Chapter 8 - What the Attic Kept
Kayla had hauled the boxes down herself.
Three of them. Banker's boxes, the tape gone yellow and brittle, stacked in the middle of my living room like something set there to accuse me.
She was sitting on the floor when we came in, papers fanned out all around her, still in her coat. She looked up when the two of us walked through the door side by side. Something crossed her face — the sight of Mark and me together — and then she pushed it down and looked back at the paper in her hand.
"She kept everything," Kayla said. "I don't know if it was guilt or if she wanted proof it was all done properly. But it's all here."
Mark sat on the floor across from her. I took the couch.
Kayla lifted a bundle of letters held together with a rubber band that fell apart in crumbs when she touched it.
"These are from Aunt Nadine. Written to Grandma during the summer Mom was up there." She opened the first one and read out loud. "'Beatrice — she's asking again. She wants to know if the baby is really gone. I told her what you said to tell her. She cried for two days straight. I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this. Please tell me we are doing the right thing.'"
The room was very quiet.
Kayla set it down. Picked up another. "'Beatrice — the boy has been placed. The Whitfields have confirmed.'" She stopped. "The Whitfields. Mark — what was Eileen's maiden name?"
Mark's voice came out careful. "Whitfield. She was Eileen Whitfield before she got married."
Kayla laid the letter on the floor between them like it might tear.
"'The boy has been placed with the Whitfields,'" she read again. "'They are a good family. The doctor says the surgery scar has healed cleanly. Beatrice, it is done. Vivian need never know.'"
I had my hands folded in my lap. I was looking at them.
Vivian need never know.
My own name, in my aunt's handwriting, in a letter written the summer I was nineteen and lying in a bed up north believing my child was in the ground.
"There's more," Kayla said. She was looking at Mark now, not at me. "There's a document. From the agency." She held it up. One page, typed, on a letterhead I didn't recognize. "It lists the fees. There's one at the bottom." She read it. "'Maternal notification suppression — $400.'"
Four hundred dollars. That's what my mother paid to make sure I never found out.
Mark took the page out of Kayla's hand and read it himself. Set it down on the floor.
"Sandra has a copy of this," he said. "Eileen found one."
Kayla looked up. "Who's Sandra?"
Mark told her. She listened without cutting in once, which is not a thing Kayla has ever been good at. When he finished, she sat back on her heels.
"So there are two copies of this document. Plus a box of letters that back up every word of it."
"Yes."
"And the agency was never licensed."
"According to Sandra, no."
Kayla looked at me. "Mom. This was a crime. What Grandma did — paying to falsify a death notification, setting up an adoption through an unlicensed operator — that was a crime."
"She's been dead eleven years," I said.
"I know." Her voice stayed level but her eyes were shining. "But whoever ran that agency might not be. And even if they are — there could be other families. Other mothers who got told their babies didn't make it." She paused. "Other Marks."
The room went quiet again.
Mark was looking at the pile on the floor. Forty years of carefully kept silence, boxed up in his birth mother's living room.
"What do you want to do?" he asked me.
I thought about the nurse who held my hand in that white room. The one who wasn't supposed to.
I thought about the forty years I'd spent grieving something I couldn't name.
I thought about my mother sitting in that church, watching Mark and Kayla trade rings, knowing.
"I want to find out if there were others," I said. "And I want to make sure nobody can ever do it again."
Kayla reached across the papers and took my hand. She hadn't done that since she was a little girl.
Mark watched us. Then he reached out and put his hand over both of ours.
May you like
"Then that's what we do," he said.
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