“…Emily Grace Parker,” Mr. Whitfield said, reading from the folder. “Seven pounds, two ounces. Born at 4:12 in the morning to Mrs. Janet Parker. Mother and child, healthy.”
I sat very still in the records office of the county hospital. The administrator had gray hair, a lanyard and kind eyes, and he turned the page toward me so I could see my own signature from twenty one years ago, shaky from exhaustion.
“Then who is she talking about?” I asked. “My sister in law wrote that my daughter still does not know who her real mother is.”
“Mrs. Parker, may I ask who gave you the photograph?”
I told him. Gloria Parker was the sister of my husband, a woman who borrowed money at every holiday and returned it in comments. She had been staying with us since the summer. She had been awfully interested in the old papers.
Mr. Whitfield nodded slowly. “Then I should tell you that someone requested a copy of this file last month. The request was signed with your name. The copy that left this office was altered. The page with the footprints and the blood type was replaced.”
“Replaced with what?”
“With a page that says the infant of Mrs. Parker was transferred to another family.” He closed the folder. “It is a forgery. The original is here, and the original is clear.”
The room went quiet except for the old air conditioner. I thought about the photograph again. The open closet, the emptied drawers, the birth certificate in the hands of someone who had no business holding it. And Gloria writing, in her happy little message, that she had found what she needed.
I drove home with the original file on the passenger seat. My husband Tom was in the garage, sanding a table, and when I walked in he turned pale again. This time I did not let him send me away. I said, “Tom, tell me everything, right now.”
It came out in pieces. Two years ago, Gloria had asked him to cosign a loan for her failing nail salon. He used the house of his mother as security, the little farm in Culpeper that was supposed to go to Emily. The salon closed. The bank was now calling the loan. Gloria told him she had a plan that would fix it, and that he must not tell me.
The plan was a clause in the will of his mother. The farm would pass to the “natural born descendants” of Tom. If Emily could be shown not to be his, or not to be mine, the farm would pass to his sister instead, free and clear of the loan.
“And you let her try?” I said.
“I did not know she meant to go through our daughter,” he whispered. “I thought she meant to argue it in court. When I saw the photograph I could not breathe.”
I did not shout. I took his hands, covered in sawdust, and I said, “You should have trusted me with the bank letter. We could have fixed it together.” He cried at the workbench like a boy.
That night I knocked on the door of Emily, gently, since the lock was gone. She was sitting on the bed in her college sweatshirt, red eyed from the breakup, with the stuffed rabbit she had pretended to outgrow. I told her all of it, and I put the hospital file in her lap.
She read her own footprints. She traced them with a finger. Then she said, “Mom, I would have loved you anyway,” and I said, “I know, sweetheart. But I wanted you to see it.”
Mr. Whitfield sent the proper certified copy to our lawyer the next morning. A DNA test, done for peace of mind, matched in four days. Gloria was charged with forgery and attempted fraud, and the judge ordered her to pay back every dollar of the loan from her own savings, which were not as small as she claimed.
Gloria came to the sentencing in a borrowed blazer and would not look at us. Afterward, in the hallway, she said she had only wanted a little security for herself. I told her that security is something you build with people, not something you take from them, and I walked her to the elevator anyway, because her hands were shaking and nobody else was going to.
Tom sold his truck and paid off what the bank still wanted. The farm in Culpeper is Emily name now. This spring she planted a row of sunflowers by the fence, and she sends me a photograph from her phone every Sunday, always from the same angle, always with the same caption. Mom, look how tall.