"Tell me," she said.
He told her. The nursery had been evacuated. Most of the infants had been gotten out. But the smoke — the smoke had been worst on that corridor — and Grace —
"Let me see her," Eleanor said.
"You can't." His voice broke. "Ellie. You can't."
"I want to see my daughter."
"It was the fire." He was crying now, openly, the second time she had ever seen it. "The remains — there's nothing to — I identified her. I signed. It's done."
She didn't believe him. That was the strange thing — in that moment, in that curtained bay with the morning light coming through, she didn't believe him, not because she thought he was lying but because the words wouldn't fit inside the world. Five days old. A birthmark like a heart. A murmur that was nothing.
"Take me to her," she said.
"There is no — " He gripped her hand hard enough to hurt. "Eleanor. Please. Let me spare you this."
She let him. That was what she would never forgive herself for: she let him. She lay back on the gurney and let the nurses bring more sedative, and slept, and woke, and the days after were a long gray corridor of casseroles and closed curtains and the phone ringing with condolences, and the nursery at the end of the hall, painted the color of morning, with the bassinet still made up and the mobile of wooden birds turning slowly in the draft from the window she couldn't bring herself to close.
She never saw a body. She never saw anything at all.
Only the empty room, humming.
Chapter 4: The Man Who Signed
Richard Whitmore had always been the man who signed.
He signed the mortgage on the Beacon Hill townhouse, the trust documents, the foundation's annual filings, the checks for the gala flowers. His signature was compact and upright, the R and W leaning into each other like two people under one umbrella. Eleanor had loved that signature once — it had seemed to say: I will take care of things. You don't have to worry.
After the fire, he signed the identification of remains. He signed the death certificate. He signed the release for cremation, which was carried out within days — "There's no reason to wait," he had said, gently, the way you speak to someone standing at the edge of a cliff. "There's nothing to wait for."
Eleanor had agreed to everything. She had been sedated and grieving and hollowed out, and agreement was easier than the alternative, which was to stand up in the funeral home and scream that she had never seen her daughter's body and would not sign a paper saying she had. So Richard signed, and Eleanor nodded, and the cremation happened, and the ashes — which she had never asked to hold, in a small wooden box — were interred in the family plot at Mount Auburn, and life went on.
But doubts are patient. They can wait twenty-three years.
The first doubt was the speed of it. Cremation within days. Eleanor had not understood, then, how unusual that was — she had been too deep in the gray corridor to measure time. It was only later, at other funerals, watching other families wait a week, ten days, for paperwork and scheduling and relatives flying in from California, that she began to wonder why there had been such a hurry. There had been no relatives to wait for. There had been no body to view. There had been, as far as she could tell, no reason for haste at all — except Richard's gentleness, and his hand on her back, and his voice saying, let me spare you this.
The second doubt was the records. Saint Anne's had lost most of its maternity files in the fire — the records room was where it started, everyone knew that — and in the years after, whenever Eleanor had tried to request Grace's file, there had been nothing to request. A one-page incident summary. A death certificate. Richard's signature, compact and upright, at the bottom of every page that mattered. She had told herself this was normal. Fires destroyed things. That was what fires did.
The third doubt was the nursery.
She had kept it. For twenty-three years she had kept it exactly as it was — the walls the color of morning, the bassinet made up with the yellow blanket, the mobile of wooden birds. The housekeeper dusted it. Richard never went in. Once, about ten years after, he had suggested converting it to a study. Eleanor had looked at him across the breakfast table and said, "No," and he had never raised it again.
She went in there sometimes. Not often. On the anniversary, in March, she would sit in the rocking chair and hold the locket and look at the faded photograph of the newborn with the heart-shaped mark on her wrist, and she would think about five days. Five days was nothing. Five days was a breath. And yet it had been enough to learn the exact weight of a daughter in the crook of an arm, enough to memorize a birthmark with a fingertip, enough to last a lifetime of March anniversaries.
She had never told Richard about the doubts. She had barely told herself. They lived in a small locked room in her mind, and she visited them the way she visited the nursery — rarely, briefly, and always alone.
Until the restaurant.
Now it was past midnight, and Richard was pretending to be asleep in their bedroom — after thirty-one years she could tell the difference — and Eleanor sat in the nursery in the rocking chair with the locket open in her palm, and the doubts were no longer in their locked room. They were standing around her in the dark like people waiting to be introduced.
A heart-shaped birthmark on the inside of a left wrist. Reddish-brown at the edges, darker at the center, coin-sized. She had seen it on a newborn in 2003 and on a twenty-three-year-old waitress tonight, and the mathematics of it was simple and terrible: a girl born in March of 2003, left at Saint Mary's Orphanage as a baby, with Grace's mark on Grace's wrist.
People have birthmarks, Richard had said.
But he had gone rigid. He had stood up and knocked his chair back and said Eleanor, stop this in a voice she had never heard from him, and all the way home in the car he had stared out the window at the dark streets of Boston and said nothing at all, and when she had finally spoken — "Richard, that girl" — he had said, "Don't," so sharply that she had flinched.
Don't. As if she were a child. As if the subject were closed.