The notebooks were still waiting on the desk. I knew the answers were in them, in Meredith's own handwriting, in the words she had written when she could not say them out loud. I would read them next. But first I stood at the window a little longer, watching my daughter in the garden, and I thought about the small, quiet baby in the bassinet on the right, and I promised her, silently, that I would find out what had happened to her.
Chapter 14
— The Notebook
That evening, after Poppy was asleep, I went back to the small room and sat at Meredith's desk, and I opened the notebook that had been on the top of the pile. It was the one with the soft blue cover, the one she had carried in her bag everywhere she went, and when I opened it the pages fell open at the middle, as though it had been opened there a hundred times before, and I saw her handwriting, neat and quick, filling every line.
The first entry I read was dated the day Poppy was born. Meredith had written it in the hospital, in the quiet hours after the birth, while our daughter slept in the bassinet beside her bed. She wrote about the moment they put Poppy in her arms, and about how small and warm she had been, and how she had cried, and how Meredith had cried with her. I read it slowly, and I could hear her voice in my head as I read, and for a moment it felt as though she were sitting beside me, telling me the story herself.
Then I turned the page, and the writing changed. It was still her hand, but it was hurried, and the words crowded together, as though she had written them fast, as though she had been afraid she would forget. "The woman in the next room had a girl too," she had written. "She was early, and small, and the nurses took her away to the nursery, and I could hear her crying through the wall, and I could not stop thinking about her."
I read on. Meredith had written that she had gone to the door of the next room, and that she had knocked, and that Veronica had opened it, and that the two of them had stood in the doorway and looked at each other, and that Veronica had said nothing, and that after a long moment she had closed the door again, softly, without a word.
The next entry was dated two days later, the day they left the hospital. "I saw her in the corridor this morning," Meredith had written. "She was leaving, 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 do not understand. I do not know what to think. I have kept the bracelet the nurse gave me by mistake, and I have kept the photograph I took in the nursery, and I do not know why I have kept them, only that I cannot throw them away."
I sat very still, the notebook open in my lap, and I thought about Meredith, a new mother, standing in a hospital corridor, watching a woman she had once known walk out of the hospital alone, and I thought about the choice Veronica had made, and about the baby she had left behind, and I thought about how Meredith had carried that night with her for the rest of her life, in a notebook and a tin box and a locked drawer, never telling me.
There were more entries, scattered through the notebook, written over the months that followed. Meredith had written about Poppy growing, about her first smile, her first word, her first steps, and between those entries there were short, careful notes about the other baby, the girl in the next room, the girl whose name Meredith had written down and then crossed out and then written down again. She had written that she sometimes thought about her, and wondered where she was, and whether she was loved, and whether she was safe.
One entry, written when Poppy was two years old, stopped me cold. "I saw her today," Meredith had written. "In the town. She was standing outside the school, watching the children come out, and I knew her face at once. She looked older, and tired, and she was watching the children the way a mother watches, and I thought about going to her, and I did not go. I stood across the street and I watched her, and then she turned and walked away."
I closed the notebook then, and I sat at the desk with my hands flat on the cover, and I thought about Veronica, standing outside a school, watching the children come out, and I thought about Poppy, who had been two years old then, with her golden-brown curls bouncing as she ran out of the school gates, and I felt cold all over.
I opened the notebook again and read the last entry, written a few weeks before Meredith died. "If anything happens to me," she had written, "someone must know about the girl in the next room. Someone must know that there were two babies that night, and that one of them was left behind, and that her mother never forgot her. I do not know what it means. I only know that it matters, and that Beau must know, one day, when the time is right."