He looked at me as if deciding whether to take the bait.
“First and foremost, I regret not being a father to Haley,” he said. “There is no excuse for it other than cowardice. I wasn’t a good father to her from the start. I never let myself get close to her. I was afraid of getting close and then having her disappear the way Lily did. I know that was irrational, but it’s how I felt.”
I remembered how little he’d had to do with Haley during her first year. I’d thought it was normal. Babies and mothers were so attached to one another that I figured fathers didn’t quite know how to fit into the picture. I never realized it was fear that kept him from bonding with her.
“When she got sick—” he shook his head “—that was it. I had to escape. Gutless. I know.”
“You’re taking the risk of losing her now,” I said. “How come?”
“I think this is my personal brand of midlife crisis.” He smiled. “Some guys see life passing them by, going too quickly, and they fill the void with a hot car or a hot girlfriend. I saw life passing me by and felt the void, but I knew it wasn’t a car or a woman I needed. I knew what I was missing. My daughter.” He slipped his sunglasses back on. “I was trying to figure out how to gracefully come back into her life when you called. Then I knew it wouldn’t be graceful, but I had to do it. To be here for her. For you, too. Though it scared the shit out of me, Anna.” He looked at me. “It still does. But if anything happened to her and I didn’t make the effort to get to know her, I’d never forgive myself. There was already so much I couldn’t forgive myself for. I earned a medal for bravery in the army, but I was a coward when it came to my own family. I wanted to give that medal back.”
I was softening toward him. I believed him. “I’m glad you’re telling me all this,” I said. “It’s kind of late, but I’m still glad.”
“There’s something else,” he said. “I have a friend here. He and his wife own a car dealership in Maryland. When I told you I had a job interview last week, I was really over there talking to them.”
I remembered his call from the interview. The woman’s laughter in the background. I frowned, waiting, wondering where this was going.
“They had a child who died of leukemia many years ago. I told them about Haley before I came out here and they told me if she ended up needing a transplant, they wanted to sponsor a bone marrow drive for her. So that’s what I was talking to them about. Just in case she ended up needing it. And she does. So—”
“Wow.” I felt guilty for having doubted him. “Wow.”
“As I understand it, the possibility of finding a donor from the drive is slim,” he said, “but the point is, it puts more people into the pool. They told me if you and Haley are willing to go public with, you know, Haley’s story, it helps pull people in. But you don’t have to.”
I’d have to think about that. We—all three of us—had a pretty damn poignant story, given Lily’s disappearance and Haley’s first bout with leukemia. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to put my daughter on display.
“I’ll talk to her about it,” I said. “We can talk to her about it. Either way, thank you for thinking of this. For doing this.”
I watched a group of tourists line up to get on the riverboat. I was still amazed by the fact that Bryan had this whole donor drive up his sleeve. That he’d been thinking ahead.
“You know,” he said now, “the whole Lily thing… It took me a long time to figure it out for myself. I still…it’s still hard for me to talk about her. I know you were angry with me for not going to Wilmington to check on her back then. Believe me, I wish I had, but I couldn’t leave you. I thought Lily was safe, but that I could lose you at any minute. You were hanging between life and death.”
“I know,” I said. “I know what you did seemed to make sense at the time.” I still wished he had tried harder. Called the hospital in Wilmington sooner than he did. Pressed them harder for more information. Something. Yet he couldn’t have known that Lily had vanished. How could anyone have known?
“I felt like it was my fault she disappeared,” he said.
“I made you feel that way.” I had wanted him to apologize to me for everything, but I could suddenly see my own culpability. I’d blamed him because I didn’t know who else to blame. I’d been in a coma at Duke University Hospital when he’d been called back from Somalia and of course I’d been his main concern. Yet when I came out of the coma and we learned that Lily had somehow disappeared from the Wilmington hospital, I was furious with him for not going there to check on her. I froze him out. “We were screwed up, both of us,” I said. “We should have been getting some serious marriage counseling.”
“No kidding.” He smiled. “We should have had a counselor move in with us.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Have you ever…did you ever get any leads on what happened to her?” he asked.
I shook my head. “The investigators thought she died, as you know,” I said. “Maybe a medical mistake someone was trying to cover up, but I’ve never been able to accept that theory.” I didn’t want to accept that theory. “Then there were all sorts of dead ends. They called me one time when Haley was about three. A woman had contacted them from South Carolina to say she thought her cousin’s little girl was actually Lily. She said the cousin just appeared with a baby one day around the same time Lily was taken and this woman thought it was weird. The investigators asked why she’d waited so many years to call and she said she’d been afraid to get her cousin in trouble, but now she thought the cousin was abusing the girl so she was making the call. It turned out the cousin had kidnapped someone’s baby, just not mine. Not ours.” I could still feel the letdown when the investigator called me with the DNA results.
“I really got my hopes up, Bryan,” I said. “After Haley went into remission when she was nearly four and I could finally think about something other than getting her well, she and I went to Wilmington for a week. We just walked the streets, while I looked for a seven-year-old girl who might be Lily. I hung out around the schools. It was a little crazy of me, especially since the hospital she’d been in covered such a huge geographical area. Lily could have been anywhere. I’ve always clung to the hope that someone who desperately wanted a child saw the most beautiful baby in the hospital and took her. At least that way, she would have been wanted and cared for.”
