“I was born in Asheville.” The girl looks annoyed with us. “Will you fix my arm? Please?”
I try to inhale, but I can’t. I try explaining. “You’re right, I’m…a little off.” I wave in the direction of my head, which now feels like an over-filled balloon. “Before I go—” I look again at her, then at her mother— “can you please step out into the hall with me?”
“Into the hall?” she asks.
“I’ll go with you,” the man says.
We step out, and I scroll through my tablet, my hand shaking so much I nearly drop it as I look for her chart. Birthday… What’s the birthday?
I see September 5 and feel relief so overwhelming I have to reach my hand out and make contact with the wall.
But NO.
My brain lurches.
If I left Evie in December, it would be September that she would have…
I blink at the father, noticing the dark pores on his nose and how his bushy eyebrows trail back toward his temples, just a few hairs here and there.
“I think you need to sit down, son.”
I shake my head, inhaling slowly. “Was your girl…adopted?”
I don’t know how I get back upstairs. I ask for Evie. Everywhere, I ask for Evie. She’s in surgery. I pace around. I hear myself paged: once, twice, three times.
She emerges through the door of the scrub room, her brown-blonde hair in a bun, her face looking relaxed as she steps out into the hall. I mean to catch her by the arm, but I can’t move. Can only rasp her name as she walks toward the nurse call station.
She whirls. “Landon.” She laughs, clearly glad to see me standing in the hall. I watch her smile wither as her gaze moves over my face. “What’s the matter?”
She’s right by me, her hand on my shoulder. I step back, shaking my head. I don’t even have the words to say what’s wrong.
“Hey…” She lifts her hands up, in a mock surrender pose. “What’s wrong,” she asks me softly. Her eyes dart behind her, toward the ORs. “Did you come from surgery? Did something happen?” Her blue eyes are full of empathy.
“You could say that something happened,” I say slowly.
“What?”
I try to speak and can’t at first. The hall around me spins. “You had a baby.”
Nine
Evie
“I saw her down in ER. She had your face—” he points— “and my eyes.” I watch as fury twists his features. “I was her doctor, Evie! She looked just like you,” he moans. “September 2007 birthday, born in Asheville…” He shakes his head, his chest pumping with his frantic breaths.
Adrenaline has lit me up, but I can’t tell him! If I do, this will be over, and it can’t be over. “Why did you think this girl you saw was—”
“No! Don’t do that shit with me, Evie! They told me she’s adopted.” Landon’s voice cracks. “They told me she was…yours.”
I shake my head as I move toward him. “We should step into a room—”
He holds his arms out as a barrier. “Why’d you name her Ashtyn, Evie? It reminds me of my mother.”
His face crumples, his head bows, and his hand comes over his eyes as Landon’s shoulders start to shake.
“I’m so sorry.”
“I was gone. You said you tried to find me. You tried, but you couldn’t…so…”
“Come here.” I reach for him, and Landon stumbles back.
“Landon, please come with me. Let me talk!” I start to sob as he takes one step back, and then another, moving his hand off his tear-streaked face.
“She...uh…hurt her arm,” he says in a thick voice. “I think she’s okay now. Bay three.”
He reaches out to touch the wall, blinking as he steadies himself. Then he turns and jogs off down the hallway.
My mind is spinning, my pulse racing, my heart wrenched with pain so awful, it’s like the day I birthed her—Ashtyn Nora Deckert—someone else’s baby. But she wasn’t someone else’s when she got here. She was mine.
I came home at thirty-seven weeks so I could birth her in my state of residence. So I could finalize the deal to give her to the Deckerts. I remember it was strangely cold that week, the weather dark and misty. Sometimes fall in Asheville is vibrant and beautiful, but that one wasn’t.
I cried every night. I would lie awake, exhausted and uncomfortable, and I would beg the universe for Landon. If he came back to me, I was going to change my mind and keep the baby.
One night, I slept downstairs in his old bed, where our baby was created. That’s the night contractions started.
I went to the hospital—Carolina General—when my parents thought it seemed like time. Emmaline cried because she couldn’t come with us. My grandma kept her.
During labor, I was treated with the utmost care and kindness by my parents’ colleagues. My mother held my hand while I screamed and moaned, and I remember how she tried to tell me moms and daughters had been doing this together for thousands of years.
“No boys,” she told Dad when he called from in the hall.
Makayla was my only friend who knew the truth. She sat in the waiting room with Dad, Aunt Raina, and my other grandma.
In the moments that I pushed, I remember thinking I was no different than Landon’s mother, a horrible abandoner who broke his heart before his poor young mind could even form its first memories. I was giving up my own child at the very same place.
I pushed hard, and felt an awful fire of pain all through my legs and belly. I started to sob, and then I saw her tiny, crying face. She had my mouth and cheeks, and Landon’s brows. When someone laid her on my chest, I fell in love. Our baby. Perfect.
I cried the whole night while I held her. Her parents wanted her to get my colostrum, and my mom wanted closure for me, so the deal was, that first night, I’d be with her alone.
Mom asked me only once if I was sure. I’d just emerged from my first shower, and Mom was looking down at her from where they sat together in the rocking chair.
“Dad and I can’t help the way some other parents could, but Evie…this needs to be your choice.”
My mother looked at me, and I at her, and I knew she was telling me to do what my heart said I had to.
I took her from my mom, and I tried to envision her at day care while I finished school and went to college. I closed my eyes and prayed, and thought of Landon. If I kept her, she would likely never know her father. Landon had been off the grid for months. I had to face that. If I gave her to the Deckerts, she’d have both. She would also get two older brothers. I had seen their pictures of the bedroom they had for her. The diaper bag and car seat. Her parents had even let me help name her.
They arrived a few hours later, and when I saw Clara Deckert sob and collapse against her burly husband, when they cried with me and talked to me and listened, when they promised they would send me pictures, and invite me for birthday parties, when they told me she was what would fill the holes inside their hearts from Clara’s stillbirth the year before…what could I do?