The Midwife's Confession

before it got too dark to see them any longer, and it was like I didn’t have the energy to turn on the light. When my mother came home, she stopped in my room to tell me she’d picked up sandwiches for dinner. I turned on the light then because I wanted to see if she looked any different to me, but she didn’t. She wasn’t the one who had changed in the past couple of hours.

After my mother went downstairs again, I logged on to the internet. I found the website for the Missing Children’s Bureau and followed the URL to the page about Anna Knightly. I caught my breath. A picture! Omigod, she looked so amazing. She had this open, beautiful face. You could tell so much from a picture. She looked gentle and full of love. She had green eyes, which had to be where my flecks of green came from. I didn’t think she looked anything like me otherwise, though. My own mother—at least, the mother who raised me—looked more like me than Anna Knightly did. I tried to find myself in her face, holding my hand mirror in front of me so I could look back and forth from my reflection to her photograph. My real father, I thought. I must look more like him. I shivered, creeped out by the thought of having any other father than the one I’d grown up with. The one I would love forever, no matter what.

I read the one sentence over and over again. “Her infant daughter, Lily, disappeared.” How did they tell her that her baby had vanished? I pictured this pretty, soft-looking woman going into the hospital nursery to take her daughter home, and all the nurses scrambling to look for the baby, their panic rising as they realized she was gone. I was gone. I still couldn’t get it through my head that Lily was me. I could imagine how Anna Knightly felt when they told her. How she’d grieved for her. For me. I could have had a whole different life.

Missing children turned up dead. That’s the way it always was on the news, and after all this time that had to be what Anna Knightly expected. She only knew I disappeared. She didn’t know the rest of my story.

“I’m alive,” I said to the picture on my monitor. “I’m right here.”

Where did she live? Could I find a phone number for her somehow? Could I call her right now? Right this second? I wanted to tell her I was alive. She could die tomorrow and we never would have known each other.

There was a phone number for the Missing Children’s Bureau and I wrote it down. There was an address, too, in Alexandria, Virginia, one state away. My mother—my biological mother—was only one puny state away.

I couldn’t sleep. I kept picturing a map. Alexandria was in the northern part of Virginia, wasn’t it? Near Washington? Washington was only like five hours away. I needed to meet Anna. I needed to find out who I really was. I could call her at the Missing Children’s Bureau early in the morning, but it would be so much better to meet her in person. I sat up, totally wired. I had to meet her now, I thought, as soon as I possibly could. Life was short. Tomorrow Anna could get killed driving to work. It happened.

I grabbed my phone and speed-dialed Cleve’s number and when he picked up—he picked up! —I burst into tears.

“Don’t hang up. Don’t hang up!” I said. “I have to talk to you. It’s not about us. Don’t worry. I just have to talk to you or I’ll go crazy.”

“Grace, it’s nearly midnight.” He sounded wide-awake. I heard people talking in the background. A girl laughing. “We can talk tomorrow, okay?” he asked.

“I just found out I was stolen from another woman when I was a baby!”

He was quiet. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I explained everything: Jenny overhearing the conversation between her mother and Ian. Noelle’s letter to Anna Knightly. The stolen baby. The Missing Children’s Bureau.

“I don’t believe this,” he said. “Are you making this up?”

“No,” I said. “Talk to Jenny tomorrow if you don’t believe me. They’re going to tell my mother Tuesday. She already thinks I’m…” My voice broke, catching me off guard. “I’ve never really been the daughter she wanted. The other baby, the one who died, probably would have been just like her.”

“Hold on a sec,” Cleve said. I heard him moving around. A door opening, maybe. “I had to go out in the hall,” he said after a minute. “My roommate’s got company. Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but your mom loves you. Everyone has issues with their mother, Grace. I’d love to disown mine half the time. But she’s my mother and she loves me and yours does, too.”

“That’s the difference. Suzanne is your mother. My mother isn’t. I want to meet my real mother and tell her everything. I’m going there.”

“Where?”

“Virginia. I’m going to go meet her.”

“When? And how do you plan to get there?”

“I’ll drive. Tomorrow.”

He laughed. “Don’t be so twelve years old, Grace.”

His words stung. “You don’t know how this feels,” I said.

“Look, tomorrow you tell your mother what Jenny told you, and—”

“I’ll get Jenny in trouble. She’s not supposed to know any of this.”

“Jenny’ll get over it. You tell your mom. If what you’re saying is true—and I doubt it—you and your mom need a lawyer. Ian’s a lawyer, right? There’s all kinds of legal stuff that’ll need to be sorted out.”

“Lawyers screw everything up,” I said. My father had been a great lawyer, but he always slowed things down when it came to his clients’ cases. I bet Ian was the same way. Daddy wanted everybody to take their time. Not rush into things. If he was alive, I wondered what he would do with this mess. “Oh, Cleve,” I said, “my dad’s not really my dad!”

“He’s your dad and your mom’s your mom. Even if this other lady had you, your parents are still your parents.”

“I’m really freaked out, Cleve,” I said, but my mind was moving away from our conversation. I walked over to my computer, sat down and clicked on Google Maps.