“I never got to see her.” Bryan’s face was slack with sadness.
“I know,” I said. “At least I had her for a few hours.”
“Does Haley know about her?”
“Of course.” He was not used to openness. To hard truths. It had taken him two months to get up the courage to mention Lily. “I told her very early,” I said. “She couldn’t have been more than five or six. Bryan, she’s an unusual girl.”
“I know that,” he said with a smile. “She’s fantastic.”
“Maybe it was because she had to go through all the medical stuff when she was so small, I don’t know, but she’s always been different from other kids her age. She even helps me look for Lily.”
He looked startled. “What do you mean?”
“She knows the sort of work the Missing Children’s Bureau does. She goes through the leads we get, looking for anything that might be related to Lily. She hangs out at the office with me sometimes. She and I have gone back to Wilmington twice, looking for Lily. She and I share that gigantic hole in our hearts. She even has a website she made herself called ‘Sibs of the Missing.’”
“You’re kidding. She made it herself?”
I nodded. “She’s a computer geek, just like her father.”
He leaned his head back, looking up at the sky. “I love her,” he said. “All these years, I sent money and Christmas presents and all that, but I didn’t love her. I didn’t feel anything except guilt for being a shitty father. Now I love her and…I can honestly say I’ve never felt like this before. This kind of emotion. The moment I first saw her in the hospital room, bald and puking—” he looked at me, his smile bo
th confused and tender “—I wanted to take her place,” he said. “Give her my health. Let me be the one sick in that bed.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I know that feeling.”
“I’m so pissed at myself.”
I didn’t want to hear any more regrets. The need to hear them, years in the making, had evaporated. “Let’s put the past behind us,” I said. “You’re here now. Now you’re earning that medal for bravery.”
22
Emerson
Wilmington, North Carolina
Hot!’s kitchen was far cleaner than the one I had at home. That was because the health department never showed up at my house, but they could sashay into the café at any moment. We had a ninety-nine rating and I was aiming for a hundred, which was why I was making Jenny clean the ice machine and scour every inch of the countertop before I’d let her go for the evening.
“I’m going to the library straight from here, Jenny,” I said, checking the refrigerator to make sure we had enough half-and-half for the morning, “so there’s a container of leftover butternut squash chili in here for dinner tonight. Will you take it home and heat it up for you and Dad?”
Jenny looked up from the counter. “You’re not coming home for dinner?” She acted like I’d said I planned to fly to the moon, but I couldn’t blame her. Except for the occasional girls’ night out with Tara, I was always home for dinner. Tonight, though, I had other plans. Unfortunately, I needed to lie about them.
“I need to do some research on heirloom recipes I want to add to the lunch menu,” I said. “I can’t get to them on Google, but the library has access.” My vagueness paid off. Jenny’s eyes glazed over at the word research. It had worked with Ted, too, when I gave him the same story. I’d lost Ted with heirloom. I had the feeling this wouldn’t be the last lie I told my family for a while. Not until I had things figured out. “So is that okay with you?” I took off my apron and hung it from the hook near the rear door. “You’ll take care of dinner?”
“I guess.” She pumped the spray bottle in an arc across the counter and began rubbing. “But I wanted to talk to you about my job. I’d like to work fewer hours.”
I laughed. “Wouldn’t we all,” I said.
She didn’t look at me and I wondered if she expected me to give her grief about it. I honestly didn’t need her that much right now. My manager, Sandra, and my other waitress and one cook could take care of things most of the time. Jenny needed the money, though, and she was a big help on the days she worked.
“I’m serious.” She moved the toaster to clean behind it. I tried to remember the last time I’d moved our toaster at home. “I’m doing more of the babies stuff because of Noelle being—” she shrugged “—you know.”
“And you want more time with Devon.”
Jenny smiled down at the counter, red-cheeked and busted. “I don’t have much free time right now,” she said.
She was smitten by this guy. I was so caught up in my own life, I’d barely noticed what was going on in hers.
“Less hours means less money in your pocket,” I said, putting away the bowls that had been air-drying in the dish rack.
“I know.”
“You work out a new schedule with Sandra and we’ll see how it looks,” I said. Jenny was a good kid. She was so much like me. Easygoing, with plenty of friends. Maybe not the most ambitious person in the world, but frankly, I thought it was more important to be liked than to be successful. I knew you could find experts who would argue with that, but I didn’t care. I wanted to be liked. So sue me. Jenny seemed to be well-liked by every person—child or adult—who knew her. I’d rather raise a child like that than one who’d stab another person in the back to get ahead.
The few boys she’d dated all seemed like nice kids, too.
She hadn’t been serious with any of them—at least, not as far as I knew—and that had been fine. Maybe Devon was different. I liked when they went out as a foursome with Grace and Cleve over the summer. Safety in numbers, though maybe I was kidding myself about that.
“How’s Grace holding up?” I asked as I closed the cabinet door.
“You mean about Cleve?”
