The receiving facility was in Lexington, and the name listed for the person taking custody was a woman I’d never heard of. I called the hospital first and asked whether the transfer had really happened. The records clerk said yes, but she couldn’t discuss the child’s identity without a court order. I told her I was the mother and had the original records in front of me. She checked the archive and then went quiet. The transfer wasn’t to another hospital. It was to a private maternity facility that closed in 1987. I asked why a newborn would have been transferred there, and she said the reason in the record was “maternal request.”
I told her I had never made such a request. She pulled the scanned form and read the signature again. My husband’s signature was on it, dated the morning after I gave birth. I asked who had witnessed it. She gave me two names, and one belonged to my mother’s doctor. I knew he had been at the hospital that day because he came to see me after the delivery. The other name was unfamiliar. Then the clerk told me something that made me sit down: the receiving facility had listed my husband’s sister as the person authorized to take custody of the second baby. My husband had no sister. He was an only child.
I found an old address book and searched the unfamiliar witness’s name. There was one entry, from 1982, with a Lexington phone number. I called it, and an elderly woman answered. When I told her my name, she said she’d wondered whether anyone from that family would ever come looking. She told me the second baby was alive and had been raised under another surname. I asked where she was now. The woman said she couldn’t tell me, but she could give me the name on the original transfer record. Then she said the name slowly, like she knew exactly what it would do to me.
It was my daughter’s name.
