“Okay,” Melissa said. “Let’s go see what we can find.”
Natalie followed the younger woman to her office, a cramped, cube-shaped room without a window but with three walls lined with tall black filing cabinets. Melissa gestured for Natalie to sit in the chair on the other side of her desk while Melissa sat in front of her computer. “Most of our records are digitized, so we should have something on her,” she said as she typed. “Here we go. Brooke Walker.” Her eyes moved over the screen, reading aloud what she saw on it. “Brought in with her six-month-old sister, Natalie, in October of 1980.” She paused, reading more, silently. “You were right. Looks like she did age out in 1994, but we don’t have anything on her after that. Nothing official, anyway.”
“Would there be something unofficial?” Despite having known that the odds were against there being anything substantive here about her sister’s whereabouts, Natalie couldn’t help but feel disappointed.
“We actually have one employee who worked here back then. Miss Dottie, our kitchen manager. She was only twenty when she was hired, and has been here almost forty years. The kids love her, and she’s got a great memory. A real knack for names. Maybe she knew Brooke.”
“Is she here?” Natalie asked, feeling a surge of hope.
“She should be. Let me check.” Melissa reached for the phone on her desk, and after a quick conversation, she hung up and looked at Natalie. “She’s in the middle of overseeing lunch prep, but we can head down to the cafeteria and wait for her, if you like.”
“That would be great,” Natalie said, fingering the edge of her leather purse strap. “I was wondering, though . . . if it’s not an inconvenience, is there any way I can see a bit of the building? Where Brooke might have stayed?”
“Sure,” Melissa said. “I’d offer to show you where you were for the brief time you were here, too, but we don’t house babies anymore. They’re kept in a different facility altogether. The infant room has been remodeled into a study hall.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Natalie said. She’d been so focused on finding out more about Brooke, it hadn’t even crossed her mind that she might want to see where she had spent a month of her own life—she wouldn’t have remembered it anyway.
Melissa moved her eyes back to the computer. After a moment of scrolling, she smiled at Natalie. “Found it.” She stood up and headed out the door, Natalie following right behind her.
They walked down a long, narrow hallway that was lit by buzzing, yellow-tinged fluorescent lights and then went up a flight of stairs. The walls there were plaster instead of cement, painted the same dingy white as the linoleum, and were covered in brightly colored posters with inspirational sayings on them, including one that said, “The struggle is part of the story.” As she walked by it, Natalie noticed that beneath that statement someone had written “Fuck you and your story” in thick black ink. She winced, practically able to feel the anger coming off the resident who had penned those words.
When they got to the second floor, Melissa led Natalie down another hallway, this one lined with several gray doors. Melissa stopped at the third one on the right and gestured for Natalie to enter. “This is it,” Melissa said as they each stepped inside. “She stayed in a lot of different rooms before she hit ninth grade, a new one every time she came back from another foster home, but this is where she spent her last four years.”
Natalie moved her eyes around the room, which was about the same size as Hailey’s bedroom at home, but rather than her daughter’s frilly canopy bed covered in a lime-green comforter and lavender pillows, the space had four black metal, twin-size bunk beds squeezed along its perimeter. There were no windows, no other furniture besides the beds, and nothing hung on the walls. The space was blank, industrial. There were dented cardboard boxes with handles under the bunks, which Natalie assumed served as makeshift dressers. There was nothing about the room that said home.
Natalie took a step over to one of the bunks and sat down on the thin mattress, resting the heels of her palms on the scratchy gray blanket. She thought of her children, how they might react to being relegated to a room like this—how they might survive knowing their mother had given them up—and she had to fight back an ache in her chest. She thought about the room that she had grown up in, with its big windows and comfy, full-size bed. She remembered wanting to redecorate it when she turned thirteen, abandoning the pink and white frills for blue paint and posters of Luke Perry and Jason Priestley. She thought about how lucky she was to have been adopted, that her parents had saved her from living in a place as sterile as this.
Natalie moved her eyes upward and noticed that the plywood beneath the top bunk mattress was etched with so many names, it was difficult to decipher one from the other. “Julie Peterson was here, 1987,” Natalie read aloud.