"What do I do about him?"
"Nothing." Claire's voice hardened. "You be dignified, you be patient, and you let him come to you. He's my son. He'll come." She didn't sound entirely convinced, and Nora didn't ask.
Chapter 14
Dora's Letters
Nora read all eleven letters in full on a rainy afternoon in the mansion library, sitting in the window seat with the pages spread around her like fallen leaves. She'd skimmed them on Mabel's kitchen floor; now she read them the way they deserved — slowly, every word.
Dora Quinn had been forty-three in March 2002, a maternity nurse for eleven years, good at her job by every record. Three miscarriages. A husband, Paul, who'd left in 1999 for a dental hygienist in Providence. A sister, Mabel, fifty-two then, who'd wanted children with a quiet desperation that Dora described as "the saddest thing I know — she folds other people's baby clothes at the laundry and cries where no one can see."
You have to understand, Dora wrote, I didn't plan it. I swear on everything I planned nothing. The alarm went off and it was chaos, and I was in the stairwell doing my count, and someone had left a bassinet by the Nursery B door — just for a moment, just while they carried two others — and she was there, this tiny girl with a star on her wrist, and I thought: Mabel. I thought her name like a prayer. And I picked her up, and I walked down stairwell C, and the rain was coming down, and nobody stopped me because everyone was running the other way.
Nora's hands shook. She read about the laundry blanket, the bus to Greyfield, Mabel's face at the door — she didn't ask where the baby came from, not at first, she just took her, she just held her and cried — and the slow poison of the years after: Dora quitting, Dora drinking, Dora jumping at sirens.
I told Mabel we should give her back. Twice I said it. The first time she said "She's mine now." The second time, she said "If you loved me you'd never say that again." So I never said it again. And every year on March 14th I sat on my porch and thought about a woman in a big house by the sea who was sitting up too, and I hated her for having everything and I hated myself for taking the one thing she didn't.
The last letter, two weeks before the stroke: Tell her before it's too late. Please, Mabel. The weight of it killed me. Don't let it kill you too. She has a right to know she's a star.
The third letter was about Mabel: She doesn't ask questions. I think she knows not to. She bathes the baby and sings to her — that old song our mother sang — and I sit in the kitchen and shake. Mabel thinks I found her abandoned. Let her think it a little longer. I'm not ready to say the words out loud yet. Saying them makes them true.
The seventh was the hardest to read, the handwriting nearly illegible: The woman is on the news again. The reward is up to two million. Mabel says we should never speak of it, that the baby is ours now, that God gave her to us. But God didn't give her to us, Mabel. I took her. I took her the way a thief takes. And the thief part of me is the part that loves her most, because I chose her, I chose her over everything, and choosing is a kind of love even when it's a sin.
The tenth was dated 2010, a year before the stroke: I dreamed last night that I walked into that hospital and put her back. In the dream she was still three days old, still asleep, still with the star. I laid her in the bassinet and the nurse turned around and it was me, I was the nurse, and I said "Here's your baby" and the mother cried. I woke up and my pillow was wet and I understood that I will never do the brave thing. I am too much of a coward. Mabel, when I'm gone, you tell her. Promise me.
Nora set the tenth letter down and pressed her palms against her eyes. "She asked you to promise," she said to the empty library. "Did you?"
She'd never know. Mabel hadn't promised, or had promised and broken it — either way, the telling had fallen to a private investigator and a cheek swab, twenty-four years late.
Nora folded the letters and sat for a long time, watching rain streak the library windows. Then she went upstairs, took the hospital bracelet from her bag, and held it next to the star on her wrist — plastic and skin, 2002 and now — and whispered, "I'm sorry," to Dora, to Claire, to Mabel, to the baby in the bassinet, to all of them at once, because sorry was the only word big enough and it wasn't big enough at all.
Claire found her there an hour later, asleep in the window seat with the letters scattered around her like she'd been buried in them. Claire covered her with a blanket, picked up one letter, read three lines, and sat down hard in the nearest chair with her hand over her mouth. When Nora woke, Claire was still there, crying silently, holding the seventh letter — the one about the reward, about turning off the television.
"She watched me," Claire whispered. "All those years. She watched me offer money I would have paid gladly, and she sat in the dark." She looked at Nora. "Do you hate her?"
Nora thought about it — really thought, the way Dora deserved. "No," she said finally. "I grieve her. There's a difference. Hate is for people who had choices. I'm not sure she ever felt like she had one."