Chapter 12
— Meredith's Desk
After Rosalind left, I sat in the sitting room for a long time without moving. The house was quiet. Poppy was in the garden with Dolores, and I could hear her voice through the open window, high and clear, asking Dolores about the birds in the big tree. The sound of her voice steadied me. I folded the torn page from Meredith's notebook and put it in my pocket, and I went upstairs, and I stood outside the door of the small room at the back of the house, the room where Meredith's desk had stood untouched for two years.
I had not opened that desk since she died. I had not opened the room much at all. After the funeral I had closed the door and left everything as it was, because going in there hurt too much, and because part of me believed that if I left her things alone, some part of her would stay in the house. Dolores dusted in there once a month, and that was all. The desk had been Meredith's since before we were married. She had written her stories at it, and graded her pupils' work at it, and kept her notebooks in its drawers, and I had never once opened a drawer without asking her first.
Now I put my hand on the doorknob and turned it, and the door opened, and the room smelled faintly of her, of paper and pencil shavings and the lavender soap she had always used. The curtains were half drawn, and the light fell across the desk in a pale band, and dust floated in it, slow and gold. I stood in the doorway for a moment, and then I went in and closed the door behind me, and I sat down in her chair, and I put my hands flat on the desk, and I waited for the shaking to stop.
The desk had three drawers on each side and one wide drawer in the middle. I opened the middle drawer first. Inside were pens and pencils, a pair of scissors, a box of paper clips, and a stack of blank paper, all arranged neatly, the way Meredith had always arranged things. Beneath the paper was a small wooden box, and I lifted the lid, and inside were the things she had kept closest: a dried flower from our wedding, a photograph of the two of us on the day Poppy was born, and a thin silver chain I had given her on our first anniversary.
I closed the box and set it aside, and I opened the drawer on the left. It was full of notebooks, stacked one on top of another, each one filled with her handwriting, with drawings in the margins. I did not open them. Not yet. I set them in a neat pile and moved on.
The bottom drawer on the left was locked. I had never noticed the lock before. I pulled at the handle, and it did not move, and I sat back and looked at it. Meredith had never locked anything in our house. I opened the small wooden box again, and beneath the dried flower I found a tiny brass key, and I fitted it into the lock, and it turned.
Inside the drawer was a single object, wrapped in a piece of soft white cloth. I lifted it out and set it on the desk and unfolded the cloth, and there it was, the thing Rosalind had told me to look for without telling me to look for it. A hospital bracelet. Small, white, made of soft plastic, the kind they put on a newborn baby's wrist. The writing on it had faded, but I could still make it out. A date. The date Poppy was born. And a name, printed in careful capital letters.
It was not Poppy's name. It was a name I had never seen before, a name that meant nothing to me, and everything. I stared at it, and my hands began to shake, and I set the bracelet down on the desk and pressed my palms flat against the wood to steady them.
The bracelet belonged to a baby girl who had been born in the hospital on the same night as Poppy, in the room next door. Meredith had kept it. She had wrapped it in cloth and locked it in a drawer, and she had kept the key in a box with the things she loved most, and she had never told me. She had carried this secret for six years, and she had carried it alone, and I would never be able to ask her why.
I sat at her desk for a long time, holding the bracelet in my hand, and I thought about the night Poppy was born, about the hospital corridor, about the nurses going back and forth between two doors, about the baby in the next room who had needed help to breathe. I thought about Veronica, alone in that room, with no one to hold her hand, and I thought about the baby she had left behind, and I thought about Meredith, sitting in her own room with our daughter in her arms, knowing that the woman next door was living through the same night and a different one.