“Whitmore,” said Jake. His voice came out thin. “My mother was Susan Whitmore before she married my dad. Why?” My wife stood in the middle of our living room with her hand on her chest, and then, to the astonishment of every person there, she burst into tears and began to laugh, both at once. “Thank God,” she said. “Oh, thank God.” I took her elbow, said something about the kitchen, and walked her out of the room past the staring faces of my daughter and her husband and the entire congregation of the church choir.
On the back porch, in the cold, she told me everything. At Christmas, Emily had mentioned that she had given blood and her donor card said B positive. Marianne is O. I am O. Two O parents cannot have a B child. She had stood in the kitchen with that fact for six months, doing the biology in her head again and again, praying that it was a clerical error or a miracle. In March she ordered a DNA kit from the internet, hid it in her sewing basket, and mailed her sample from a post office three towns away. The results arrived in May. “Emily is not on my list at all,” she whispered. “But a woman named Rebecca is. A first degree match. A daughter, Walter.”
The ice storm of January 1993 had knocked out the power at St. Luke Hospital the night my daughter was born. Marianne had kept the little plastic bracelet in the photo album for thirty one years. She had never thought to read it carefully. Last month, in a fit of insomnia, she had taken it out under the lamp and read the line printed under the date. Mother: Susan Whitmore. Baby Girl. “That is not my name,” she said. “I looked at it for an hour. And then Jake told us at dinner, last Sunday, what his mother had been called as a girl.”
A question about a maiden name at a baby shower unraveled a hospital mistake and gave one family a second daughter.
Marianne had spent the week in a private agony. If Emily was the daughter of Susan Whitmore, and Jake was the son of Susan Whitmore, then the man our daughter had married was her brother, and the child she carried was a catastrophe that no one could fix. Only at the shower, with the hand of Jake reaching out to shake mine, did she lose her nerve and demand the name, in front of everyone, because she could not carry it another hour. “If Jake is her son,” she said on the porch, “then we have done something terrible.”
The porch door opened. Susan Brandt stood there in a lilac cardigan, sixty four years old, her face the color of oatmeal. She had heard it all, I think, through the screen. For a long moment nobody spoke. Then she said, very quietly, “Jake is adopted.” Marianne stared at her. “We brought him home at six weeks, from an agency in Cincinnati. He is not related to your daughter by one drop of blood. And my own daughter Rebecca, who has red hair like nobody in my family or the family of my husband, has been asking me for thirty one years why she looks like a stranger.” My wife sat down on the porch step as if somebody had cut her strings.
Emily had followed us. She stood in the doorway in her maternity dress with one hand on her belly, and her face was white and perfectly still. “So I am the child of Susan,” she said. “And you are not my mother.” “I am the one who held you,” Marianne said, almost in a whisper. “I am the one who sang to you every night for thirty one years. I do not care what a bracelet says.” Emily crossed the porch in three steps and dropped to her knees on the boards beside her. “That is what I wanted to hear,” she said. “That is all I wanted to hear.” And then the two of them were crying, holding on to each other.
The tests were done the following week. Susan and Emily: parent and child. Marianne and Rebecca: parent and child. Jake and Emily: no relation, as every one of us now knew. Rebecca, a nurse in Dayton with the chin of Marianne and her habit of tapping her fingers when she was thinking, drove up on a Saturday morning in a green sweater. I opened the door. She looked at me, and I looked at her, and I knew the face from forty photographs of my wife at twenty nine. “Hello, Dad,” she said, without thinking, and put her hand over her mouth in alarm. I told her that she could say it as often as she liked.
The mothers sat together on the porch that afternoon with a pot of tea and did not need us. They talked for four hours. When they came in, her eyes were red but dry, and she told me what they had agreed. Nobody was going to subtract a daughter. For thirty one years each of them had raised a girl with all the love in her heart, and the girls were what the love had made. What the hospital had broken could not be undone. It could only be added to. “We do not have a daughter and a stranger,” she said. “We have two daughters.”
That night I went upstairs, where Emily was sitting on the edge of her old bed. I took the plastic bracelet from my shirt pocket and held it out. She turned it over in her fingers, and the light from the hall fell across the words printed on it. “It says Whitmore,” she said. “It is the wrong name.” I told her that it had been the wrong name for exactly one night, and that I had been calling her mine for the other eleven thousand. “Keep it,” I said. “Give it to the baby someday. Tell the story.”
Our granddaughter was born in August, in a hospital with working generators, and she was named Lucy Marianne. Four grandparents stood in the waiting room with the same terrified smile. At Thanksgiving we sat down around the long table in our dining room, Emily and Jake on one side, Rebecca beside Marianne, Susan and her husband Hal at the far end, and I counted the faces over my glass and could not find a single one I would have given back. The ice storm had given us a mistake. It had taken thirty one years for love to turn it into a family.