Chapter 4 - Two Floors Down
I looked at Daniel. "I want to see her. Lauren."
His face changed. "Mom..."
"What."
"She knows you're in the building. She still doesn't want to see you."
That stopped me where I stood.
For thirty-six years, my daughter had never gotten older than a few hours old. Now she was thirty-six and had a whole life, and opinions about the kind of mother I might have been. She'd earned every one of them.
"Okay," I said.
Daniel blinked. "Okay?"
"If she doesn't want me in that room, I'm not going to force my way in." I picked up my purse. "But I want her to hear something from you."
"Anything. What?"
"Tell her I never gave her away."
"She knows that, Mom."
"Tell her again. And tell her I'm sorry."
"Sorry for what?"
"For not finding her."
Daniel's face crumpled. "You thought she was dead."
"I know what I thought. It doesn't help."
I went back upstairs.
Clara was asleep in a clear plastic bassinet by the nurses' station. I stood over her for a long time.
Thirty-six years ago, somebody carried my newborn daughter out of a room before I could learn her face. Now there was another newborn girl six inches from my hand.
I didn't pick her up. It didn't feel like mine to do. She belonged to Lauren, and Lauren barely knew I was alive.
Mark came and stood beside me.
"Lauren asked Daniel something before the surgery," he said. "She asked if you could hold Clara if anything happened to her on the table."
I looked at him. "She said that?"
"That was before she found out I'd called you."
I looked back down at the baby. "Then I'll wait until she asks me again."
For the first time all morning, Mark didn't argue.
We sat in those hard chairs for almost an hour. Then the doors swung open and Daniel came through.
"Mom."
I was on my feet before he finished the word. "Is she okay?"
"She's awake."
Relief went through me first. Then I saw his face.
"What is it?"
"She's asking for you."
I couldn't move.
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure."
Mark stood up too. Daniel shook his head. "Just Mom."
I followed him to the elevator and down two floors. Outside her door my legs started shaking and wouldn't stop.
Daniel put a hand on my shoulder. "You don't have to do this right this second."
"I've waited thirty-six years."
I went in.
Lauren was propped against a stack of white pillows. She had dark hair, the same dark hair as the baby upstairs.
But it was her eyes that knocked the air out of me. Gray. My mother's eyes. My eyes. Clara's eyes.
She looked at me and neither of us said anything for a long moment.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to call you," she finally said.
My eyes filled. "You don't have to call me anything."
She looked at the window. "I thought you'd be different."
"Different how?"
"I don't know. I just had a picture in my head. I don't know."
"Neither do I."
That almost got a smile out of her. Almost.
Then she looked back at me. "Did you really think I died?"
"Yes."
"For all that time?"
"Every day for thirty-six years."
Her eyes filled and she turned toward the window.
"I spent most of my life thinking you didn't want me."
"I wanted you more than I've ever wanted anything."
"You were seventeen."
"I was still your mother."
She wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand. "Daniel told me your parents set the whole thing up."
"I didn't know. I swear to you, I didn't know."
"I believe you. Now."
There were a thousand questions stacked up in my throat. Who raised you. Were you loved. What was your first word. Did you like school. Who sat up with you when you were sick. Who taught you to drive. Who held you the first time somebody broke your heart.
But those questions belonged to thirty-six years I couldn't get handed back to me in one hospital room.
So I asked the only one that mattered right then.
"How are you feeling?"
"Tired."
"Then I'll let you sleep."
I turned to go.
"Wait."
I stopped.
"Is Clara okay?"
I smiled through the tears. "She's perfect."
"You held her?"
"Not yet. I was waiting for you to say it was all right."
Something in her face eased. "It's all right."
That was all she said.
It was enough.
Lauren went home a few days later. To her own house, not mine. That part mattered to both of us.
We didn't turn into mother and daughter overnight, the way it happens in the movies.
For weeks it was mostly texting. Sometimes she wrote back in a minute. Sometimes three days went by. I taught myself not to panic at the silence.
Our first lunch lasted forty minutes. The second one ran almost two hours.
Eventually she met Aaron and Evan. Watching my three grown sons sit across a table from the sister they'd never known they had was one of the strangest, best things I've ever seen.
Mark and I had harder work in front of us.
I understood why he'd been afraid. Understanding it wasn't the same as forgiving it. Loving him wasn't the same either.
We started seeing a counselor.
Daniel apologized more times than I could count. One afternoon I finally told him he could stop.
He looked relieved for about two seconds.
"But you have to stop deciding what I can and can't handle," I said. "That part's not up for debate."
"I know."
"I mean it. Those choices are mine. Not yours."
"I know, Mom."
Both my parents were gone by then. That was its own kind of ache — there would never be a conversation, never an explanation past the paperwork Lauren had dug up and the truth the rest of us pieced together. I would never get to sit across from my mother and ask her how she could hold my hand in that hospital bed and tell me my baby had died.
I had to learn to live in a house with that unanswered question.
About six months after Clara was born, Lauren brought her over for the afternoon.
At some point Clara fell asleep against Lauren's shoulder.
I went upstairs. In the back corner of my closet was a storage box I hadn't opened in years. Inside it was the pink blanket.
I brought it down.
Lauren looked at it. "What's that?"
"I bought it when I was pregnant with you."
She stared at me. "You still have it."
"I thought it was the only piece of you I was ever going to get."
She reached out and ran her thumb along the faded edge.
For a moment neither of us said a word.
Then she tucked it carefully around Clara.
I started to cry.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
I laughed and wiped my face. "I'm working on it."
"Yeah," she said. "So am I."
And somehow that was better than either of us pretending it was already fixed.
Thirty-six years got taken from us. We were never getting them back.
But we still had a say in the years that were left.
Clara stirred under the pink blanket, and Lauren settled it around her tiny shoulders.
This time, when I looked at that blanket, I didn't see the baby they'd told me I'd lost.
May you like
I saw my daughter, sitting right next to me.
So let me ask you this: if you found out that the worst loss of your life had never really happened — that the people closest to you had known the truth and stayed quiet to spare you the pain — could you ever forgive them for it?
