Tara and Grace moved next to the woman and Tara touched the frame where it shivered in her hand. “Oh, my God, Emerson,” she said when she saw the picture. “How can this be?”

“Tara,” the woman said, as if asking her friend to fix something that had moved entirely out of her control. “It can’t be,” she said. “It isn’t.”

I watched all four of them stare at the photograph. I watched as the truth sank in. I held Haley’s hand, waiting for the moment I could take my other child, my firstborn daughter, into arms that had ached to hold her for sixteen years. In that girl’s beautiful dark eyes, I saw confusion and fear and it broke my heart.

“Jenny,” I said. “Is that your name? Did I get it right?” I hadn’t really heard the introductions.

The girl slowly raised her gaze from the photograph. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said.

Grace looked at her mother. “I’m not…?”

It took Tara a moment to shake her head. “I don’t think so.” She touched the other woman’s shoulder. “Em,” she said, “is this possible? What do you remember?”

“I had her in the hospital,” the woman said again. “It’s impossible. It’s ridiculous.”

“When is your birthday?” I asked Jenny.

“August 31,” she whispered.

My baby, I thought, my eyes filling. She’d lain alone in a hospital for two days with no mother to hold her. No mother to talk to her. She’d been all by herself until the midwife stole her away, quietly, taking all records of her existence with her, erasing her so that I’d never be able to find her again.

“You’re my Lily, Jenny. I’m certain of it.”

“Stop it!” the woman snapped at me, tugging Jenny close to her, and I knew I’d said too much, too fast, but I hadn’t been able to help myself.

The girl pulled free of her mother and fled down the hallway. Grace took off after her. Tara grabbed the woman’s arm to stop her from following them. “Let Grace,” she said.

The woman looked terrified. “I don’t understand what’s going on!”

“She’s Lily,” Haley said. “She’s so Lily.”

Tara looked at me, her hands wrapped around the woman’s forearm. “Let me talk to Emerson,” she said.

I didn’t want them to leave. I was afraid Lily would vanish once more into thin air. But what could I do?

“All right,” I said. Emerson had already turned away, disappearing into the hallway, getting away from me as quickly as she could. “Please don’t leave, though,” I added, but they were gone and only Haley heard my words.



61

Noelle


Wilmington, North Carolina

1994

She awakened with a great start and couldn’t immediately figure out where she was. The odd, dim lighting in the room disoriented her. She blinked hard, trying to focus. The small sink. The bassinet. She turned her head to the right and saw the bed where Emerson slept. She felt something hard against her thigh through her skirt and glanced down to see a bottle next to her on the seat of the recliner. She’d been feeding the baby. What was her name? Grace? They’d wanted to name her Noelle. No, this baby wasn’t Grace. It was Emerson’s child. Jennifer. Jenny. She had the vaguest memory of getting up to return the baby to the bassinet, but the bassinet was empty. She tried to think. Had Jill come in to take the baby from her arms? She drew in a long slow breath, worried she’d feel dizzy once she got to her feet. She pressed her hands on the seat of the chair to keep her balance, but as she started to stand, her glance fell to the floor at her feet and she saw the baby who had slipped from her tired arms down the silky fabric of her skirt.

She couldn’t breathe. She bent over too quickly to reach for the infant and fell from the chair to the floor, landing hard on her hip. Grabbing the baby, she pulled her onto her lap but knew right away she was too late. Too impossibly late. The baby’s head was at an unnatural angle, her lips already blue and lifeless.

Noelle stared at the infant, eyes wide, horror filling her chest. You killed her, you killed her, you killed her! Her hands trembled as she attempted to straighten the little head on the broken neck. She leaned over to try to breathe life into the purplish lips and tiny nose, where a trickle of blood had already crusted.

She pulled herself to her feet, one hand on the edge of the sink. She felt as though she was wailing, but the sound was caught inside her chest and couldn’t come out. She picked up the baby and placed her in the bassinet, then stood stock-still, trying to clear her head. Trying to think.

The baby in the nurses’ station. The twin to this one. The one with the dying mother. The missing father.

How would she get Jill away? Quietly, she crossed the room and opened the door to the nurses’ station to find it empty. Jill wasn’t there, but the baby was still in the bassinet. Brown hair. Six and a half pounds. No time to waste. No time to think.

