Luis gripped the back of the couch and read the name on the surrender form twice. Then he looked at me, and his eyes were wet.
“Her name is Elena,” he said. “The birth mother. Elena Garcia.”
Teresa frowned. “You know her?”
“She is my sister,” Luis said. “My little sister. I have not seen her in nineteen years.”
I sat down hard on the arm of the chair. Luis almost never spoke about Elena. All I knew was that she had run off at seventeen, that there had been a terrible fight with their father, and that she had vanished and never answered a letter again.
“The birthmark,” Luis said, touching his own shoulder. “Our grandmother had it. Our father had it. Elena had it, right below her shoulder, exactly the same. It runs in the blood.”
The baby on our coffee table was not a stranger we had been asked to keep safe. She was my husbands niece.
Teresa stepped out into the hall and made some calls. When she came back, she told us Elena had asked for a family in this county on purpose. She had been sick, and frightened, and with no way to raise a child, and some part of her had remembered that her big brother settled down somewhere near Wichita years ago. She had hoped, without daring to say it, that the baby might find its way to blood.
It took Luis three days to find her, in a shelter two towns over. I will not forget watching my husband walk into that room and watching a grown woman fold into his arms like the nineteen years had never happened.
Elena is getting back on her feet now, with help, and she sees her daughter every week. The courts let us foster the baby while she heals, and she asked us, through her own tears, to adopt her little girl and raise her as family, so the child would always know where she came from.
We kept the pink blanket with the little ducks. And Luis, who used to go quiet every time we passed a playground, does not go quiet anymore. He pushes a swing now, with a crescent moon birthmark riding along below one tiny shoulder, laughing at the sky.