I would have loved to have Emerson with me for moral support, but I was only going to get Grace and go, as Ian had advised. We didn’t need any big scene with all four of us. “You go to the cafeteria,” I said, “but keep your cell on and I’ll call if I need you, okay?”
The hospital came into view in front of us, a huge geometric collection of glass and metal. My daughter was in there. I couldn’t believe she’d had the courage to set foot inside. To actually drive herself there. She was just deep, Jenny had said. Yes, she was. I wanted to know every millimeter of that depth. I wanted it not to be too late for us and I was so afraid it was.
54
Grace
Anna moved around Haley’s hospital room, rearranging books and remote controls and tissue boxes and drinking glasses, and Haley chattered about a movie she’d seen and I kept looking at the doorway. We were all waiting for my mother to show up. It would change everything, having Mom here. She would take charge, and I realized how much I depended on that—on my mother taking charge of things.
The three of us were talking about the most unimportant things—my school and Old Town Alexandria and what Wilmington was like, as though I was just someone who’d dropped by for a visit, not their daughter or sister.
I jumped every time I saw someone in the hallway. Finally, there she was. My mother. She barely looked like herself, she was so pale and frazzled. I jumped up from the couch, the blanket falling from my shoulders, and ran into her arms.
“Mom,” I said, and suddenly everything I’d been through in the past twenty-four hours—Jenny showing me the letter, the horrible drive through the dark rain, the search for Anna Knightly—hit me all at once. My leg muscles felt like mush, and I knew I was only able to stand because my mother was holding me up.
“Sweetie,” Mom said, her voice quiet in my ear. “My sweetheart. It’s okay. I’m here.”
I held on to her. “I’m sorry I left like that,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. Her eyes were wet. “None of that matters.”
I could have stayed like that for the rest of my life, wrapped safely in her arms, but I could feel Anna behind me and Haley staring at us from her bed. I pulled away from my mother.
“This is my mom,” I said to Anna.
My mother walked over to Anna, her hand outstretched. “I’m Tara Vincent,” she said.
“Anna Knightly,” Anna said. “And this is my daughter, Haley.”
My mother looked at Haley. “Hi, Haley.” She put her arm around my shoulders. “I’ve spoken with my attorney,” she said to Anna. “He’ll be in touch with you.”
Anna tilted her head to the side and I knew she didn’t like my mother’s attitude. “Could we talk for a minute?” she asked. “Please? Mother to mother?”
“We can’t just leave, Mom,” I said. I knew she didn’t get exactly what was happening. She didn’t realize there was a life-or-death situation going on in that room.
My mother looked from me to Anna. “All right,” she said, “but I want to talk to my daughter alone first.”
Anna nodded. I could tell she was afraid my mother would take me away. I wanted to leave. I did. But I wouldn’t. “There’s a lounge at the end of the hall,” Anna said. “It’s usually empty. Go ahead.”
My mother held my hand as if I were a little girl as we walked down the hall. As if I were her little girl.
If only I could be.
55
Tara
There was so much I wanted to say. I wanted to ask her a thousand questions about her fears and her confusion and to know everything she was thinking and feeling. I wanted her to know that she would always be my daughter, that I would never allow her to be taken from me and that her body was hers. She didn’t have to offer a single one of her cells to see if she was a match for the stranger in the hospital bed.
But I said none of it as we sat on the two love seats in the tiny room. I asked her no questions. I felt Sam in the room with us, holding me back. He would have listened to her without prodding. Without picking her brain. He knew how to love our daughter.
“I love you,” I said, and it turned out to be all I needed to say. She began to cry.
“I’m so sorry I just left like that,” she said again. “It was so stupid.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “All that matters is that you’re safe.”
“I wish I never found out you’re not my mother.”
“We’ll need a DNA test before I’ll believe that,” I said, “but a blood test will never change how I feel about you, Grace.”
