Part 3 — Room Six
Mr. Dufresne read the name on the intake card. The seventeen-year-old girl who came to St. Annes in the night in 1979 was Regina Pellerin. My aunt. The woman now standing in a lawyers office with Grandmas pearls around her neck.
Regina sank into the chair. For a long moment she said nothing at all. Then she opened her coat, took out the savings book, and laid it on the desk, and she said, in a voice I had never heard from her, I have been waiting forty-five years for somebody to say it out loud.
Her parents had arranged it all, she told us. She was a frightened girl of seventeen, and the hospital administrator and a broker from Hartford told her the baby had not survived. She signed a paper she did not understand, and her father told her never to speak of it. When she was thirty, a nurse hinted the baby might have lived. She never knew where to look.
She had found Grandmas sealed second sheet in the bottle weeks before, tucked behind the dresser. She took it because she was afraid of what it meant, and because she had no courage to read it. It was in her coat pocket the whole meeting, beside the savings book. She handed it to Mr. Dufresne.
The second sheet carried the Connecticut plate number, the name of the broker, and the address of an attorney in Hartford. Grandma had also written down the babys weight, and a date, and a small hopeful line, I pray someone loved him. Mr. Dufresne wept openly. So did I.
We took everything to the Massachusetts Attorney Generals office. An investigator named Ms. Okonkwo pulled the St. Annes records, which the hospital had long ago given to the state. File Room 6 held twenty-seven intake cards from the years 1976 to 1982. Each card had a baby, a date, and the same signature on the line marked, released.
The broker was eighty-seven years old and still living in a Connecticut assisted living home. The state filed what the law permitted, and the hospitals successor settled a civil claim with the families involved. A registry was opened so any adoptee could request his file. One small paper rolled inside a perfume cap turned into twenty-seven answers.
Regina took a DNA test that very week. Three weeks later, the registry sent a match. The baby was alive. He was a forty-six-year-old high school music teacher in Hartford named Daniel Sutter, and he had been searching for his mother for ten years.
They met in a diner halfway between, on a Sunday morning. I drove Regina myself, and I sat in the car for the first hour. When I went in, she was holding both of his hands across the table and laughing through tears. Daniel had her eyes. He had Grandmas chin.
Regina returned every piece of jewelry and every key. She paid for the funeral herself. We sold nothing. The house on Pleasant Street still stands, with the bedroom Grandma kept for me and a new one for Daniel when he comes up on holidays.
On Grandmas dresser, in the old place, I set a new heavy glass bottle with a gold atomizer cap. I fill it with her scent every month. One spray on the wrist, one behind the ear, and she is in the room.