"Yes," Vivienne said. Her heart was beating in her throat. "Book her for a portrait sitting. Here, at the house. This week if possible."
She hung up and stood at the window, the photograph in her hand, watching the lighthouse turn. Twelve seconds. Gone again. Back again.
Some lights, she thought, never really go out. They just wait for someone to look in their direction.
Chapter 4
What Rosa Carried
Rosa Delgado had not slept either, though she would never have admitted it.
She sat in the kitchen long after Alba had gone up to her darkroom, the radio off now, the house quiet around her except for the refrigerator's hum and the distant foghorn. She had sat at this table for every crisis of her life — Lucia's pregnancy, the clinic years, Alba's fevers — and it had never once failed to hold her. On the table in front of her lay the dish towel she had been folding for twenty minutes without progress. Her hands — the hands that had caught half the babies in Greyport — were shaking.
Twenty-five years. She had carried it for twenty-five years, and she had thought she would carry it to the grave. She had thought the grave was the plan.
The memory came the way it always came: not as a story but as weather. Cold. The smell of antiseptic. The particular greenish light of St. Aubin's Private Maternity Clinic at three in the morning.
She had come on shift at eleven with a thermos of coffee and a paperback she never opened, and the clinic had been quiet in the way it got before a storm — the night nurse humming, the radiators ticking. Then Lucia's pains had quickened, and the quiet had broken open, and Rosa had gone into Room 4 and not come out for hours, her daughter's hand in hers, whispering the old words — respira, mi hija, respira — the way her own mother had whispered them to her.
October 12, 2001. Rosa had been fifty-seven, on the night shift, and her daughter Lucia — twenty-four, unmarried, terrified — was in Room 4, laboring hard. In Room 6, behind a closed door with a private nurse, was Vivienne Halden, twenty-two, the shipping heiress, whose pregnancy the whole town had been forbidden to know about.
Rosa had known. Nurses always knew.
Lucia's labor went wrong at half past two. The bleeding started and didn't stop. Rosa had held her daughter's hand and lied to her — "you're doing beautifully, mi hija, beautifully" — while Lucia's eyes went distant and her grip went slack. By three o'clock Lucia was gone, and her son — born blue and silent — was gone with her, and Rosa was a grandmother of nothing, standing in a corridor with her shoes full of her daughter's blood.
And then she had heard it. Through the half-open door of the doctor's office: Dr. Crowe's smooth voice, and another man's — low, clipped, a lawyer's voice. "...the arrangement stands. The infant will be declared stillborn. Mrs. Halden the elder has made the transfer. The child goes to the couple in Nova Scotia tonight. No records. No trace."
Rosa had stood frozen in that corridor, her daughter's blood on her shoes, and understood with perfect clarity what was about to happen: a healthy baby girl, born an hour earlier in Room 6, was going to be erased — taken from a mother who wanted her, given to strangers across a border, all because Cornelia Halden had decided that a dockworker's grandchild would contaminate the family name.
She had not thought. That was the truth she had lived with for twenty-five years: she had not thought, she had acted. She went to the nursery. The Halden baby was there, pink and furious and alive, one of two infants in the room — the other being a stillborn boy whose mother had been taken to surgery. Rosa took the living girl, wrapped her in her own shawl, and walked out through the laundry entrance into the October dark.
The October dark had been cold enough to show her breath. She remembered the baby's weight — nothing, seven pounds and change, the lightest heavy thing she had ever carried — and the way the infant had rooted against her shawl, blind and furious and alive, and how Rosa had stood on the empty sidewalk and made a promise to no one: I will keep you. Whatever it costs, I will keep you. She had walked the twelve blocks to Breaker Lane with her shoes still wet, and washed them in the kitchen sink before dawn, and told no one, not even the walls.
She told Dr. Crowe at dawn, her face empty, that the Halden infant had died in the night and that she had "taken care of it, per the arrangement" — and Crowe, who wanted no questions and had been paid for none, had signed the death certificate without looking at a body.
She had brought the baby home to Breaker Lane. She had told Greyport that Lucia's baby — a girl — had survived, and that Lucia had not. Nobody questioned a grieving grandmother. The birth certificate was filed late, in November, signed by Crowe, who by then would have signed anything to keep Rosa quiet.
She had named the baby Alba, after her own mother. Dawn. A new day.
Rosa pressed her shaking hands flat on the kitchen table. She had told herself, for twenty-five years, that she had saved the child. That Vivienne Halden — rich, protected, with a whole life ahead — would have survived the loss, while the baby would not have survived the arrangement. She had told herself that love was what mattered, and she had loved Alba with everything she had.
But tonight, for the first time, she had seen the other side of the arithmetic: a woman in a blue gown, going white at the sight of a birthmark. A mother who had never stopped mourning.
Rosa got up and went to the window. The foghorn sounded. Out in the bay, the lighthouse turned.
"Forgive me," she whispered, to Lucia, to Vivienne, to God, to no one. "I did what I thought was right. Forgive me."