next morning, Susan knocked on my door at eight.
I opened it without speaking.
She looked as though she hadn’t slept.
“Emily will be here at eleven,” she said.
I
stepped aside.
Susan entered and sat on the edge of the armchair.
For a while, we simply looked at each other.
Finally, I asked, “How old is she?”
“Forty-one.”
I did the math.
Susan had become pregnant when we were seventeen.
The year we’d graduated from high school.
The summer she’d supposedly gone to stay with an aunt in another state.
I remembered it clearly.
She’d been gone for almost eight months.
Her parents had told everyone she was helping a relative recover from surgery.
I’d written her letters.
She’d
answered only a few.
When she returned, she’d been thinner and quieter.
I thought she’d been homesick.
“You were pregnant,” I whispered.
Susan nodded.
“Who was the father?”
“A boy
named Daniel. He was nineteen. We dated secretly for a few months.”
I searched my memory.
“I don’t remember him.”
“He lived two towns away. You never met him.”
“What happened?”
Susan looked down.
“When I told him about the baby, he said he wasn’t ready to be a father. Then he disappeared.”
Her hands tightened around one another.
“My
parents were furious. They were terrified of what people would say.”
I felt my anger give way to something else.
“They sent you away?”
“Yes.”
“To have the baby?”
She nodded.
“I gave birth to Emily in a small hospital. I held her for twenty minutes.”
Her voice trembled.
“Twenty minutes, Claire. That’s all the time I had.”
I sat opposite her.
“What happened afterward?”
“My parents arranged an adoption. I was seventeen, frightened, and completely dependent on them. They told me it was the only sensible choice.”
“Did you
