"Mabel," Nora whispered. "You've worn that key my whole life and I never saw it."
"You never looked," Mabel said, and there was no accusation in it, just tired fact. "Nobody looks at old women, baby. That's the one advantage of getting old — you become invisible, and you can carry anything."
She held out the key. Nora took it. It was warm from Mabel's skin.
"Whatever's in here," Mabel said, "I want you to remember one thing when you see it. I loved you before I knew your name. Whoever named you first, I loved you first in the way that counts — in the mornings, in the nights, in the fevers and the school plays. Don't you forget that."
"I won't," Nora said, and her voice broke, because she was afraid she might.
Chapter 8
The Cedar Box
Inside the cedar box, on a bed of yellowed tissue paper, lay three things. A hospital ID bracelet, the plastic gone cloudy with age, the printed strip inside reading Baby Girl Beaumont — St. Aurelia's — 3/14/02. A silver rattle, tarnished black in the creases, engraved with the initials L.B. And a stack of letters, tied with a faded blue ribbon, in a handwriting Nora didn't recognize — loopy, hurried, the ink brown with age.
Nora picked up the bracelet with two fingers, as if it might burn. "Baby Girl Beaumont," she read aloud. Her voice sounded very far away. "Mabel. What is this."
Mabel sat down heavily at the kitchen table and put her head in her hands. For a full minute she didn't speak. The television murmured. The iron cooled, ticking.
"Read the letters," Mabel said at last, not looking up. "She wrote them to me. She never sent them — she gave them to me all at once, near the end. Read them and then — then you'll know everything I know. Which is everything."
Nora untied the ribbon with shaking fingers and opened the first letter. Dear Mabel, it began. I don't know how to write this so I will just write it. On the night of March 17th, during the fire alarm, I took a baby from Nursery B...
The kitchen tilted. Nora read on, the words blurring and refocusing. Dora — Mabel's middle sister, the one who'd died in 2011, the one whose name was barely spoken in this house — a maternity nurse at St. Aurelia's. The fire alarm. The evacuation. A bassinet left momentarily unwatched in the corridor chaos. A baby with a star on her wrist. And Dora, forty-three years old, who'd had three miscarriages and a husband who left, who'd watched her older sister Mabel grieve the children she'd never have — Dora, who in seventeen minutes of madness lifted the sleeping baby from the bassinet, wrapped her in a laundry blanket, and walked down stairwell C into the rain.
I told myself I was saving her, Dora had written. The rich have so many, I thought. You had none. I told myself God would understand arithmetic. He did not. He has not, one day since.
There were eleven letters. Nora read them all, sitting on Mabel's kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet, crying silently, while Mabel sat at the table with her head in her hands and didn't try to stop her.
The second letter described the night itself, and Nora had to stop twice to breathe: The alarm screamed and everyone ran, and the corridor was full of nurses carrying babies like armloads of firewood, and I was assigned to the stairwell, Mabel, I was supposed to stand in the stairwell and count. And there was a bassinet by the door of Nursery B where someone had left it in the rush, and she was so small, and she had that star on her wrist, and I thought — I thought it was a sign. I am telling you this plain because there is no other way to tell it. I picked her up.
The fifth letter was about the first year: She cried for her mother for three weeks. Not you — the other one, the one whose milk she remembered. I walked the floor with her every night and I hated myself with every step, and I loved her with every step.
The ninth was short, written in a shakier hand: The rich woman was on television again, offering the reward. Two million dollars. I turned it off. Mabel, I am afraid all the time now. I hear sirens and my hands shake. Tell me I did the right thing. You won't, because I didn't, but tell me anyway.
"Did you ever answer them?" Nora asked, her voice hoarse.
Mabel nodded, staring at the table. "I'd go sit with her on that porch. She'd cry, I'd hold her hand. What was there to write back? We were both in it by then." She looked up, her eyes red. "The weight of it killed her. She died scared, Nora. Scared and alone on that porch. I think she was waiting for forgiveness. I don't think she knew the difference anymore."
Nora carefully retied the ribbon around the letters — all except the last one, which she folded and put in her pocket. Then she picked up the silver rattle and shook it gently. It made a dull, tired sound, the little bells inside corroded with age.
"Did I —" She stopped. "When I was little, did I know? Did I ever ask where I came from?"
"Once," Mabel said. "You were five. You asked why you didn't look like me. I told you you looked like your mama, and you said —" Her voice broke. "You said, 'I don't remember her.' And I said, 'That's okay, baby, I remember enough for both of us.'"
They sat in silence while the television murmured and the afternoon light moved across the oilcloth. Finally Nora stood, gathered the bracelet, the rattle, and the letters into her bag, and hugged Mabel at the door — a real hug, fierce, the way they'd always hugged, even though everything was different now.
"Monday," she said again. "Whatever it says."
She drove back to Port Calloway with the bracelet in her pocket, and all the way home she could feel it there, small and hard and undeniable, like a stone in her shoe. Like the truth.