.

Every second of this night should be etched on her memory, but it isn't. It comes back to her in flashes, unprovoked; moments of searing pain that stab her without warning day after day, more than three years on. The moments that she reaches for, though – the handful of spots of faint light in the abyss that is her memory of those hours – drift frustratingly out of reach.

No; frustrating is too small a word. She could scream with sheer terror at the thought those details – the softness of skin, the whisper of hair – are fading, that one day they will be gone forever, that all she will be left with is the darkness. But she could scream for so many reasons, and if she starts she will never stop.

She blinks again, and she's back. It's March not July. It's day, not night. Her belly is flat and her arms are full. The fear is different, but still all too familiar; bone deep and chilling on behalf of a life utterly dependent on her.

Her feet are cased in concrete and her blood is ice cold. She never meant to come back here. Few things in the universe could have induced her to come even this close, but she's holding one of them in her arms right now. The effort it will take to take the dozen steps to the revolving door still feels superhuman.

Hayley isn't superhuman.

I'm in awe of you, she's heard too many times. I don't think I could have survived that. The words fall like scalpels on her oversensitive skin. You're coping too well, she hears. You're not feeling it enough. (She has no idea how she could feel it more. She feels it with every breath, scalding her lungs and burning in her blood.)

Hayley isn't superhuman, and Hayley can't move.

She's come this far on adrenaline alone. Louie screamed, and primal instinct took over, and necessity brought them here. But Louie is limp in her arms now, he's screamed himself out. Little gasping sobs still fall from his lips but the urgency has faded and Hayley can't move.

She isn't superstitious. That's not it at all. And no one in this place was anything but gentle with her, with both of them, with Dan too. But the memories haunt her nonetheless and this place is steeped in them. They already drift around her feet, swirling like mist. The second she steps through those doors they'll snarl around her ankles and drag her into their depths and Hayley... Hayley's only human, damn it.

Tears are flowing down her cheeks now, and her arms are straining against Louie's weight. He whimpers, too young to find the words but clearly at a loss as to why Mamma isn't moving, isn't making this better, is standing here in the car park, crying.

She's been so careful, she planned everything so well. That she would choose another hospital for Louie was a given, of course, but it went beyond that. From the second he was viable she barely left its environs, certainly never ventured anywhere that would make this the closest place to deliver him, should he make his own way into the world before her induction date.

She's got sloppy.

They were at baby sensory, for goodness' sake. Louie's arguably too old for it, at a stocky 18 months, but Hayley finds herself clinging to these vestiges of a babyhood that she thought she might never experience. That she's already had snatched away once. They were row-rowing their boat, remembering all too late the warnings about baby elbows and their tendency to decouple under strain. And then Louie was screaming.

Louie was screaming, and instinct (and the class leader) said hospital and here they are.

Louie cries once, sharp and loud. She takes a step closer to the doors.

People are starting to look. She's used to that. She's a connoisseur of Looks by this point; in the early days every interaction was a Rubicon to cross. Even people she didn't know by name – the shopkeepers and the librarians and the pharmacists – knew her by sight, and their eyes did the too-familiar flick from flat belly to pale face to empty arms. It was a coin toss, then, what came next. A bland smile and a pretence that nothing had happened, that Hayley's world hadn't shattered into more pieces than she could ever hope to find, an erasure that might seem callous but more often was a guilty relief? Or the twist of a face in sympathy, a hand on the shoulder, and empty words that all but demanded the thank you, the yes, I'm ok. You know. Coping. A million little lies to protect the rest of the world from the reality that had scooped out her soul from the inside and left her hollow.

These looks are different. These are the wary looks of strangers weighing up the risk – to themselves, to the visibly injured toddler – of intervening or not. She still has time, though. She's not a teen mum. She's well-dressed, white, holding a child who is the spit of her. These people's prejudices will preserve her privacy just a fraction longer.

Her eyes fall on Louie's arm, at the limp fingers and the too-slack wrist, and she takes two more rapid steps forwards. Louie's cry of protest gains them three more, steadier paces, but she falters again before the threshold. The doors open like jaws. She's small, and Louie is smaller, and they're nothing but prey.

A smiling volunteer in a lurid t shirt steps close. The hovering eyes avert. "Are you coming in, love?"

Hayley moves in a dream. Her legs obey this woman where they won't obey her, and she's drawn into the emergency department's cavernous maw. Her knees are weak and her eyes are still streaming and her feet are still moving without her permission. Panic grips her, a vice in her chest. Her lips are numb, her fingers are numb, her toes are numb. Louie is a warm weight in her arms and she snatches in a breath that smells of him. Under the antiseptic and the fear sweat, cutting through the myriad scents of distressed humanity, there's Louie. There's her baby, and he's warm, and he's alive. She breathes. They both breathe.

She moves robotically where the volunteer points, and gives their details at the desk, and waits. And nothing happens. No sirens blare or lights flash, nothing is triggered by the entering of her name on their system. Because her tragedy is a drop in the ocean here, isn't it? She's nothing special. This hospital sees death and worse every day, it eats human lives for breakfast, and while every step through these corridors is shredding her, eviscerating her, it's all been done a million times before.

"Come straight through," says the triage nurse, and she's falling. She's tumbling backwards into the abyss of memory as her body remains rigid, her arms locked around Louie and her heart and her soul three years back in time with Carys.

Come straight through.

It's four am. Two women pace the waiting room, breathing intently, partners hovering. Hayley isn't breathing at all.

Come straight through.

Sensors on her bump, familiar by this late stage of her pregnancy, but the pinched expression on the midwife's face is new. Need to check something. A new face, medical scrubs, obvious bedhead. Gel, a wand, and silence where there should be a pitter-fast beat.

I'm so sorry.

And she's falling.

"...Maynard? Mrs Maynard?" Solicitous hands on her arm, on Louie, and she recoils.

"No! No, I've... I've got him."

"All right." Scepticism. "Just this way."

She can't listen. She can't. Louie needs her, the nurse is asking questions, and she can't.

I'm so sorry.

Temperature. Oxygen sats. Pulse. Oh, God, pulse. It's there, though. Steady and strong, numbers flashing green on the screen. Louie looks at her, shifts in her arms, but that means nothing, does it? She feels Carys kick in her belly even now.

The nurse reaches out, takes Louie's hand, and he screams.

I'm so sorry.

"There," he says. "All done."

"What?" Louie straightens, bounces in her lap, grins toothily at the nurse. "What do you mean?"

"It's a really common injury in toddlers. We call it a pulled elbow. I've reset it. The doctor will need to check him over but you can go home as soon as she's done."

"What?"

His brow furrows. "Louie is fine, now," he says carefully. "I'll give you a leaflet. You can go home soon."

"We can go home?" They can go home. Louie can go home. She can take her baby home from this place. She chokes on a sob and clutches him close. "I can take him home."

"When the doctor has seen you," the nurse confirms, still gentle, still looking worried. She tunes him out, holding Louie close, rocking him against her chest. We can go home. We can go home.

Louie toddles out of the door with her, clutching her hand. If this was a movie, she thinks vaguely, there would be choirs of angels at this point. A challenge overcome, a new inner strength found.

There are no choirs. There's no new strength. There's a gaping void inside her and the hospital is still crouched, waiting to eat them alive.

There are no choirs, and instead a ghost walks at her side. She holds her son's hand and treads the path she walked three years ago, step for step with the shade of a woman who is holding a memory box instead of a baby, and whose empty arms will never stop aching.

She steps out into the sunlight, her heart split in two. One half for the baby who is skipping into the sunlight, the day's trauma no longer-lasting than ice cream.

And one half for the baby who never came home.