The next morning, the nurse said they were taking him down the hall for his newborn checkup. Hearing test, blood work, weighing.
Before she took him, I reached over to my purse on the bedside table and took out my grandmother’s silver cross.
My grandmother Rose had worn that cross every day of her life. It was small and simple, on a thin silver chain. When I was nine, I’d dropped it on the sidewalk outside her house, and it had hit the edge of the curb and gotten a little nick on the left arm. A tiny notch in the silver. I’d cried for an hour. My grandmother had just laughed and said, “Now it’s got a story, Annie. Now it’s yours.”
She gave it to me on her deathbed, when I was fifteen.
I took it off my own neck that morning in the hospital. I wrapped the chain carefully and tucked the cross into the fold of Fabian’s yellow blanket, right against his chest.
I put one of the little white crocheted booties in the blanket with it. The smaller one. The one I’d made six times.
“So you’ll know I’m with you,” I whispered to him. “Even down the hall.”
The nurse wheeled him away in his little plastic bassinet.
Twenty minutes later, my parents came into my hospital room.
My father was carrying a manila folder.
My mother was behind him. She wouldn’t look at me.
My father set the folder down on the tray table in front of me. Right where my breakfast had been.
“Adoption papers,” he said.
I stared at him.
“What?”
“Adoption papers,” my father said again. He opened the folder. There were several typed pages inside, with little yellow sticky arrows where I was supposed to sign. “Relinquishment of parental rights. Everything’s arranged.”
“What?” I said. My voice came out high and strange. “You promised. You promised I could bring Fabian home. You said you’d help me. You bought a crib.”
“We’ve reconsidered,” my mother said quietly. She was looking at the floor. “This is what’s best, Annie. For everyone. For you. For the baby.”
“No,” I said. “No. I’m not signing anything.”
My father took a pen out of his shirt pocket. A black ballpoint pen from the hardware store, with MERCER’S HARDWARE printed on the side in gold.
He set it down next to the papers.
“Sign them,” he said. “Or find somewhere else to live.”
I begged.
I begged them for more time. A week. A day. An hour. I begged them to let me take Fabian home just for a little while, just to try. I promised I’d get a second job. I promised I’d move out the day I graduated. I promised I’d never ask them for anything again.
My mother started crying. She still wouldn’t look at me.
My father just stood there with his arms crossed.
“You’re eighteen years old, Anne,” he said. “You have two hundred dollars and a part-time job at a bakery. The boy who did this to you ran away. You can’t take care of a baby. You can barely take care of yourself.”
“I can learn,” I said.
“There’s a good family waiting,” my father said. “A family with a house and money and two parents. They’ll give him everything you can’t.”
“Who? What family?”
“That’s not your concern.”
I was so tired. I’d been in labor for nineteen hours. I’d slept maybe two hours since. I was bleeding. My whole body hurt.
And I was terrified.
I kept thinking about the laundromat on Fourth Street. About the two hundred and forty dollars. About sleeping in a shelter with a newborn baby in January in Pennsylvania.
About having nowhere safe to take care of him.
My father was standing over me. The pen was sitting on the papers.
I picked it up.
I signed.
I signed all four places with the little yellow arrows. I could barely see the lines through my tears.
My father picked up the folder and tucked it under his arm.
“You did the right thing,” he said.
Then he walked out of the room.
My mother stood there for a moment by the door. She opened her mouth like she was going to say something. Then she closed it and followed him.
A nurse brought me a pill to help me sleep. I took it. I slept.
When I woke up, it was dark outside, and my mother was sitting in the chair by the window.
“Where’s Fabian?” I said.
She didn’t look at me.
“He’s gone to his new family,” she said quietly. “This afternoon. They came to get him.”
“Where? Who are they? Where did they take him?”
“I can’t tell you, Annie.”
“Mom. Please.”
She shook her head. Tears were running down her face.
“Your father says it’s better if you don’t know,” she said. “So you can move on. So you can have a real life.”
I went home two days later.
The little white dresser was still in my room. I opened the top drawer.
It was empty except for one thing.
One tiny white crocheted bootie. The bigger one. The one that had only taken me twice.
The other one had gone with my son.
I lived in that house for four more months. I didn’t speak to my father at all. Not one word. I spoke to my mother only when I had to.
I graduated from high school in June. I didn’t go to the ceremony. They mailed me my diploma.
The day after it arrived, I packed two suitcases and moved into the apartment over the laundromat on Fourth Street. Mrs. Hoffman gave me full-time hours at the bakery and lent me the deposit. I paid her back in four months.
And I started looking for my son.
I looked for him for thirty-one years.
I contacted every adoption agency in Pennsylvania. Then in Ohio. Then in New York and New Jersey and Maryland. I filled out registry forms. I wrote letters. I called St. Mary’s Hospital so many times that the records clerk started to recognize my voice.
Nobody had any record of Fabian.
There was no adoption filed under my name. No agency had handled it. No court had a record. It was like he’d never been born.
“Sometimes private adoptions slip through the cracks,” one woman at a state agency told me, kindly. “Especially back then. Lawyers handled them directly. Sometimes the records were sealed so tight nobody can open them. I’m so sorry, Ms. Mercer.”
When I was twenty-six, I saved up enough money to hire a private investigator. A retired police detective named Mr. Lattimore with a gravelly voice and an office above a dry cleaner.
He looked for six months. He found nothing.
When I was thirty-four, I hired another one. She looked for a year. She found nothing.
When I was forty-one, I did one of those DNA tests you send away in the mail. I spit in a tube. I waited eight weeks. I matched with some distant cousins in Ohio and a woman in Oregon who might have been my great-aunt’s granddaughter.
No son.
I confronted my father once. When I was thirty.
I drove to the house on Linden Street on a Sunday afternoon. He was in the backyard, raking leaves.
“Where is he, Dad?” I said. “Where’s my son?”
My father kept raking.
“I told you,” he said. “With a good family.”
“Who?”
He stopped raking. He looked at me.
“Anne,” he said, “you have a life. A good job. An apartment. Let it go.”
“He’s my son.”
“He’s somebody else’s son now,” my father said.
He went back to raking.
I never asked him again.
