A boy who came back: the near-death, and changed life, of my son Max

Summary

I look back at the last day of our old life with a kind of wonder now: the million summer freedoms, the complacency of our ease.I watched the cricket with Max on my knee. Friends came to visit, and Ruth fed Max while we talked about our new neighbourhood among piles of books and packing boxes. Max gurgled regally as I changed one of his famous nappies. I organised our phone chargers and put his birth certificate carefully in a drawer with our passports and the mortgage statement. Then I hung a picture in what would soon be his room: a print from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, of a little boy sailing bravely across the ocean, with “Max” emblazoned on the prow of his ship. I stood back and admired it, feeling all three of us to be limitless, and wondering what would happen next.Ruth called her mum and gave her the latest; I told one group chat I thought Ring doorbells were for dickheads, and asked another what had been happening at work during my paternity leave. I ate half a chocolate bar, then forgot about it. Finding it a week later levelled me. This melted Dairy Milk, left for me by another person entirely, a stranger from an antique land.Then I have an in-between memory. I woke at five and stumbled to the bathroom to drink from the tap. The house was silent. Maybe the unknowable internal dominoes had already started to fall, or maybe they could still have been stopped. Maybe I could have decided to get Max up early, for no particular reason. Gina, the night nanny helping us through the move, would have thought me strange, but it would have been fine. Or if I had picked him up for a cuddle and put him straight back. Or if changing any single moment in his life or mine might have made everything different. A different bedtime. A different bed. A different house. A different dad.Just before six, the day already too hot, the pallid dawn creeping around the blinds: Gina’s voice, bursting into our room, screaming, blurred by a dream. I don’t remember her w...