She wound the end of her hair around her finger. “I get so mad at you,” she said. “I even hate you sometimes. And today I can’t even remember why I ever felt that way. I wanted to go see Cleve and you said no and I got so angry and now that seems really stupid.”
I nodded, just to let her know I was listening.
“Right now I’m not even thinking about Cleve,” she said. “He’s like the last thing on my mind.” She let go of her hair and leaned toward me. “I don’t know who I am, Mom.”
I wanted to tell her who she was. She was the sensitive writer in the family, the quiet girl who had so much to say on paper. She was the apple of her father’s eye and the thread that had always connected Sam and me, biology be damned. She was the beauty who, truth be told, looked like neither of us. She was the girl I wanted so much to get to know.
I struggled instead to find the most open-ended thing to say. The Sam thing to say. “You’re still Grace,” I said, and knew at once it had been exactly right. She wore a small frown as she stared at me, and I could nearly see the wheels turning in her mind.
“I don’t want to lose Grace,” she said. “Even though I spend so much time wishing I was…not me. Wishing I could be more like you.” She did? I had never once thought she wished she could be like me and I wanted to ask her why, but managed to keep my mouth shut.
“I always wished I could be more like Jenny. Everybody loves Jenny. I never know what to say around people and I just… I’m so different. I’m weird.”
No, you’re not, I wanted to say. How could I let that comment go unchallenged? But she kept going before I had a chance to respond.
“But it’s like all of a sudden I want to just be me, Mom,” she said. “I don’t want to be somebody else’s daughter. Haley is nice. She’s cool. But I suddenly feel like everybody wants me to save her life and—” She shook her head. “Please…can you make this all go away?”
I moved next to her on the love seat, my arms around her. “You and I share the same wish, Grace.” I smoothed my hand down the length of her hair. How long since she’d let me do that? “I wish I could make this all go away, too, but I don’t know that I can.” I was the one who fixed things. Who controlled things. Never had anything felt so out of my control. “The one thing I can promise you is that I will slow this train down, okay?”
“She could die if I don’t give her my blood marrow.”
I nearly corrected her but let the mistake stand. She seemed so small in my arms, a child who didn’t know bone marrow from blood marrow, and I would allow her to be that child for as many more hours as possible.
“Your baby died.” Her cheek was on my shoulder, her breath against my throat.
At some point, I knew that phantom baby would work her way into my heart, but she wasn’t there yet. “I’m not thinking about that baby,” I said. “I’m thinking about you.”
“Can I be with you when you talk to Anna? Please?”
It had been easy for Ian to tell me to get Grace and go.
Easy for me to think of doing exactly that before I’d set foot in that hospital room, where “Anna Knightly” turned from a mere name to a woman. A mother.
I hugged Grace closer to me. I knew she was afraid that Anna would somehow convince me to turn her over without a fight. Why was it that on this day I understood my daughter so well? Had I known her all along?
“Yes,” I said. “This is all
about you and you can be with us.”
56
Anna
The woman, Tara, wanted Grace to be with us as we sat in the little room. I thought it would be better to leave her out of the discussion. She could stay with Haley while Tara and I talked, but Tara and Grace were a unit. Two against one. That’s good, I told myself. That’s the way it should be. If Grace turned out to be my Lily, I wanted her to have had the sort of life where she was loved and protected. Yet Grace seemed so fragile that I wasn’t sure she should be privy to our conversation. Still, it wasn’t my call.
Grace looked more like Tara than she did like me, that was for sure, but frankly, she didn’t look much like either of us. She and Tara sat side by side on the love seat, holding hands. Both of them probably had brown hair beneath the blond highlights and both of them had brown eyes, yet their features were dissimilar. I couldn’t help but study them, comparing one nose to the other. The shape of their lips. The curve of their eyebrows.
I couldn’t get past my lack of feeling for Grace except as a possible bone marrow donor for Haley, and that upset me. I never expected to feel so flat at the prospect of seeing my lost daughter in front of me.
