The Baby Who Looked Like Hers

Darlene is Loretta’s younger sister, and she is everything Loretta is not, loud and soft and easy to cry, a big warm woman who sells Avon and hugs you whether you want it or not. She came by our house in the early spring when Nell was about four months old, to drop off some hand me down clothes from her own grandbabies, and she sat at my kitchen table and bounced Nell on her knee and made the faces and the noises, and then she went quiet.

I was at the sink. I heard her go quiet and I turned around and Darlene was holding Nell up in front of her, the way you hold a baby to really look at them, and the tears were just running down her face without a sound.

“Darlene?” I said.

She put Nell back down against her chest and she wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and she said, “I’m sorry, honey. She just favors somebody so strong.”

“Favors who?” I said. “Everybody says she looks like Wade’s baby pictures.”

Darlene looked at me for a long moment. I watched her decide something and then decide against it. “She does,” she said. “She looks just like a Hollis.” And she changed the subject, and she left not long after, and she hugged me too hard at the door and told me I was a good mama, and I stood in the yard and watched her little car go down the lane and I knew, the way you know a storm is coming by the way the leaves turn over, that there was something nobody was telling me.

I did not sleep that night. I lay there next to Wade and I went back over everything. The silence on the phone. The way Loretta would not touch my belly. The look at Easter. The blood leaving her face in that hospital room. Darlene crying over the baby and saying she favors somebody. It did not add up to a woman who hated her grandchild. It added up to something else, something I did not have a shape for yet, and sometime before dawn I got up and I went into Nell’s room and I stood over the crib and I looked at my daughter in the gray light and I tried to see what they were seeing. She was just Nell to me. My own face and Wade’s chin and all that dark hair. I could not see the ghost.

Because that is what it was. I know that now. They were seeing a ghost.

I decided I would ask Loretta myself. Not fight with her. Ask her. It took me two more weeks to work up to it, and I did it on a Sunday, after church, when I knew Earl would be out at the barn and we would be alone. I drove out to the farm with Nell in her car seat and I did not call ahead because I did not want to give her the chance to have the beans on the stove.

She came to the screen door and she saw me on the porch with the baby and I watched her go still. “Hannah,” she said. “Wade know you’re here?”

“No,” I said. “I came to talk to you. Just us.”