“Well, honey, maternity is on the third floor.”
“No, not a—I need to find a record on a baby that was born here.”
Carla’s penciled-in eyebrows rose into her tight black curls. “A baby?”
Riley pulled the birth certificate from her pocket. “She may have been adopted.”
Carla sighed and leaned closer to Riley, pushing her elbows onto the desk. “Look, honey, I understand what you’re going through, but I can’t just go handing over those records. There must have been a reason why the adoptive parents asked for a closed adoption. I know it’s hard, honey.” Carla reached out and patted Riley’s hand; Riley stared down at the intricate pattern on Carla’s incredibly long fingernails and absently wondered how she typed. “But it was probably the best thing all around.”
Riley’s expression sunk, and Carla pursed her lips into a tight pucker. “Did you want to do it? Did your parents make you do it? Make you give up your baby? Lord, you wouldn’t be the first who came back looking for their child. You’re awfully young though, aren’t ya?”
Riley stepped back, shaking her head. “No. Oh, no.” She pushed the birth certificate toward Carla. “It wasn’t my baby. I didn’t have it. It—she—” Riley pointed to the page as if the complete explanation was written there.
Carla smoothed the paper, her pursed pucker breaking into a soft smile. “Is this you, honey? Were you the one who was adopted?”
Riley’s mouth went dry.
“Your parents probably stole you…” Shelby’s words echoed in her head—but this time, the lightness in them was gone. Could I be baby Jane? Could I have been adopted? Riley tried to swallow. Or stolen? Again, her mind raced. She didn’t have asthma; her father did. Her mother burned if she so much as stepped into direct sunlight—Riley never burned. They were fiercely overprotective. They never let her go out alone. And the one thought that hit Riley like a punch to the gut: there were no pictures of her before the age of three.
Because she hadn’t been there.
“Hon?”
Riley cleared her throat. “Yeah…I guess.”
Carla tilted her head and her eyebrows rose into sympathetic slits. “Oh, honey. It goes both ways. I can’t give you any information unless you have ID. Does your ID have”—she took the page between her enormous fingernails—“Jane Elizabeth O’Leary on it?”
Riley shook her head. “Can you at least—can you at least tell me if you have any records on any of these people? Like, did they come in later for a broken bone or chicken pox or something? Did they have any big illnesses?”
Carla looked at Riley, head still cocked, ruby red lips pressed in a contemplative pucker. She looked all around her then leaned in close again. “I shouldn’t be doing this, but since I’ve been telling them to fix the dag-on air conditioning for two months now and they ain’t done nothing about it, I can take a small liberty.”
Riley sucked in a breath, sure that an enormous, stupid grin was cutting across her whole face. Carla paused then and eyed her. “Just a small one. I can tell you if the family has been through here.”
Riley’s heart pattered nervously as Carla heaved herself back into her chair and focused hard on the computer monitor in front of her. “Lemme see that paper again, honey.”
Riley slipped the birth certificate over the counter and clasped her hands behind her back so Carla wouldn’t see them trembling. She looked over Carla’s head, studying everything on every wall while Carla typed and Riley’s heart leapt into her throat. She was about to start pacing when Carla said, “Hmm. Now that’s odd.” She picked up the paper and squinted at it, pulled a pair of cheater eyeglasses up her nose, and typed again. She threw herself back in her chair and it squeaked a few inches backward. “Hmm.”
“Is everything OK?”
Carla folded up the birth certificate and handed it back to Riley. “I’m sorry, honey, but there is no record of this birth in our system.”
There was a tightness in Riley’s chest that spread slowly, heavily, through her whole body. “What?”
Carla shook her head. “Birth certificate says the baby was born here, but no, I don’t have any record of it at all. Kind of like a phantom.”
Riley leaned forward, rolling up on her tiptoes, her fingers gripping Carla’s counter so hard they were white. “But what about the parents? Did you look them up?”
Carla clucked and shook her head some more. “Tried ’em all. Even different spellings, you know, ’cuz a lot of times people get nervous just after they get their babies. But nothing.” She shrugged, her big shoulders hugging her ears. “Nada.”
“Well, maybe your records just don’t go back far enough.”