“I don’t understand how all this happened,” Tara said. “Were you living in Wilmington?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question for the past couple of hours,” I said. “And no, I was living here, but I was a pharmaceutical rep and I often traveled to Wilmington.” I remembered back. I needed to figure this out for myself. “I was about thirty-five weeks pregnant with Lily on my last trip down there. Bryan, my husband, was stationed overseas at the time. While I was in Wilmington, I went into premature labor and delivered Lily down there. She was already six pounds three ounces and healthy. I was having trouble with my blood pressure, though, and a few hours after Lily was born, I had a stroke and slipped into a coma.”
“Oh, my God,” Tara said.
“They transported me to Duke,” I said. “Bryan was still in Somalia, trying to get permission to come home, but of course I was out of it and had no idea what was happening. When Bryan got home, he stayed in a hotel near Duke. I guess it was a terrible time for him.” It was something I rarely thought about, how incredibly difficult that period must have been for Bryan. “Our home was up here in Alexandria. Our newborn baby was in Wilmington. And I was in a coma in Durham. He called the hospital in Wilmington to ask about Lily, and they told him she wasn’t there. That she must have been transferred with me. Bryan tried to reach the EMTs who transferred me, but no one had a record of a baby being moved with me. She—” I looked at Grace “—she had just vanished along with any record of her birth. Bryan didn’t know the name of the doctor who delivered her. It was all a big mess. I was in a coma a little more than two weeks. I’d actually had very little damage from the stroke, thank God. My left side was weak. My vision and speech were a little off. My left hand is still not all that strong.” I flexed my fingers. “My memory was worthless. I couldn’t remember any doctors’ names, either. The only thing I remembered was that I’d had a beautiful baby and I wanted her back.”
“I’m sorry,” Tara said, but I saw her tighten her hand around Grace’s as if she had no intention of ever letting her go.
“When I was well enough to travel,” I continued, “we went to Wilmington. Lily would have been about seven weeks old by then. We worried that someone thought Lily had been abandoned, which in a way she had been, and that they’d moved her to foster care, so we searched through the foster system.”
“How terrible for you,” Tara said, but she was still clutching Grace’s hand hard.
“I saw the letter your midwife wrote to me,” I said. “I… It’s hard to take it all in. Did you have any idea?”
“None,” Tara said. “Noelle died recently….” She looked at Grace. “Did you tell her?”
Grace nodded.
“She committed suicide and my friend and I found the letter and we began searching for the ‘Anna’ Noelle was writing to. We finally figured out it was you, but we didn’t know whose baby she…whose baby died. We never in a million years thought it was mine.”
“Didn’t you see your baby…I mean, wouldn’t you know if your baby suddenly looked different?” I asked.
“It was the middle of the night when she was born and my labor had been very difficult. When Noelle brought her to me in the morning, I guess she’d already…made the substitution, because that baby was definitely Grace.”
“I don’t think much of your midwife,” I said.
“She did a terrible thing,” Tara said. “But it’s hard for me to let it define who she was.”
“Tell her about the babies program,” Grace said softly.
“Would you like to tell her?” Tara asked. “You’re more involved with it than I am.”
“She started an organization to help babies…preemies and poor babies and sick babies,” Grace said. “She won the Governor’s Award for it, but she wouldn’t accept it.”
I couldn’t look at her as she spoke. I was so afraid of attaching to her. Instead, I looked at Tara. “Maybe this is why,” I said, sweeping my hand through the air to take in the three of us and our predicament. “Maybe she felt she didn’t deserve any awards.”
