Through the gap in the curtain, the baby catches my eye again and this time points at me. I raise my free hand, the empty cuff dangling from my wrist, and wave back.
When Annemarie comes to see me again I smile right away at the sight of her, and offer a little wave. The more I see her, the more I’m filled with wonder at the way she looks. I’ve often heard women talk about the first time they held their newborns—how they marveled at the long delicate fingers and perfect hands, the clear perfection of blinking eyes, the froggy stretch of a leg. I never had any of that, but I understand it now as I stare at this adult before me. Even her mannerisms, from the anxious twitch of her shoulders to the way she raises her eyebrows before she sighs, were mine once, before I came to a place where the unrestrained notes of body language became an expensive liability. I wonder how that can be, and whether the muscles themselves contain the code for those movements somehow, passed along from mother to daughter with the rest of the womanly genes.
“Happy birthday,” I say, once she’s closer. I know the date now: July 9, 1985. Yesterday, while I waited in the clinic for fresh bandages on my arm, I rifled madly through my file the nurse had left on the table beside me. It was a quick and dirty search that only left time to read the barest details, but finding the date was enough of a victory. I try to hand her the little tissue-wrapped package I’ve prepared, but a C.O. intercepts it.
“No direct transfer,” he says. He looks from me to Annemarie. “I can open it and evaluate it.”
I nod, and he slips the pink crocheted hat out of the package, gives it a cursory examination, and hands it to Annemarie. “I made it for you,” I explain to her. And then boldly, with the same surge of nerve that it took to squeeze my milk carton with perfect aim, I say, “While I was pregnant with you.”
Her smile is slow and incredulous and beautiful. “And you kept it all this time. Wow. How did you know I would be a girl?”
“I just knew.”
She runs her hand along the fabric I’ve made, so neatly webbed, without one flaw. “Thank you. This is the most wonderful present. I’m going to cry.” She laughs, a quick, heartbreaking sound, and turns her glimmering eyes toward the ceiling. “Not here. I’ll save it for later.”
We sit at a table, and she gestures to my arm. “What happened?”
I feel a blush creeping into my cheeks. “Someone in the yard didn’t like it that the cat prefers me to her.”
The side of Annemarie’s mouth begins to lift in a disbelieving smile. “Are you serious? What did she do?”
“She cut me. I’m all right. The doctors stitched it up.” I set my face in a lighthearted expression. It’s bad enough that she must come to visit me here; I don’t want this experience to be more depressing for her than it needs to be. “You know it’s the first time I’ve been out of this building in twenty-four years? And you know what really got to me, while I was out and about?”
“Not being fenced in?”
“No, the smell of a hamburger.” This time her laugh is musical. Delighted. “It was called In-N-Out Burger. It was next to the road on the way to the hospital. For a moment I thought I was having a nervous breakdown at the smell of it. That or a religious experience.”
She nods. “I’ll go with the second choice there. In-N-Out burgers are pretty close to heaven.”
“My God. It’s messed with my mind. After so many years here the food just seems normal. But drive past that and it brings it all back. Now I can understand why people in here fake medical emergencies all the time to get out. Before I thought that was just silly and frustrating, but boy oh boy. It was worth every stitch.”
“Did you get stuck in the emergency room for hours and hours?”
“No, they took care of me right away.”
She looks amused. “The VIP treatment, huh? Most people spend the whole night waiting in triage.”
“I did see a lot of people waiting. There was one very cute baby just outside my curtain. She kept waving at me.”
Her lips tighten, and she looks down at the pink bonnet resting on the table. She strokes it with one finger. I feel a tensing in my stomach and know I’ve said something wrong. That I showed fondness for a baby, even though I surrendered her? Did I cause her to think about the baby she lost? I can’t tell, but I twist my fingers against each other and wait out her silence. It strikes me suddenly that she’s now the age I was when she was born—the age when everything ended for me, and began for her. But I’d never given any thought to having babies then. Perhaps I was a late bloomer, or else only a realist. I wanted Ricky to pull it together enough that we could plan a future, but I certainly wasn’t thinking about when to bring a child into the world while my beloved partner still hadn’t mastered concepts like paying for car insurance and producing a clean urine sample for an employer. Annemarie is years ahead of the twenty-four-year-old Clara— although an obnoxious little thought keeps worming its way into my mind. I might have been very much like her if my mother had never met Garrison Brand.
“I found a bit of that information you were looking for,” I say, and she looks up. “Your father had a sister with Turner Syndrome. I’m not sure what that is, but a…a person familiar with him mentioned that to me, when I asked. Other than that, there’s nothing very remarkable in the medical history. I’ll write it all down and mail it to you.”
She replies with a slow blink and unreadable expression. “Thank you. Will the names be on the information you send?”
I turn on my flat face. “I was just planning to list the relationships and the relevant information. I haven’t asked his family if they’re okay with me disclosing names and all that personal stuff, and it seems like it’s only right for me to ask first, you know, in case some of them are still living.”
Annemarie nods, but I can see she’s thinking hard about this, and that I’ve made her unhappy. “Do they know about me at all? That I even exist?”
“No.”
“Is my father still alive?”
I take a deep breath. “No.”
Her face falls a bit, but then she pushes her chin forward almost imperceptibly. “So it is Ricky, then.”
“I didn’t say that. You’re twenty-four years old, Annemarie. A lot of people have died in that time.”
“Clara,” she says, and hearing my first name spoken in her lovely voice makes me feel like a dog being swiped at with a rolled newspaper. “Couldn’t you offer me a hint, at least? Come on, let’s be real here. I researched everything I could find about you before I came here the first time. I know I asked you questions, but the truth is I already knew a lot. About your family, about your dad who died, the places where you lived, and the crime. I read all about the crime.”
“What you read isn’t necessarily what is true.”
“Maybe not, but it can’t be too far off. After all, here—”
“It can be farther off than you think.” My voice is sharper than I want it to be. I struggle to soften it, but a tightness still pulls beneath the quiet. “You’re an artist, Annemarie. You know how different something appears if you stare at it straight on instead of from the side. And everything you’ve seen or read about this is from a side angle, often an extreme one. Please don’t assume you have the true story.”
“Then why don’t you tell it?”
“I’m working on that. Why don’t you ask me what you want to know about him? Maybe I can at least provide you with some background.”
She folds her hands on the table in front of her, those brown eyes taking on a determined gleam that is new to me. Her nails are shiny, French-manicured. “You said my father wasn’t Ricky Rowan, but everyone testified that you were dating him at the time. If it wasn’t him, then who? The licentious dentist?”