I struggled instead to find the most open-ended thing to say. The Sam thing to say. “You’re still Grace,” I said, and knew at once it had been exactly right. She wore a small frown as she stared at me, and I could nearly see the wheels turning in her mind.
“I don’t want to lose Grace,” she said. “Even though I spend so much time wishing I was…not me. Wishing I could be more like you.” She did? I had never once thought she wished she could be like me and I wanted to ask her why, but managed to keep my mouth shut.
“I always wished I could be more like Jenny. Everybody loves Jenny. I never know what to say around people and I just… I’m so different. I’m weird.”
“But it’s like all of a sudden I want to just be me, Mom,” she said. “I don’t want to be somebody else’s daughter. Haley is nice. She’s cool. But I suddenly feel like everybody wants me to save her life and—” She shook her head. “Please…can you make this all go away?”
I moved next to her on the love seat, my arms around her. “You and I share the same wish, Grace.” I smoothed my hand down the length of her hair. How long since she’d let me do that? “I wish I could make this all go away, too, but I don’t know that I can.” I was the one who fixed things. Who controlled things. Never had anything felt so out of my control. “The one thing I can promise you is that I will slow this train down, okay?”
“She could die if I don’t give her my blood marrow.”
I nearly corrected her but let the mistake stand. She seemed so small in my arms, a child who didn’t know
“Your baby died.” Her cheek was on my shoulder, her breath against my throat.
At some point, I knew that phantom baby would work her way into my heart, but she wasn’t there yet. “I’m not thinking about that baby,” I said. “I’m thinking about you.”
“Can I be with you when you talk to Anna? Please?”
It had been easy for Ian to tell me to get Grace and go.
Easy for me to think of doing exactly that before I’d set foot in that hospital room, where “Anna Knightly” turned from a mere name to a woman. A mother.
I hugged Grace closer to me. I knew she was afraid that Anna would somehow convince me to turn her over without a fight. Why was it that on this day I understood my daughter so well? Had I known her all along?
“Yes,” I said. “This is all about you and you can be with us.”
56
Anna
The woman, Tara, wanted Grace to be with us as we sat in the little room. I thought it would be better to leave her out of the discussion. She could stay with Haley while Tara and I talked, but Tara and Grace were a unit. Two against one.
Grace looked more like Tara than she did like me, that was for sure, but frankly, she didn’t look much like either of us. She and Tara sat side by side on the love seat, holding hands. Both of them probably had brown hair beneath the blond highlights and both of them had brown eyes, yet their features were dissimilar. I couldn’t help but study them, comparing one nose to the other. The shape of their lips. The curve of their eyebrows.
I couldn’t get past my lack of feeling for Grace except as a possible bone marrow donor for Haley, and that upset me. I never expected to feel so flat at the prospect of seeing my lost daughter in front of me.
“I don’t understand how all this happened,” Tara said. “Were you living in Wilmington?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question for the past couple of hours,” I said. “And no, I was living here, but I was a pharmaceutical rep and I often traveled to Wilmington.” I remembered back. I needed to figure this out for myself. “I was about thirty-five weeks pregnant with Lily on my last trip down there. Bryan, my husband, was stationed overseas at the time. While I was in Wilmington, I went into premature labor and delivered Lily down there. She was already six pounds three ounces and healthy. I was having trouble with my blood pressure, though, and a few hours after Lily was born, I had a stroke and slipped into a coma.”
“Oh, my God,” Tara said.
“They transported me to Duke,” I said. “Bryan was still in Somalia, trying to get permission to come home, but of course I was out of it and had no idea what was happening. When Bryan got home, he stayed in a hotel near Duke. I guess it was a terrible time for him.” It was something I rarely thought about, how incredibly difficult that period must have been for Bryan. “Our home was up here in Alexandria. Our newborn baby was in Wilmington. And I was in a coma in Durham. He called the hospital in Wilmington to ask about Lily, and they told him she wasn’t there. That she must have been transferred with me. Bryan tried to reach the EMTs who transferred me, but no one had a record of a baby being moved with me. She—” I looked at Grace “—she had just vanished along with any record of her birth. Bryan didn’t know the name of the doctor who delivered her. It was all a big mess. I was in a coma a little more than two weeks. I’d actually had very little damage from the stroke, thank God. My left side was weak. My vision and speech were a little off. My left hand is still not all that strong.” I flexed my fingers. “My memory was worthless. I couldn’t remember any doctors’ names, either. The only thing I remembered was that I’d had a beautiful baby and I wanted her back.”
“I’m sorry,” Tara said, but I saw her tighten her hand around Grace’s as if she had no intention of ever letting her go.
“When I was well enough to travel,” I continued, “we went to Wilmington. Lily would have been about seven weeks old by then. We worried that someone thought Lily had been abandoned, which in a way she had been, and that they’d moved her to foster care, so we searched through the foster system.”
“How terrible for you,” Tara said, but she was still clutching Grace’s hand hard.
“I saw the letter your midwife wrote to me,” I said. “I… It’s hard to take it all in. Did you have any idea?”
“None,” Tara said. “Noelle died recently….” She looked at Grace. “Did you tell her?”
Grace nodded.
