The young woman on our porch was the girl from the sidewalk. Red hair in a long braid, freckles across her nose, a green coat, and a worried frown that I had seen a thousand times, in the bathroom mirror of Susan. She held a plant in a clay pot in both hands, a small green fern. Beside her stood a tall bearded man with kind eyes and a baby carrier strapped to his chest, a sleeping infant tucked inside. “Mr. Hollis,” she said. “I am Hannah. I am so sorry to come to your house. Susan said Sunday, but we thought it would be easier if it were not all at once.” Susan whispered behind me, “Oh, Hannah. Oh, honey. Come in.”
Ryan stood next to me, frozen. I put an arm around his shoulder, and he felt rigid as a board. We moved into the living room, and the girl sat down on the sofa beside her husband, a high school science teacher named Ben, and the baby gave a small contented sigh. Susan took the chair across from them with her hands folded in her lap, her knuckles white. The silence in the room grew long. Finally Susan said, “Jim. Ryan. I have to tell you something I have never told another living soul.” Her voice cracked. “In 1999, I had a baby. I was nineteen. I was in a home for unwed mothers in Omaha. I gave her up for adoption.”
She told it in a flat, careful voice, as if she were reading from a transcript. She had been a college freshman at Drake. The father of the baby was a boy who left within the week. Her parents, devout and proud, drove her to a Lutheran home in Omaha, and she gave birth in the last week of November. “They let me hold her for ten minutes,” Susan said. “She had red hair. A little puff of it. I counted her fingers. The nurse told me, It will be easier if you do not look.” She pressed a fist to her mouth. “I looked anyway. I have been looking for twenty five years.”
A young woman with a fern and a baby carrier arrived to meet the mother who had been looking for her for twenty five years.
I sat in my own living room, listening to the confession of a woman I had loved for twenty eight years, and I discovered that I was not shocked. What I felt was a long, slow, aching sadness. For nearly three decades my wife had gone on Mondays to yoga, or what she called yoga, and had come home with red eyes, and I had said nothing. “Susan,” I said, finally. “Why did you never tell me?” She looked at me with great wet eyes. “Because I was ashamed. Because when we met, I had already buried it. And every year it got heavier, and every year it got harder to say. I thought you would not love a woman who gave up her own child.”
I got up and knelt in front of her, with my old knees complaining, and I took her hands. “Susan,” I said. “You were nineteen. Your parents sent you away. You did the hardest thing a young girl can do, and you did it alone.” Her face collapsed. “I would have loved you more,” I said. “Not less. I would have driven to Omaha and stood in that hallway.” She leaned her forehead against mine and sobbed. Behind us, I heard the quiet voice of Ryan, thick with tears. “Mom. I have a sister.” He crossed the room. He did not hesitate. He dropped to his knees beside Hannah, and he said, “Hi. I am Ryan.”
Hannah laughed and cried together, a high, helpless, hiccupping sound. “I know,” she said. “I have a picture of you from the swim team on my phone. Mom, I mean Susan, sent me.” Ryan said, “You can call her Mom. I will not mind.” Hannah said she would call her Susan for now, if that was all right. “She is not my mother yet. I have a mother. Her name is Linda, and she is an amazing woman.” Susan nodded, wiping her face. “Of course. Of course. Your mother is the one who raised you. She is the one who deserves the title. I would never take that away.” Hannah gave her a long, searching look. “You really mean that,” she said wonderingly.
Ben unbuckled the carrier and eased the baby into his arms, and held him out. “This is Theo,” he said. “He is three months old. We named him after her father.” Susan looked at the baby with an expression of such yearning that I had to look away. She took him with trembling hands, and the infant, who had been drowsing, opened a pair of blue eyes and stared up at her. He had a tuft of red hair. Susan made a sound like a prayer. “Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, look at you.” She rocked him, and the tears dropped onto his blanket, and he reached up one fist and grabbed her braid.
We talked for hours. Hannah had grown up in Cedar Rapids, the only child of two schoolteachers who told her from the age of five that she was adopted. She became a nurse. She searched for her birth mother after her own son was born, because she wanted him to know where he came from.
Hannah stayed the night, with Ben and the baby, in the room where Ryan used to keep his swim trophies. In the morning we found them all in the kitchen. Susan was making pancakes in her robe, Ryan was holding the baby, and Hannah was laughing at something Ben said. It was the happiest scene I had ever seen. I thought of all the years my wife had carried that grief like a stone in her purse. Now she was flipping pancakes, and someone had put a plate in front of me, and Hannah had said, with a shy smile, “Good morning, Jim.”
They visit every month now, driving up from Cedar Rapids, and we make the trip down for the holidays. Susan quit her Monday yoga class and took up knitting for the baby, a small red hat that is already two sizes too big. She and Hannah talk on the phone every Sunday night. Ryan applied to medical school in Iowa City, to be near his sister. And last Christmas, Hannah gave her a gift in a box with a lopsided bow. It was a framed photograph of a newborn with a puff of red hair. On the back, in neat nurse handwriting, it said, You were looked at. You were loved.
