The Baby Who Looked Like Hers

It came through Wade. He had not known. That is the thing that still sits heavy in me. My husband was thirty six years old and he found out he had a sister on a Sunday afternoon in his parents’ kitchen. He sat at that table and his mother told him about Faye and he put his face in his hands and he said, “All those years I thought you were just hard. I thought I did something. I spent my whole life thinking I did something to make you like that.” And Loretta reached across and took her son’s face in her two hands the way you do a child, and she said, “No, baby. No. It was never you. It was never ever you.” And a thing that had been wrong between those two for a whole lifetime started, right there, to come unwound.

And it came through the town, which surprised me most of all. Because once the lid was off, it turned out the whole town had been holding it down with her. Old Mrs. Pruitt at the diner, who must be ninety, took my hand when she heard and told me she had brought a ham to the Hollis place in the fall of 1983 and had never heard that baby’s name spoken since, and she cried and said she had wondered all her life if Loretta was all right in there, and now she knew she had not been, not for a long time. The women at the church, the second pew women, they had known, in the way a small town knows everything and says nothing, and once Loretta started saying Faye’s name they let themselves say it too, and I watched my mother in law get held, actually held, by women she had sat beside for fifty years and never once let close, and I understood that she had been alone in a crowd her whole life by her own hard choice, and that the choice had not been pride. It had been survival.

The bittersweet of it, the part I did not expect, is that you do not get the forty two years back. I used to think reconciliation meant everything got fixed. It does not. Faye is still gone. Loretta still wakes some nights, I know she does, in that farmhouse, having dreamed of a fever breaking that never broke. There is a grief in that house that will not leave because it should not leave, because it is the shape love takes when the person is gone. What changed is that the grief got to come out of the locked room and sit at the table with the rest of us. That is all. That is everything.