Noelle lifted the infant into her arms. She grabbed the thin chart attached to the bassinet and slipped back into Emerson’s room. Her hands shook wildly as she placed the motherless baby next to Emerson’s child in the bassinet. Then she wrapped a flannel blanket around the lifeless infant, Emerson’s little Jenny, and slipped her gently into her huge leather purse.

The wristbands! She reached into her purse and worked the band from the baby’s wrist, then exchanged it for the one worn by the infant in the bassinet, but not before she noticed the name: KNIGHTLY, baby girl. She dropped that baby’s record and wristband into her purse. She’d burn the records. She could already picture the fire in her fireplace.

She stole out of the hospital, passing a couple of nurses and one obstetrician she knew, but they barely acknowledged her as they raced down the hall. The unit was an uncalm place tonight. As uncalm as she felt inside. As uncalm as she would feel for the rest of her life.

It was three-thirty in the morning by the time she got home and by then she was operating on sheer adrenaline. Almost without thinking, she found the shovel in her shed. She selected the corner of her yard farthest from the house and, in the darkness, she dug and dug and dug, the earth soft from August rains. She made the hole deep and narrow. She wrapped the baby in her favorite skirt, because it was beautiful and because she needed to sacrifice something she loved. She lay flat on the ground and carefully lowered the baby deep into the ground, then she shoveled the earth over her, finally letting her tears come.

When she was finished she sat on the ground above the baby, above Emerson’s Jenny, not moving even when a misty rain started to fall. She sat there until the sky began to lighten with strands of pink and lemon and lavender, like a bouquet of flowers for a baby girl. That was what she would do this morning, she thought. She’d go to the garden shop and ask them what plants would bloom into a lush blanket of pastel blossoms that even a stranger would not be able to look at without thinking, This is a garden that’s filled with love.



62

Tara


Washington, D.C.

2010

We found Grace and Jenny in the little room at the end of the hall. They sat on the floor, leaning against one of the love seats and my daughter—my daughter, I was sure of it—had her arm around her best friend. They looked up when Emerson and I walked into the room.

“Mom,” Jenny said. “Please tell me I’m not her daughter! Just because I look like those girls doesn’t mean anything.”

Emerson sank onto the love seat. Every trace of color had left her face. She smoothed her hand over Jenny’s head, gently squeezing a fistful of her hair as if she could hold on to her that way. “I don’t understand how you possibly could be her daughter,” she said. “Noelle had nothing to do with your birth.”

I saw the doubt in Emerson’s eyes as she spoke. We’d both seen the picture of those girls. You could exchange Jenny for one of them in the photograph and no one would know the difference.

“The letter Noelle wrote to Anna,” I said. “It didn’t say where she was when she dropped the baby, did it?”

Emerson jerked her head toward me, a look of betrayal on her face. “Do you actually think Jenny could be the one?” she nearly barked at me. “Tell me how that could possibly have happened.”

I sat down on the love seat opposite them, wondering how much to say. How to say it all without being cruel because what happened now seemed so clear in my mind. “Noelle was upset you were alone when you were in labor.” I felt all their eyes on me. “Ted was trying to get a plane home and Noelle was with Sam and me, remember? But once Grace was born, she had a doula come over so she could go see you at the hospital.”

“She never came to the hospital,” Emerson argued.

I looked down at my lap, where I was twisting my wedding ring on my finger. “That’s what she told us later,” I said quietly. I lifted my gaze to Emerson again. “Of course, that’s what she’d tell us—that she never made it there. That she was so tired, she just went home and went to sleep. Didn’t that seem unbelievable at the time, Em? That she wouldn’t come see you?”

Emerson looked away from me. In her hand, she still held a fistful of Jenny’s hair.

“Mom.” Jenny put her hands over her ears as though she could somehow block out what was happening. “I can’t stand this!”

I felt such relief to know that Grace and I were free from the nightmare, yet I was now reliving the emotions of this long day again, reliving them through the friend I loved so much. Tell Jenny she’ll always be yours, I thought, leaning forward, and Emerson seemed to get my unspoken message.