Rosalind looked at me for a long moment before she answered, and when she did her voice was barely above a whisper. "That is the part I need to tell you slowly," she said. "And Beau, you are going to need to listen to all of it, because it changes everything."
Chapter 11
— Two Rooms, One Night
She told me that six years ago, in the hospital where Poppy was born, the room next to Meredith's had belonged to Veronica. The two women had gone into labour on the same night, within hours of each other. The nurses had gone back and forth between the two doors all night long, and Rosalind had heard the baby crying in the next room while she sat beside Meredith's bed.
"I thought it was a coincidence at first," she said. "Two women giving birth on the same night in the same hospital. It happens. But then I saw Veronica in the corridor, and I knew her face, and I knew it was not a coincidence at all. She had come to this hospital on purpose, Beau. She had followed Meredith here."
I asked her what she meant, and she said Veronica had known Meredith for years, long before I had ever met either of them, and that the two of them had been close once, and then something had broken between them, and Veronica had never forgiven it. She would not say what the break had been, only that it had been about a man, and that the man was gone now.
"She was alone," Rosalind said. "No one came to sit with her. No one held her hand. I saw her in the corridor in the middle of the night, standing outside her own door, looking down the hall toward Meredith's room, and her face was white, and she was shaking, and I thought she was afraid. I went to her, Beau. I asked if she needed anything, and she looked at me as though she did not know me, and she said she was fine, and she went back into her room and closed the door."
The baby in the next room was born in the early hours of the morning, a little girl, small and early, and the nurses carried her away to the nursery in a hurry, and Rosalind said she heard one of them say the baby needed help to breathe. Meredith's baby, our Poppy, was born not long after, strong and loud, and Meredith held her against her chest and cried, and Rosalind cried with her, and for a little while the whole world had been only that room, and the baby, and the light coming through the window.
But Rosalind could not stop thinking about the room next door. The next morning she went to the nursery to see the babies, and there they were, two little girls in two small bassinets, side by side, one strong and pink and wailing, the other small and quiet, with tubes and wires, fighting for every breath. She stood there a long time, looking at them, and she thought about how close they were, and how different their lives would be, and she felt something cold settle in her chest.
"Veronica left the hospital two days later," she said. "She left alone, with no baby in her arms. I asked one of the nurses where the baby had gone, and the nurse said the baby was still in the nursery, and that the mother had signed papers, and that a family was coming for her. I did not understand. I still do not understand. But I know what I saw, Beau. Veronica gave birth to a little girl that night, and she left that hospital without her."
I sat very still. My hands were flat on my knees, and I could feel the fabric of my trousers under my palms, and I could hear Poppy laughing in the kitchen, and I thought about the baby in the nursery, small and quiet, fighting for breath, and I thought about Veronica, who had held my hand and told me she had never wanted children, and I felt sick.
"Why did Meredith never tell me?" I asked.
Rosalind shook her head. "She wanted to. She started to, more than once. But she did not know what to say, and she was afraid you would think she had been keeping something from you, and in a way she had. She wrote it down, though. She wrote everything down, in her notebook. She always wrote things down when she could not say them out loud."
She reached into her bag then and took out a small folded piece of paper, and she held it out to me. It was a page torn from a notebook, and on it, in Meredith's handwriting, were two words: the date Poppy was born, and beneath it, the name of the hospital, and beneath that, a single line. "The woman next door had a girl too."
I read it three times. The handwriting was Meredith's, the same handwriting I had seen on a hundred shopping lists and birthday cards, and for a moment I could not breathe. Rosalind watched me, and her eyes were full of tears, and she said, "I kept it because I was afraid the truth would be lost. Meredith gave it to me the week before she died. She said, if anything ever happened, if Veronica ever came back into your life, you would need to know."
"Veronica did come back," I said.
"I know," Rosalind said. "And now you know why she came back. She did not come back for you, Beau. She came back because of the girls. Both of them. She has never stopped thinking about that night, and she has never stopped thinking about the baby she left behind."