We Always Show the Baby

At four in the morning the girl in room 3 started screaming that her baby was dead, and for eleven seconds Lucía Morales had nothing to prove her wrong.

He had come out all at once, grey and limp, the cord wrapped twice round his neck. Lucía had slid two fingers under the loop, eased it over his head, clamped, cut left-handed, and she was already turning away from the mother with the small body along her forearm. Three steps to the warmer. The red lamp. The towel.

“He's not crying! Why isn't he crying?”

Lucía rubbed his back with the towel, hard, bottom to top. She rubbed the soles of his feet with her thumb. She suctioned his mouth, once. She was counting in her head, the way she always did, without knowing she did it. Three. Four. The skin stayed the colour of an oyster.

“You're hiding him from me! You're hiding him, I know you are!”

The mother's name was Kenza. Twenty-one, first baby, in at midnight with her gym bag and a sister who filmed everything. The sister had stopped filming. She was flat against the wall, phone clutched to her chest.

Fatima, the healthcare assistant, put down the bowl and went to hold Kenza by the shoulders. Kenza shoved her off. She was trying to sit up, legs still in the stirrups, her empty belly sagging back in on itself.

Seven. Eight. The heart was beating. Lucía could feel it under her fingers, at the base of the cord, a little slow, a hundred and ten maybe. A beating heart is not a dead child. It's a child who hasn't made up his mind yet.

Lucía did something nobody had ever taught her. She pulled the warmer half a metre across the floor on its wheels and swung it round to face the bed.

“Look at him,” she said. “We always show the baby. Always. Look at him. He's right here.”

Kenza looked. Nine. Ten. Lucía blew once, gently, on the grey face, and rubbed again.

Eleven.

The cry came in two goes, a cough first, a sort of outraged bark, then the real one, the one that opens the chest. The colour rose from the middle outwards, like wine in water. The hands closed. The feet stayed blue a while longer. Feet always do.

Kenza said nothing. She held out both arms.

Lucía gave her the child skin to skin, belly to belly, a dry towel over his back, and stayed there with her hand flat on that tiny back until she could feel him breathing on his own. Only then did she look at the clock. Four minutes past four. She wrote it on the chart left-handed, and the edge of her hand smudged the ink, as usual.

---

She had delivered a little over two thousand babies. She didn't keep count. Fatima did, in a spiral notebook where she wrote down the names of the babies she thought were pretty, and Fatima said she'd gone past two thousand the summer before.

Lucía was forty. She had been a midwife at a maternity unit in Anderlecht for seventeen years, nearly always on nights, because women give birth better at night and the doctors are asleep. She was tall, dark, left-handed, with a swimmer's shoulders and hands that didn't shake. The young ones on the ward thought she was cold for about a year, and after that they called her when things went wrong.

In the staff room the coffee machine dispensed a brown liquid that smelled of rubber. Lucía sat down with the cup and didn't drink it. Her fingers went to her right ear of their own accord.

Just in front of the ear, where the helix began, there was a hole. A real little hole, the size of a pinhead, that she'd had all her life. A preauricular sinus, the textbooks said. A leftover from the embryo, a seam that had never closed. Nothing serious. She saw one or two a year in newborns, and every time she requested a hearing screen, on principle, and every time she touched her own while she filled in the form.

Her father used to call it el agujerito del flamenco. The flamenco hole. Manuel Morales said that was where the music got in, that you had to leave it open, that girls who had one danced better than the rest. She had never danced. But she touched the hole when she was thinking, with the tip of her index finger, and Thomas said he could always tell when she was about to give him bad news, because her hand was at her ear before she'd opened her mouth.

She thought about Kenza. About what she'd said to her. We always show the baby. It wasn't in any protocol. It was something else, a rule of her own that she had never said out loud. A living baby, you show it, because the mother needs to see it. A dead baby, you show it too, because the mother needs to see it. You dress it, you wash it, you put it in her arms, you take its footprints. She had done it. Eleven times, maybe twelve. A mother who is never shown her child never lets it go.

Dr Claes put her head round the door.

“Your girl in 3 is asking for the lady who turned him round to face her.”

“I didn't turn anyone round,” said Lucía. “I turned the warmer.”

Hanne Claes laughed and went. Lucía tipped the coffee down the sink.

---

At twenty to eight she came out of the hospital into a damp cold that clung to her cheeks. It wasn't light yet. She went home to Saint-Gilles by the same streets as always, under a February sky that wasn't a colour so much as the absence of one.

