Chapter 8

Fern’s room was at the end of the hall. She was propped up in bed with the oxygen cannula in and a tray of untouched food beside her. She looked smaller than she had at the door, all bones and gray skin.

“You came,” she said.

“I need the intake form.”

“You need a lot of things.”

I sat in the chair beside the bed. The room smelled like antiseptic and old breath. A monitor beeped slow and steady.

“You took him,” I said. “You walked him out of the hospital.”

Fern looked at the ceiling. “I didn’t walk him out. Your mother did the paperwork. A nurse brought him to the discharge desk. I signed the intake at Lakeshore. I took him home.”

“Why?”

“Because a doctor told me the state would take him.” She turned her head. “You were on a morphine drip. Your tox screen was positive. They said the baby would be placed, and you’d never get him back. I was your aunt. I thought I was saving him.”

“You let me believe he was dead.”

“Verna told me you knew. She said she told you the truth and you agreed. I believed her for a year. Then I figured it out. By then he was walking. By then he called me Nan.”

“You kept him.”

“I loved him.” Her voice cracked. “That doesn’t make it right. But I loved him.”

I looked at the wall. I had spent nine years loving a dead baby. Fern had spent nine years loving a living one. We had both been robbed, but only one of us had done the robbing.

“The intake form,” I said.

Fern reached under the pillow and pulled out a plastic tote. She set it on the bed and took out a carbon copy. Four pages, soft at the edges, signed at the bottom: Fern Lattimore, placing relative.

The date was three days after the birth.

“I took him because they told me you were unfit,” she said. “I know now that was a lie. But I can’t give him back nine years.”

I took the form. My hands were steady. That surprised me. I felt like I was holding a grenade.

“The review is Friday,” I said. “I’m going to enter this into the record. I’m going to name you.”

Fern closed her eyes. “I know.”

“He’s going to hear it.”

“I know.”

She looked at me then, and for the first time I saw the woman in the doorway, the woman who had raised my son, the woman who had taught him to thank people twice and keep his hands in his lap.

“Tell him I loved him,” she said. “When it’s time, tell him that.”

“I will.”

I left the room with the form in my jacket. In the elevator, I let myself cry for exactly one floor. Then I wiped my face and drove home.