Chapter 3

St. Auren's records archive lived in a sub-basement with a dehumidifier humming like a controlled breath.

I had spent two days threatening the records department with nothing - I had no case, no subpoena, no standing, only a mother's right to her own file and a partner's name on letterhead. On the third morning a supervisor named Ruth Achebe, gray-braided and unsentimental, met me at the elevator with a cart and said, "You're not the first person who's come looking for a baby in this hospital. Follow me."

We did not find a plot number, because there was no plot. We found something better and worse: a single-page relinquishment form, creased into a file that should have held a burial permit. It was on old St. Auren's letterhead, dated one day after my sons were born.

Voluntary relinquishment of a live-born male infant. Reason: private placement. Fee paid: yes. And on the signature line, in a nurse's loose hand, a name.

Hattie Pruitt, R.N.

I stood in that humming room and read her name four times. A nurse. Not a doctor, not an agency, not a lawyer. A woman who had worked in the maternity ward the night my sons were born and had carried my child out of that building the way you carry a coat.

Below her name, in the box for arranging party: two initials and a firm name I knew better than my own signature. VE, c/o Ellery Holdings.

Verena Ellery. My mother-in-law, who had held my hand in that delivery room and prayed over me.

"She's dead," Ruth said quietly, when I asked about Pruitt. "Retired in the eighties. There's an old personnel file if you want it."

I wanted it. In it were three addresses over twenty years, a sister listed as next of kin, and a notation that Hattie Pruitt had died eleven years ago - which meant she had died when my son would have been three.

Eli, six, had learned to fold his own shirts because nobody else in the house did it right.

That was the winter the state first knocked. He remembered a woman who called herself Aunt Loretta, who fed him oatmeal with brown sugar and kept a shoebox of receipts she would not let anyone move. Then the apartment got dark for a while, and then the county came, and then there was a series of rooms with other children in them, and a name that changed pronunciation depending on who called it.

He had kept the cord around his neck through all of it. He had slept with one hand on it in the winter he slept on the Orange Line, because it was the only thing he owned that had been his before he could remember, and he had decided early that a boy who could not say where he came from could at least point to something.

He did not know the word Ellery meant a family with a lakefront penthouse and a family trust. He only knew it was the one word on his body that nobody had been able to take.

The personnel file gave me Loretta Pruitt's last known address, in a six-flat on the South Side. And it gave me one more name, in the margin of a payroll ledger: Edwin Cole, M.D., obstetrics consultant - retired, last listed at a care community in Evanston.

I drove north on the lake in the snow. Dr. Cole was ninety-one, in a chair by a window, and he knew my face before I said a word - I saw it in the way his hands came up off the arms of the chair and then went back down, like a man reaching for a rail in a dream.

"Nadia Ellery," he said. "Verena's daughter-in-law."

"You signed the stillbirth certificate."

He looked out the window for a long time. Then he said, "I signed my name to a piece of paper because I was told the family would handle the burial and the mother must not be told, for her own recovery. I was young in that decision. I have been old in it for fifty years." He turned back. "The baby was alive. I heard him cry."

"What did they do with him?"

"Ask the nurse's people," Dr. Cole said. "I was told the arrangement was private and charitable. I chose to believe it." His mouth worked. "That is the whole of my confession, and it is not enough."

It was not enough. But it was a name, and I had a name now, and a name is a door.

I stood in the snow outside the care community with my phone in my gloved hand, and I called the one person I had not yet been able to call.

"Grant," I said, when he answered. "I found the nurse."

There was a silence on the line long enough to hold a marriage in.

"I'll be home in an hour," he said. "Wait for me. Don't call anyone else."

"That's not how it works," I said. "I'm a lawyer."

"I know what you are," my husband said. "Please. Wait for me."