Chapter 2

The Ackerly house sat up on the bluff with its lamps burning, always burning, as if the stone refused to go dark. Claire parked behind her mother's car and let herself in with a key she had never once used without knocking first.

Ruth was in the morning room in a cream robe, tea going cold, the family checkbook open on the desk beside her. She did not look up.

"Sit down, darling. You're wet."

"I want my delivery records."

Ruth turned a page. "It is half past eleven."

"From St. Brigid's. The night I had the boys."

For a moment the only sound was the rain working at the windows and the clock on the mantel doing what it had done since Claire was a girl. Ruth set the pen down parallel to the checkbook, squared it, and only then looked up, and her face was the face she wore in photographs: composed, generous, faintly amused.

"You're frightening yourself," she said. "That boy is a waiter with a cheap piece of silver. They sell those at the junk stalls on Ferry Street."

"He has the name. And he has the mark."

Ruth's eyes did not move. "What mark."

"Behind his ear. The same one Grady has."

"Children have birthmarks, Claire. You were a nurse. You know that."

"I was a nurse," Claire said. "You were the volunteer coordinator at that hospital for twenty years. You would know exactly what happens in a basement archive when a mother asks for her own file."

Ruth lifted her tea, found it cold, and set it down again without drinking. Something went through her then - quick, gone - and Claire, who had spent a lifetime reading her mother the way other people read weather, caught the flicker and could not name it.

"There was a boy," Ruth said.

The room tilted. Claire put one hand on the back of the chair and stayed standing.

"Yes," Ruth said, evenly, as if she were confirming the date of a garden party. "There was a boy. You had two sons, and one of them died. You know this. You have known it for seventeen years. I sat with you while they told you."

"I never saw him."

"You were sedated."

"I never held him. I never named him. You handled it. You handled everything."

"Someone had to." Ruth's hands folded together on the desk, small and dry and certain. "You were twenty-six years old and you were bleeding and half out of your mind. Dr. Pyle was called. He was very kind. He took care of the - of the arrangements."

Claire caught the pause. She caught it the way she would once have caught a skipped beat on a monitor.

"Pyle," she said. "He was my doctor?"

"He was called in."

"Who called him?"

Her mother looked at her, and for the first time in Claire's life she watched a door in Ruth Ackerly's face close and lock, quietly, the way doors close in houses where no one is allowed to slam anything.

"Go home, darling," Ruth said. "You have had a terrible night, and you are about to do something you cannot undo. Some things are finished. Let them stay finished."

Claire took her hand off the chair. "I want the records."

"They are with the family lawyer."

"Then I will go to the hospital."

Ruth's mouth thinned - the smallest thing, one corner of it - and she picked up her pen again. Claire understood then that her mother was not afraid of the hospital. Her mother was afraid of something else, and Claire had just walked past it without seeing its shape.

"Claire." Ruth did not look up from the checkbook. "Don't."

Claire drove home through the rain and did not sleep. By four in the morning she had decided what she would tell her husband about tomorrow, and the story had a florist in it, and it was a lie.