…delivered you. And then arranged for you to be sold.”
Dr. Hale had worked at the same hospital as a young resident. He recognized the format of the tag. He also recognized my mother-in-law’s name on the delivery records he pulled up for me later that week: Nurse Barbara Quinn.
The name on the tag was Baby Girl Whitaker. My birth date. My hospital. But my parents’ last name was Sullivan.
The rash, he said, came from mothball chemicals the blanket had been stored with for decades. Irritating, but not dangerous. What was dangerous was the tag.
I drove straight to my parents’ house. My mother — my adoptive mother, I suddenly knew — went white when I showed it to her. She told me the truth in her kitchen, crying the whole time.
She and my father had been unable to have children. A nurse at the hospital told them about a “private arrangement.” A young woman who couldn’t keep her baby. A fee of eight thousand dollars, in cash. No agency, no paperwork. The nurse would handle everything. My parents knew it wasn’t legal. They wanted a baby so badly that they didn’t ask questions.
That nurse was Barbara.
I confronted her that night. My husband, Ryan, was beside me. Barbara didn’t deny it. She just sat down at her kitchen table and seemed to grow smaller.
“I recognized you the day Ryan brought you home,” she said. “Your face. Your mother’s face. I’ve been afraid of you ever since. That’s why I was so cold. I thought you’d find out.”
“Then why give me the blanket?” I asked.
“Because you’re having a baby,” she whispered. “And I’m old. I didn’t want my grandchild born into a lie I told.”
Barbara had arranged eleven private adoptions over six years. She told the police everything. The statute of limitations had long passed for most of the crimes, but the information helped several adoptees find their birth families. Including me.
My birth mother, Laura Whitaker, had been seventeen. She was told her daughter had been placed with a “good church family” and that records were sealed. She’d written letters to the hospital every year on my birthday. We met three months before my son was born. She was in the delivery room with me.
Ryan and I wrapped our son in a new blanket. The old one is in a box with the tag, for the day he’s old enough to hear the whole story.
