Chương 13
Noah said, “There’s more.”
Paper moved.
“A second lab sheet.”
“Whose?”
Noah went silent again.
Mara took the phone back.
“Whose, Noah?”
“Mine.”
Her heart began to pound.
“What does it say?”
“O positive.”
Mara looked at Daniel.
He shook his head.
“Still not enough by itself.”
Thomas spoke in the background.
“There’s a note clipped behind it.”
Noah read silently first.
Then he made a sound Mara had never heard from him.
Not crying.
Something smaller and more frightened.
“What?”
Noah said, “It says Richard requested comparison testing in 2003.”
The year the birth certificate was amended.
“What comparison?”
Noah did not answer.
Mara could hear him breathing.
Then Thomas said something too quietly to catch.
“Noah.”
“I’m here.”
“Comparison with who?”
“The preserved neonatal sample from the baby born in 1990.”
Mara leaned against the fence.
Daniel’s hand touched her shoulder.
She did not move away.
“What was the result?”
Noah’s voice broke.
“It says the samples were consistent with being from the same person.”
For several seconds nobody spoke.
A dog barked two houses away.
A delivery van rolled down the street.
Mara stared at a spiderweb stretched between the fence and a hydrangea branch, trembling whenever the breeze moved.
“No,” she said.
Daniel squeezed her shoulder.
“That report would need verification.”
“No,” Mara repeated.
Not to Daniel.
Not even to Noah.
To the shape the story was trying to take.
“If you were that baby, you’d be almost a year older.”
“I know.”
“Mom would have recognized you.”
“I was a newborn when she lost him.”
“But why would they tell her he died and then give him back eleven months later?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why would Dad know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why would he change your birth certificate twelve years later?”
“I don’t know.”
Noah’s voice rose.
“I don’t know any of it.”
Thomas spoke quietly in the background.
Noah snapped, “Stop telling me to sit down.”
Mara shut her eyes.
“Where’s the original lab?”
“This looks like a photocopy.”
“Then it proves nothing yet.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
“I know, Mara.”
She heard the strain in his voice and softened.
“Don’t leave Thomas’s office.”
“I won’t.”
“We’re coming.”
Daniel looked at her.
Mara nodded.
He understood.
Then a car horn sounded from the street.
Mara turned.
Elaine was climbing out of a rideshare at the curb.
She had no purse, no phone, and was carrying a small white cardboard box.
The car drove away.
Mara walked toward her.
“Where did you go?”
Elaine looked at the phone in Mara’s hand.
“Is that Noah?”
“Yes.”
“Hang up.”
“No.”
Elaine’s face changed.
“He opened Levin’s envelope.”
Mara stared.
“How did you know there was an envelope?”
Her mother did not answer.
Mara looked at the white box.
“What is that?”
Elaine held it tighter.
“Something I should have destroyed a long time ago.”
Mara’s mouth went dry.
Noah said through the speaker, “Mom?”
Elaine closed her eyes at the sound of his voice.
When she opened them again, tears had gathered but had not fallen.
“Noah,” she said.
He did not answer.
Elaine looked at Mara.
Then at Daniel.
Finally she opened the cardboard box.
Inside lay a yellowed infant hospital cap, a folded receiving blanket, and a clear plastic specimen tube sealed inside an old laboratory evidence pouch.
A faded label was still readable through the plastic.
ELLISON, MALE.
4/21/90.
Mara looked at her mother.
“You had a sample?”
Elaine nodded.
“Hair.”
Noah made a strangled sound over the phone.
Mara touched neither the pouch nor the box.
“Why did you keep it?”
“Because I didn’t believe them.”
“Who?”
“The hospital.”
“About his death?”
Elaine’s mouth trembled.
“About whose baby I gave birth to.”
Mara stopped breathing.
Daniel stepped closer.
Noah whispered, “What?”
Elaine looked down at the little cap.
“When my son was born, I saw him for less than a minute before they took him away.”
Her fingers moved over the edge of the box.
“The next morning, they brought me a baby to feed.”
Mara waited.
Elaine’s voice dropped.
“I told the nurse it wasn’t mine.”
Elaine kept her eyes on the blanket.
“The nurse told me I was confused from the medication.”
Mara heard Noah breathing through the phone.
“What was different?” she asked.
“His ear.”
Elaine touched her own left ear without seeming aware of it.
“The baby I saw after delivery had a little fold at the top of his left ear.”
She looked toward the street as a landscaping truck rattled past.
“The baby they brought me the next morning didn’t.”
Daniel said, “Newborn ears can change shape.”
“I know.”
Elaine’s answer came too quickly.
“I know what everyone told me.”
Mara watched her mother’s fingers close around the edge of the cardboard box.
“What happened to the baby they brought you?”
“I fed him.”
Noah made a small sound.
Elaine looked toward the phone.
“What else was I supposed to do?”
Nobody answered.
“He was hungry,” she said.
“The nurse was standing there waiting for me to stop being difficult, and he was hungry.”
Mara could see the scene without wanting to.
Her mother at twenty-seven, exhausted and frightened, holding a child she believed belonged to someone else while everyone around her treated certainty as illness.
“How long did you have him?”
“Maybe twenty minutes.”
“And then?”
“They took him for tests.”
“What tests?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“Of course I asked.”
Elaine’s voice sharpened.
“They stopped answering me.”
She lowered it again.
“Richard told me I was upsetting myself.”
Mara glanced at Daniel.
He was watching Elaine now with the stillness he used when something important had shifted.
“Dad believed the hospital?”
“At first.”
“At first?”
Elaine nodded.
“The next afternoon, Dr. Levin came in with Richard.”
Mara felt the air change.
“What did he say?”
“He said our son had developed respiratory distress.”
“Which son?”
Elaine flinched.
“That’s exactly what I asked.”
Noah whispered, “Jesus.”
May you like
Elaine pressed her lips together.
“Levin told me there had only ever been one Baby Boy Ellison assigned to me.”
