There was a silence, and then Elspeth said, very quietly, "Yes. I think that is right. We will come the day after tomorrow."
"It suits me," I said. "It suits me very well."
I put the telephone down, and I stood in the kitchen for a long time, and I thought about the call, and about Elspeth, and about Maisie, and about the two girls, and about how much had changed in three days, and about how much more was still to come.
Chapter 16
— How Maisie Came Home
Elspeth and Maisie arrived the day after tomorrow, just as she had promised, in the late afternoon, when the light in the garden was turning gold. I was standing at the front window, watching the road, and I saw the car pull up outside the house, and I saw Elspeth get out, and then I saw a small girl climb out after her, holding Elspeth's hand. I opened the door and knelt down to her height and said hello.
"Hello," Maisie said, very softly, and she hid half behind Elspeth's coat, and then she peeked out at me again, and I saw that she had dark hair, and dark eyes, and a small, serious face, and that she was holding a drawing book in one hand, pressed against her chest like a shield.
Poppy was in the garden with Dolores, and I called her, and she came running, and she stopped at the sight of the strangers. Then she looked at Maisie, and Maisie looked at her, and for a moment the two of them just stood there, staring at each other, two six-year-old girls, born on the same night, meeting for the first time.
"Do you want to play?" Poppy asked, and Maisie nodded, and Poppy took her hand, and the two of them ran off toward the big tree, and Dolores followed them, and Elspeth and I stood in the doorway and watched them go, and Elspeth wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and we went inside.
We sat in the sitting room, and Elspeth told me how Maisie had come home. She told me that Meredith had called her from the hospital, two days after Poppy was born, and that she had said the baby in the next room was still in the nursery, and that her mother had signed papers, and that the baby needed a family, and that Elspeth was the only person she could think of who could give her one.
"I drove to the hospital the next morning," Elspeth said. "I had never been so frightened in my life. I had never held a baby. I walked down that corridor, and I went into the nursery, and I saw her, lying in her bassinet, so small, and I thought, this is the baby Meredith told me about, and she needs me, and I am going to take her home."
She told me that the hospital people had asked her many questions, and that she had answered them all, and that they had given her papers to sign, and that she had signed them, and that they had told her the baby would need to stay in the hospital a little longer, until she was strong enough to go home, and that she had gone to see her every day, for three weeks, sitting beside her bassinet, talking to her, singing to her.
"She was so small," Elspeth said. "She weighed less than a bag of flour when she was born. The nurses said she was a fighter, and they were right. Every day she grew a little stronger, and every day I sat beside her, and I told her about the sea, and about the house in Wilmington."
After three weeks, the hospital said Maisie could go home. Elspeth drove her to Wilmington in a car seat that was far too big for her, wrapped in a blanket Meredith had sent, and she carried her into the house by the sea, and she put her in a small bed beside her own, and she sat beside her all night, listening to her breathe.
"But nothing went wrong," Elspeth said. "She grew strong. She grew curious. She grew into the girl you saw in the garden just now. She is my daughter, Beau. I adopted her, and the papers are in order, and no one can take her from me. But I have always known that one day she would need to know where she came from, and that one day she would need to meet Poppy."
I asked her if Maisie knew anything about her birth, and Elspeth said she knew she had been adopted, and that she had been born in a hospital far away, and that her birth mother had not been able to keep her, and that she had been loved from the very first day, and that was all. She did not know her birth mother's name. Elspeth had been waiting for the right time to tell her, and now, she said, the right time had come.
We sat in silence for a while, listening to the girls laughing in the garden, and then Elspeth said, "There is one more thing, Beau. Something Meredith told me on the telephone, the night Poppy was born, something I have never told anyone. She said the baby's father was coming to the hospital that night, and that he never arrived. She said his name was Jared, and that he was her cousin, and that he loved the baby's mother very much."
I stared at her. "Jared," I said. "Meredith's cousin."