The house was narrow and tall, with a steep staircase where you hit your head on the third step if you forgot. The kitchen light was on. Thomas was standing at the toaster in his shirt, his tie hanging round his neck like a football scarf. Forty-four, a history teacher at a secondary school in the centre, a Brussels Fleming who had spoken French with her for twenty years and Dutch with his pupils, and who said that was why he was so calm: he spent his whole life translating.

“Well?” he said.

“A boy. Three point four kilos. He took his time.”

“Good for him.”

He kissed her on the forehead. He smelled of toothpaste and toast. She sat down and slipped her shoes off under the table.

Zoé came down the stairs like an avalanche, cleared the third step without looking, and walked into the kitchen with one foot in a trainer and the other trainer in her hand.

“Did you get it?” she said.

“Get what?”

“Mum. The email. Your origins. They said five weeks, it's been five weeks and two days.”

Zoé was fourteen and had a theory about everything. At Christmas there had been two little white boxes under the tree, the same size, with ribbons on, and Zoé had explained very seriously over dinner that it was the present of the year, everyone was doing it, you spat in a tube and found out if you were a Viking. She'd wanted one for herself as well. The website said you had to be eighteen. She'd thought that was outrageous and said so more than once.

One box for Lucía. One for Granny Charo.

Charo had opened the parcel, read the packaging with her glasses on the end of her nose, and closed it again. She had smiled at Zoé, her Sunday smile, and said in Spanish, very softly, in the voice she kept for things that were not up for discussion:

“I don't spit in tubes, sweetheart. It's against God.”

Zoé had asked where in the Bible it said you couldn't spit in a tube. Charo had laughed and given her some flan. The kit had sat on the sideboard till the evening, and Lucía had taken it home in her bag so that Zoé wouldn't feel snubbed. It was still in her desk drawer, under the bills.

Lucía had done hers the next day. Half a centimetre of frothy saliva up to the line, the cap that released the blue liquid, the prepaid envelope. She'd posted it in the box on the corner on her way to the pool. She hadn't given it another thought. She already knew where she came from. From Seville, from an Andalusian mother and a father who had been a miner and then a builder, from a family that talked loud and ate late. She expected to read what she already knew, with percentages.

“I haven't looked,” she said.

“Look.”

“You'll miss your tram.”

“I won't miss my tram if you look now.”

Thomas rolled his eyes, the look that meant he wasn't refereeing. Lucía took out her phone. The fifth unread email said:

“Filiora — Your DNA results are ready”

Zoé pressed up against her shoulder, the other trainer still in her hand. Lucía opened the link. Zoé typed the password: she was the one who had set up the account.

The page opened on a map of Europe. A big orange blot covered Spain and Portugal and spilled over a little into the south of France.

“Ethnicity estimate — Iberian Peninsula: 98% — North Africa: 2%”

“Is that it?” said Zoé.

“What were you hoping for?”

“I dunno. An eighth Irish.”

“You've got a great-grandfather from Huelva who fished for sardines.”

“That's rubbish.”

Zoé leaned over the screen and scrolled with her finger, faster than Lucía could have read. She stopped on a tab.

“There. DNA matches. That's people who've done the test and have the same blood as you. Your cousins and that.”

“It's not blood, it's spit.”

“Mum.”

Lucía touched the tab. The page took a while to load, a little wheel going round.

“You have 312 DNA matches.”

The list came up. Names, initials, small round photos, or grey silhouettes where there was no photo. Under each name, a line: “3rd–4th cousin”, “Distant cousin”, a number followed by “cM”, a country. Spain. Spain. Argentina. Spain. France. Mexico. Spain.

Lucía read the names. A Rodríguez from Córdoba. A Fernández from Lyon. Pérez, López, Gómez, names that half of Andalusia shared. She was waiting for a García. She was waiting for a Morales. She was waiting for a name she might have seen on an envelope, on a wedding invitation, in a family group chat.

“Know anyone?” said Zoé.

Lucía didn't answer. She took the phone back from her daughter and scrolled right up to the top, to the first name on the list, the one she shared the most with. A Joaquín R., Huelva, “2nd–3rd cousin”. A stranger. She went back down, slowly this time, one name at a time, to the bottom of the page, and the page loaded more, and she went down again.

Three hundred and twelve people in the world carried a piece of her DNA.

She didn't know a single one of them.