I asked him what she had written, and he turned the page toward me. The relationship said “daughter.” I told him my grandfather and grandmother had only one child, my father, and he said he knew that was strange because the burial record listed the deceased as a newborn girl. I asked for the date. He gave it to me: October 1988. I was twenty-three then, married with a baby of my own, and I remembered that year clearly. My grandmother had disappeared for almost two weeks that October, and when she came back she told everybody she’d been helping her sister after surgery. Nobody ever questioned it because she had always been private. I asked whether there was a funeral record. He said no, but there was a hospital reference attached to the interment order.
I drove home and called my aunt, the only person still alive who had been old enough to remember that year. She went silent when I said the date. Then she asked me where I had gotten it. I told her about the cemetery, and she said my grandmother had made everyone promise never to talk about October 1988. I asked why. She said because my father had been away working and my mother had been pregnant, but the baby wasn’t supposed to survive. I told her I had never had another sibling. She said, “You didn’t.” Then she corrected herself and said there had been a baby, but my grandmother took her away from the hospital before anyone in the family could see her. I asked where she went. My aunt said she didn’t know. She only remembered my grandmother returning with a hospital bracelet and crying for three days.
I went back to the cemetery and asked the man to pull every document connected to that space. There was one more page that hadn’t been in the plat book. It was a handwritten authorization from my grandmother allowing the cemetery to bury the child under our family name, but the baby’s surname had been crossed out and replaced with another one. I asked him to read it aloud. He did, and the name underneath was my father’s. Then I noticed the witness signature. It belonged to the doctor who had delivered my own daughter six years later. I called his old office, and after searching their archived records, his daughter called me back. She said her father had kept one envelope from 1988 because he had been afraid someone would eventually ask about it. The envelope had my grandmother’s name on it.
Inside was a photograph of a newborn girl.
And written on the back, in my grandmother’s handwriting, were three words: “She is yours.”
