PART 3 — THE PHONE NUMBER
I did not call the number from the nursing home. I drove home first, sat with it all night, and in the morning, with my hands shaking, I dialed Columbus, Ohio.
A woman answered. When I said the name Amy Lynn, she went very quiet. Then she said, I have been waiting my whole life for someone from before to call.
It was my sister. Amy was alive.
She had not wandered off from that Ferris wheel line. She had been handed to a family two states away through a quiet, unlawful arrangement, and the people who raised her had been told her parents were gone. They had loved her well. She grew up safe. She just grew up believing a story that was not true.
For twenty years our family grieved a little girl who was alive and loved in Ohio, kept from us by the one person we trusted to help us look for her.
My mother, in her clearest moments, finally told the nurse the truth her illness could no longer hold back. Aunt Donna had set the whole thing in motion, and she had frightened a grieving mother into silence for twenty years. That was the apology Mom kept trying to send up the line. Tell her I am sorry. Tell her Donna made me.
I took it all to the authorities. The arrangement, old as it was, had left a paper trail, and Donna had to answer for every bit of it. She stopped telling me to let my mother rest.
Amy and I met at a diner halfway between us, two grown women who cried in a parking lot until we could not stand up.
She never did bring me that stuffed bear from the fair. So I bought two at a county fair this summer, one for each of us, and we rode the Ferris wheel together, forty years late, holding hands at the very top.