Then I heard Poppy calling my name from downstairs, and I wrapped the bracelet in its cloth and put it in my pocket, beside the torn page from the notebook, and I went down to her. I had opened Meredith's desk, and I had found the bracelet, and there was more in that desk. The notebooks were waiting upstairs.
Chapter 13
— Two Bassinets
I went back to Meredith's desk the next morning, after Poppy had gone into the garden with Dolores. The house was quiet, and the light in the small back room was pale and thin, and the desk sat where it had always sat, with the notebooks still stacked in a neat pile on top of it. I had not slept well. I had dreamed of the hospital, of a long corridor with two doors, and of a baby crying somewhere I could not reach.
I sat down in her chair and opened the right-hand drawers, one by one. The top drawer held her teaching things, old lesson plans, a box of coloured pencils, a small notebook full of names and dates. The middle drawer held a stack of envelopes, bills and receipts and letters from the school, nothing that mattered. The bottom drawer held a sewing kit and a bundle of fabric, and beneath the fabric I found a flat tin box, the kind biscuits come in, and I lifted the lid.
Inside the tin box were photographs. I took them out one by one and laid them on the desk. There were photographs of Meredith and me on our wedding day, photographs of Poppy as a baby, photographs of the garden in summer, photographs of Elspeth standing on a beach in Wilmington, laughing, her hair blowing in the wind. And then, at the bottom of the box, beneath all the others, I found the one I had been looking for without knowing it.
It was a photograph of a hospital nursery. Two bassinets stood side by side against a pale green wall, and in each bassinet lay a tiny baby, wrapped in a white blanket. The baby on the left was pink and round and strong, her face scrunched up, her mouth open in a wail. The baby on the right was smaller, so small that the blanket seemed to swallow her, and she lay very still, with a thin tube taped to her cheek and a small monitor blinking beside her bassinet. Above each bassinet, on the wall, hung a small card with a name written on it in careful handwriting.
I held the photograph close to the light and read the cards. The card above the baby on the left said Poppy. The card above the baby on the right said a name I had never seen before, the same name that was printed on the hospital bracelet in my pocket. I set the photograph down and sat very still, and I thought about the two bassinets, side by side, and about the two little girls who had lain in them, six years ago, in a hospital nursery.
On the back of the photograph, in Meredith's handwriting, were three lines. "Two bassinets. Two girls. Born the same night." Nothing more. No explanation, no story, only those three lines, written in her neat, careful hand, as though she had been afraid to write any more, as though the words themselves might be too much to carry.
I turned the photograph over again and looked at the two babies, and I tried to see what Meredith had seen when she stood in that nursery. She had been a new mother, holding her own daughter, and she had walked down the corridor to the nursery, and she had seen the two bassinets, and she had taken out her camera, and she had taken this photograph, and she had kept it in a tin box in her desk for six years, and she had never shown it to me. She had kept it because she knew it mattered. She had kept it because she knew that one day someone would need to see it.
I thought about the baby on the right, the small one, the quiet one, fighting for every breath. I thought about where she was now, and whether she was all right, and whether she knew anything about the night she was born. I thought about Veronica, who had given birth to her and left her in that nursery, and I thought about the family that had come for her, and I wondered who they were, and whether they had loved her.
Then I thought about Poppy, out in the garden with Dolores, playing under the big tree, and I thought about how close the two girls had been, once, in that nursery, in two bassinets side by side, and how far apart their lives had taken them, and I felt a kind of grief I could not name, a grief for a child I had never met, for a baby who had lain in a bassinet next to my daughter and then vanished from our lives.
I put the photograph in my pocket, beside the bracelet and the torn page from the notebook, and I closed the tin box and put it back in the drawer, and I stood up and went to the window and looked out at the garden. Poppy was sitting on the grass with Dolores, making a crown out of daisies, and she looked up and saw me at the window, and she waved, and I waved back.