The Baby Who Looked Like Hers
We took Nell out to the little cemetery behind the Baptist church on a green morning in May. There is a small stone there, so small, with FAYE ELIZABETH HOLLIS on it and two dates eighteen months apart, and I had driven past that church two thousand times in my life and never once seen it, because you do not see the small stones unless you know to look. Loretta knelt down in the grass in her church clothes and she brushed the leaves off it with her hand, the way she must have wanted to for forty two years and not let herself, and she said, “Faye, this here is your niece. Her name is Nell. She’s got your hair.” And I stood behind her holding my daughter and I cried for a woman I never met, who would have been in her forties, who might have been the one holding this baby if the world had been kinder in the fall of 1983.
We named her middle after my mother, Sue, before any of this came out. But Loretta asked me, careful, not wanting to take anything, if she might sometimes call Nell by a nickname that was just between them, and I said of course, and the nickname she chose was Faye. She does not use it in front of people. It is theirs. When she thinks no one is listening, out on that farmhouse porch with the baby on her shoulder, I have heard her singing low into Nell’s dark hair, calling her little Faye, and it is not a sad thing anymore, or not only a sad thing. It is a woman getting to say a name she loves out loud, after a lifetime of holding her breath.
My mother in law is the best grandmother that child has. I need to say that plain, because of how I started this. The woman I was sure could not stand the sight of my daughter now drives forty minutes each way to sit with her so I can nap, and she has sewn her a quilt by hand, and she teaches her the old hymns in a cracked alto that does not care about the key, and when Nell reaches up and grabs a fistful of Loretta’s gray hair and laughs, Loretta closes her eyes like she is receiving something holy, because she is.
I spent a year believing a cold story about a woman, and I was ready to teach my daughter that story, to raise her to know which grandmother showed up. I think about that a lot. I think about how close I came. The cruelty I thought I saw was real in the sense that it hurt me, but it was never what I thought it was, and I had decided I already knew it all, and I almost shut a door that would have cost my daughter the person who loves her most fiercely on this earth.
So I will tell you what I tell myself, now, when somebody’s cold face makes me sure I know their heart. I do not know their heart. I have never once known somebody’s whole story from the outside. The hardest people I have ever met were almost always carrying the heaviest things, set down a long time ago in a locked room, and quietly dying for somebody to knock.
Loretta knocked, in the end. Or I did, on a Sunday, with a baby on my hip and nothing left to lose. I will be grateful the rest of my life that I did not drive home instead.