The Changeling

On top of the TV there was a picture, colourized and framed, of baby Gail sitting on my father’s knee, with her name printed in the top right corner: “Gail Gallant at 3 months.” There were pictures of my parents, scarred and on crutches against floral wallpaper. The scar had left my mother’s smile unbalanced, a half-smile. Our family photo album had pictures of a gravestone on which “Gail Gallant” was clearly etched, though no one visited her grave. There were stories about the accident that summer and stories about my birth the following year. Did my mother really believe that I was Lazarus, her one and only baby Gail, back from the dead

On a July night in 1955, my parents, Lawrence and Maria Gallant, were driving eastbound on the highway from Toronto to Prince Edward Island in their weeks-old Ford Fairlane. It was the first day of their vacation, and their three daughters were with them. Two-year-old Glenna was asleep in the back seat. Four-year-old Linda was restless, so my mother reached back and gave her a rosary. The four-month-old baby, Gail, was bundled and sleeping, in those pre-baby-car-seat days, between my parents on the front seat.

My mother was drifting off when the crash occurred. The impact was head-on, and then she found herself on her hands and knees, looking up through the smashed windshield at mangled metal. There was screaming and crying from the back seat, and in the front seat, blood, glass, and broken bones. My mother’s cheek was cut open from cheekbone to mouth. His foot broken, my father tried to open the back-seat door but couldn’t. He thought of gasoline and fire, and in a reflex move, smashed the window with his elbow. My mother looked for her baby and saw her on the floor, where she had fallen after hitting the dashboard. She tried to reach down but couldn’t move her arm. Strangers from a nearby diner surrounded them, yelling and pounding and pulling at the doors until they opened. Someone reached in and took the baby.

At the hospital in Montreal, doctors picked glass out of my mother’s face. (She would never believe they’d removed it all.) My father had more than thirty stitches. The broken bones were set. My parents returned to Toronto several days later by train with two of their daughters. The baby stayed in intensive care in the hospital with a severe skull fracture.

All through that hot Toronto summer, my parents called the hospital daily. Weak and with burning pain, my mother delirious with anxiety, they travelled by train to visit Gail. They signed consent forms for her surgery. My mother sat at the bedside, talking sweetly to her through tears, until Gail slowly opened her eyes. Her condition was serious but stable. Surgery was performed. It was counted a success. My mother picked out a pink frilled baby-doll dress and bonnet for her homecoming.

Gail had been in the hospital for more than a month when my parents got a call saying she would be discharged the next day. The following afternoon, while they were waiting for the taxi to take them to the train station, the phone rang. It was Gail’s doctor. “Your daughter has a high fever and is having convulsions,” he said. Tests confirmed that she had contracted meningitis. Disbelieving, my parents travelled to Montreal. At the hospital, they looked down at their baby’s face. She lay in cherubic repose, the picture of perfect life.

For the next month, my mother staggered to daily Mass, prayed, cried, and begged God not to take her baby. Gail remained comatose. Finally the parish priest, who had been watching my mother’s agony, put a hand on her frail shoulder as she shook in the pew, and recommended that she let Gail go back to God. The doctors could not make the baby better again. Only God could do that.

Gail died two days later, on August 15, 1955. She was buried in her coming-home outfit. For the next two months, my mother barely ate or slept. She prayed. By October, she was pregnant again. No one talked of nervous breakdowns, except perhaps several neighbours who came over to the house one afternoon to express concern that my mother’s daughter, Linda, was telling children on the street that Gail was coming back. What if she gave birth to a boy My mother assured them she was having a girl.

Apart from the initial visit to confirm the pregnancy, she saw no doctor during the next nine months. She had given birth three times and knew what to expect. But when her water broke late one July night, she was frightened. Labour hadn’t begun yet. She called the hospital and was told to come in right away. It was 3:30 a.m. A doctor examined her and told the nurse to take my mother into the delivery room immediately. She was fully dilated. The child was ready to be born, but my mother wasn’t having any labour pain. In those days, women in delivery were given a short-term general anesthetic during the final minutes of birth. The anesthesiologist waited as the minutes ticked by, waited for a contraction that would signal the need to bear down. He sang “Jimmy Crack Corn” and joked that if the baby wasn’t born by 4 a.m., he was going home. At one point, she felt a strange sensation across her abdomen, like “pins and needles.” Otherwise, nothing. The doctor said, “Everything else is going your way, what do you want” A seven-and-a-half pound, dark-haired baby girl.

That was her last memory before waking up a half-hour later, with me lying in a basket beside her, eyes wide open, looking around. A miracle birth. A birth without pain. And as my mother would say, an uncanny resemblance. It was inevitable that I would be named Gail.