Ruby came to Macon on the first bus she could catch. She is seventy eight years old, with a cane and a hat, and she walked into my kitchen carrying a paper sack of peaches as if nothing in the world had changed. Then she sat down across from me and began to cry, and I understood that the thing I had held in the attic was real. She said, “Your mama worked as a nurse aide, Bernie. At Akron City. Her name was Opal Whitlock, and she lost her own baby that same week.”
Ruby told it all, very slowly, in the voice of someone who had carried it for sixty years and set it down at last. Opal Whitlock had been twenty three, a girl from Macon who had gone north for work. In March of 1955 she gave birth to a stillborn daughter at the same hospital where she worked. The nurses wrapped the child and carried her away. Two nights later, in a state she never afterward could explain, Opal walked down the hall to the nursery and lifted a living baby from a crib.
She took a train to Georgia in the uniform she was wearing. She told her own mother that the baby was hers, that the father had abandoned them, and that she wished never to speak of it. The family, who loved her, did not ask. Ruby was ten. She had overheard her aunts whispering in the kitchen and had been slapped for repeating a word. Opal never again set foot in Ohio. She raised me with a ferocity I had always taken for love. I realized it was love, and grief, and fear, braided together like a rope.
A grief that has no place to go will sometimes take a stranger home, and love her more than the law allows.
Then I opened the letter at the bottom of the cedar chest, the one I had not been able to read. It was in the shaky handwriting of Opal, dated 1994, two years before she died. Bernie, my girl, I took you from a place where you were wanted, and I have been sorry every day and also not sorry, because I could not have lived without you. Leon knows. He promised to tell you when I was gone. If he did not, forgive him, as I hope you will forgive me.
I telephoned Akron the next morning. The number was written inside the envelope of Leon, beneath the names of the Christmas cards. A man answered on the second ring. His voice was deep and cautious. I said, “My name is Bernice Tate, and I believe I am your sister.” There was a silence so long that I thought the line had failed. Then he said, in a voice I felt in my knees, “Bernice. We have lit a candle for you every March fourteenth for seventy one years.”
His name was Stanley Kowalski, and he was sixty nine. He had been born two years after I was stolen, into a house where an empty crib stood in the corner of the bedroom of his parents until the day they died. He told me that our mother had set a place for me at every Thanksgiving. He told me that our father, a steelworker with hands like shovels, had driven to the train station every March for twenty years, on the chance that a grown woman would step off with his nose.
He drove down to Macon the following Friday with his daughter, in a minivan full of photographs. At my front door he stopped, and looked at me, and put his hand over his mouth. I knew what he saw. I have the nose of my mother, and her chin, and her exact eyes. He said, “You look just like Ma.” I took him in my arms in the doorway, and the daughter of Stanley, a woman of thirty with a camera around her neck, began quietly to cry.
The FBI sent an agent from the Atlanta office, a polite young man who took a swab from the inside of my cheek and a copy of the old newspaper. The results came in three weeks. They confirmed what the nose, the chin and the eyes had already said. The agent closed a file that had been open since 1955, one of the oldest in the cold case unit. He shook my hand at the door and told me that in thirty years he had never been given the privilege of ending one.
I went to Akron in April. Stanley took me to a cemetery on a hill outside the city, where my parents lie under a single gray stone. I stood in front of it with a bunch of peonies and said nothing for a long time. Then I sat on the bench and hummed the hymn that Opal sang while she washed dishes, and Stanley said quietly, “Ma loved that one too.” I think the Lord has a sense of humor, to give two women who never met the same song.
People ask whether I forgive Opal. I tell them I have two mothers, one who lost me and one who stole me, and I loved them both, and I do not know how to stop. Every March fourteenth, now, there are two candles. One burns in a window in Akron. The other burns on the piano in Macon, where a girl of nine sits for her lesson on Thursdays, and plays the hymn with one wrong note that I never correct.
