My aunt said the man was twenty-six, married, and involved with the church youth program where I’d been volunteering after school. She wouldn’t say his name at first. She only told me that my mother discovered I was pregnant after I fainted in the kitchen, and that by then I was far enough along that there was no pretending it hadn’t happened. My mother pulled me out of school, sent me to my grandmother’s house three counties away, and told everybody I had mononucleosis. Apparently I knew exactly why I was there. I just don’t remember any of it now.
According to my aunt, the delivery was difficult. I lost a dangerous amount of blood, developed complications afterward, and spent days heavily medicated in the hospital. The baby was a girl. My mother arranged a private adoption before I was discharged, and when I came home she decided the kindest thing was to never speak about it again. My aunt said I asked for the baby repeatedly during those first weeks, then gradually stopped. By the time I returned to school, I was repeating the same explanation everyone else had been given: I’d been very sick with mono.
I asked how an entire pregnancy could disappear from my memory, and my aunt said she couldn’t answer that. She could only tell me what she’d witnessed and give me the box my mother had left with her before she died. Inside were hospital bracelets, adoption papers, three photographs of me holding a newborn, and twenty-two birthday cards my mother had bought over the years but never mailed. Every one was addressed simply to “Baby Girl,” because the adoption had been closed and she never learned the name my daughter was given.
Then my aunt handed me one last envelope. It had been mailed to my mother in 2003, four years before she died. The return address belonged to a woman with a name I recognized immediately — my daughter’s college roommate, a woman who had been in my house dozens of times when they were nineteen. My aunt watched my face and said, “That’s why I’ve been waiting for you to ask. Your mother found her. She knew exactly who your first daughter became. And before she died, she made me promise I wouldn’t tell you unless you discovered 1979 yourself, because the girl asked her not to.”
