The Baby Sister I Prayed Forty Years For
I stood up. I said something I do not repeat. I left.
That was the spring I married Arlis Whitlow in the front of this church, and the last time I sat in that kitchen. I kept writing, though. Every August ninth for twenty-five more years, from our own kitchen table now, on a penny postcard and then a nickel one, and every August came the blue-ink card. In 2001 mine came back with a yellow sticker on it. Moved, no forwarding address. I held it a long while. Then I put it in the shoebox with the rest and did not know where else to send anything.
My daughter Karla was born in the spring of 1986, after eleven hours in the county hospital and a nurse who kept telling me to breathe. I was twenty-eight. When they laid her on my chest, wet and furious, with a head like a small hot loaf, something in me came open that I had kept shut for nearly twenty years.
I had carried a baby once before. I lay in that bed with Karla’s heart going against mine, and I understood what I had been asked to do at nine years old, and what had been done to us both.
Arlis was asleep in the vinyl chair with his boots still on. I turned my face to the window and I said it out loud, very low, the first time I ever said it in full.
“Lord, let me hold her once more before I die.”
I said it that night and the next night. I made it a promise, the way you promise to keep a pilot light lit. Not a request I might forget. A thing I owed. Every night, in the same words, for forty years: kneeling when my knees allowed, sitting on the edge of the bed when they did not, once from a hospital cot when Arlis had his gallbladder out. I said it the night Kolton was born, who has my mother’s ears. I said it the night I turned sixty-eight, in March, when Arlis brought me a slice of lemon cake and asked, “Anything you want?” and I said, “Just this,” and he sat on the bed beside me while I said it.
People ask why I did not simply find her. I tried.
I signed the state adoption registry in 1996, the kind where you put your name down and wait for the other person to do the same. Nobody signed back. I called the welfare office twice. The files were sealed, the woman said kindly. I wrote to a retired judge. Every answer was gentle, and every answer was no.
I did not have money for a detective on a school cook’s wage. I cooked lunch for the Alder Grove elementary for forty-eight years and Arlis drove the propane truck for the farm co-op, and we paid off the house in 2004 and thought ourselves rich.
Two years ago Kolton, who is sixteen now and does everything on a telephone, sat me down at my own kitchen table and said, “Grandma, there’s a thing, you spit in a tube.” He sent it off for me. We waited six weeks. The email came on a Thursday while I was shelling peas, and he read it aloud with his voice getting smaller.
No close relatives. A few third and fourth cousins in Missouri. Nothing in the place where a sister should be.
“Maybe she hasn’t done one, Grandma,” Kolton said. “Maybe she doesn’t know to.”