“Could be,” Tara agreed. She put her arm around Grace. “I think we need a DNA test,” she said. “And I think we’d both better lawyer up. I don’t mean that in an adversarial way, but we—”
“I agree completely,” I said. “We all need to know what we’re dealing with. But I did explain to Grace earlier about Haley’s need for a bone marrow donor. She’s extremely ill. She’s—” I shrugged, giving into the word “—she’s terminally ill. And Grace agreed…”
“Grace didn’t know what she was agreeing to, Anna,” Tara said. “I’m sorry, but I have to put the brakes on right now, okay? Let’s take things a little more slowly. I’ll have my lawyer contact yours and see what timeline they recommend for the DNA test and then go from there.”
I felt like jumping from my seat and barring the door. “In a normal world, that would make sense,” I said. No tears. Please no tears. Tara was a cool customer and one thing I’d learned in my line of business was the need to stay calm. Still, I couldn’t keep the tremor out of my voice. “Please understand, Tara. I don’t know if Grace is Lily…” I looked at Grace. “I’m sorry to speak about you in the third person,” I said. “I just don’t know, but what if she is? And what if she’s a match for Haley? And what if we find that out too late? We haven’t been able to find a donor and a sibling has a one in four chance of being a good match.”
Tara shook her head. “You’re asking a lot of her,” she said. “That decision will just have to wait.”
“I want to do it,” Grace said. She looked at her mother. “I have to.”
“No, you don’t, honey. You don’t have to do anything.”
“I want to,” she repeated.
Please let her, I thought.
I saw Tara weaken. A lawyer would say to wait, I was sure of it, but this was different. This was two mothers. Two daughters.
“All right.” Tara gave in. “If you’re sure.”
57
Emerson
Jenny’s ice cream sundae had melted into a mocha-colored soup in her bowl and she pushed the soft liquid around with her spoon. My salad was practically untouched. We sat by the window in the cafeteria, surrounded by the chatter of doctors and nurses and visitors, but Jenny and I were in our own little bubble.
Maybe we should have gone with Tara to the girl’s room. I told myself that giving them privacy had been for the best. It was going to be confusing enough as it was; adding two more people to the mix could only make it messier. But I’d been glad Tara hadn’t wanted us with her. I didn’t think I could stand to watch her go through it all. I felt so guilty. Guilty for not telling her the moment I suspected that Grace was Anna Knightly’s child. Guilty that it was my daughter who hurt Grace with the truth. And I was tormen
ted by the thought of how Tara felt at that moment.
I could imagine the conversation between Tara and Anna Knightly. Two mothers fighting over their daughter. Of course, Grace would always be Tara’s. Anything else was unthinkable. Yet Anna’s baby had been stolen from her. How could she not demand at least a part of that child’s life back?
Jenny pushed her bowl of ice cream soup away from her. “I am so sorry, Mom,” she said once again. I’d lost track of how many times she’d apologized.
“Look,” I said, moving my salad aside, “you screwed up by not telling me you overheard. I screwed up by not talking to Tara right away. But none of that would change the fact that Noelle did what she did and now everyone has to deal with the consequences. That’s what you and I need to focus on. Helping Tara and Grace handle what’s coming.”
“I don’t want her to move away and be part of some other family and live up here and—”
“I doubt any of that will happen,” I said. “Grace is sixteen and she’ll have a say in any decision. And you don’t think Tara would say, ‘Oh, here, she’s yours,’ do you?”
“What would you do if you were in Tara’s place right now?” Jenny asked.
I blew out a breath and looked up at the ceiling. “I would give the other woman—Anna Knightly—I would give her my deepest sympathy, but I would do just what I hope Tara is doing. Get Grace out of here and let the lawyers handle everything.” I was worried, though. Jenny and I had debated over getting something to eat because we thought Tara would call us within minutes. Now, nearly forty minutes had passed. What was taking so long?
“How would you feel in Grace’s shoes right now?” I asked.
She gnawed on her lip for a moment. “I’d want to get to know the people,” she said. “My other family. But I wouldn’t want them to try to take me away from you and Dad. I absolutely wouldn’t let them. And I’d feel sad that your baby died that way. That’s so awful. Poor Tara.”