“It’s got to be hard for her since you’re still with Devon.”
“She’s…” Jenny shrugged. “She’s bummed. And Cleve is being a cretin.”
“Well, I can understand his feelings.” I took the chili out of the refrigerator, afraid she might forget it. “He probably wants to experience college and being away from home without being tied down.”
“It’s not that,” Jenny said. “I get that. It’s how he’s acting now. He constantly texts her and emails her and that keeps her hopes up that he’ll get back together with her.”
“Oh,” I said. Not good.
“I mean, she does it first,” Jenny said. “Texts him or whatever. But he always gets back to her and then she thinks he still cares.”
“I’m sure he does still care.”
“Not the way she wants him to.” She put the spray bottle in the cabinet beneath the sink and tossed the paper towels in the trash. “I think he’s being mean,” she said.
“It’s a double whammy for her.” I slipped the chili into a plastic grocery bag. “First her dad and then Cleve.” Poor Grace. She’d been so close to Sam. I’d envied that. Ted and Jenny didn’t connect the way Sam and Grace had. “I feel bad for her,” I said.
“Me, too.” Jenny washed her hands at the sink, then leaned back against the counter as she dried them with a paper towel. “I can’t imagine Daddy dying, Mom,” she said. “It’s hard enough having Noelle die and Great-Grandpa at hospice.”
“I know, baby.” One of the hospice nurses had called me that morning to tell me my grandfather wanted to see me alone the next time, without Jenny or Ted. I had no idea why, but I’d honor his wish, of course. I’d do anything for him.
I stepped closer to Jenny, brushed aside the hair that nearly covered her left eye and planted a kiss on her temple. “Love you,” I said.
“You, too.” She shook her head to let the curtain of hair fall across her forehead again. Then she looked at the bag on the counter. “Ready to lock up?”
“Uh-huh.” I put my arm around her as we headed for the back door. I’d miss spending so much time with her if she cut back her hours in the café. “So how serious is it getting with Devon?” I asked.
“Not serious,” she said.
I felt the invisible wall go up between us and knew our mother/daughter bonding moment had passed. There’d be no getting it back this evening. That was all right. I’d remember these few minutes with Jenny as I tried to track down Anna, the woman who’d never had the chance to know her daughter because of what Noelle had done.
I sat down at one of the computers in the library, pulled up the NC Live website and typed in the password they’d given me at the desk. At home, I’d checked Google for Anna and baby and Wilmington and hospital and received plenty of useless hits. I was hoping NC Live would give me something more to go on.
According to Noelle’s record books, the last baby she delivered had been a boy, so our guess that she’d given up practicing after the “accident” was wrong. Unless, of course, she’d written nothing at all about that botched delivery in her records. I wanted to find the newspaper article Noelle had mentioned in the letter she’d started to write on July 8, 2003. Maybe an impossible task, but I needed to try.
It took me a while and some help from one of the librarians, but I finally found the search page for the Wilmington Star. Noelle’s letter didn’t say exactly when she saw the article mentioning Anna. NC Live only had issues of the Star back to April 2003, so I hoped the article was later than that. Maybe it actually appeared on the eighth and that was what prompted Noelle to write to her.
Optimistically, I decided to search June and July 2003 for any Wilmington Star articles containing the name Anna. How many could there be? Fifty-seven, as it turned out. I was swamped by Annas. I began sifting through the articles
—obituaries, track team results, a crooked sheriff, a couple of births. I narrowed the results down to women who might have been of childbearing age during the years Noelle was a midwife. There was an Anna who won a Yard of the Month award, a twenty-seven-year-old Special Olympics athlete and a woman who stole beer from an IGA store. I jotted down the surname of the Yard of the Month winner—Fischelle—who seemed the only real possibility. She lived in midtown. I pictured her putting all her energy into her yard to try to fill the empty place her missing child had left behind.
I searched online for her. There was only one Anna Fischelle, and she did indeed live in Wilmington, but as close as I could figure from the White Pages website, she was about sixty-eight years old.
I tried another search of the Wilmington paper using the words hospital and baby and missing, but none of the results seemed promising. I sat back and frowned at the computer.
Time to get serious. Noelle had been a news junkie. At one time, she’d even had the New York Times delivered to her door in Wilmington each morning, but that had been long ago, before she started reading it online. I knew she’d read the Washington Post online, too, because she was always complaining about how conservative it had become. She read it, anyway. She loved any excuse to rail against pundits who annoyed her.
I tried the Post first, searching for an Anna between June 1 and July 8, 2003, and quickly had ten pages of two hundred and two results. I stared up at the library ceiling. This was a losing battle. It seemed silly to look at the Post and would be sillier still to look at the New York Times. The baby was taken from a Wilmington hospital. The article had almost certainly been in the Wilmington paper. I was about to switch back to the Star when my eye fell on a headline halfway down the first page of results: Police Defend Actions in Case of Missing Three-year-old Girl. I stared at the headline, caught by the word missing. But that couldn’t be the right article. The child Noelle had taken had been an infant. Maybe it was because I felt lost in a sea of search results and didn’t know what else to do that I clicked on the headline and began scanning the article for the name Anna.