My son’s baby book has a page torn out, and my handwriting on the next one picks up mid-sentence. The page numbers are printed, so there’s no question about what’s missing. It’s page eleven, and page eleven covers the first three days. He’s thirty-four now and asked me about it at Christmas, joking, and I laughed, and then I didn’t sleep. My sister was there for those three days, so I called her in January and asked, straight out, what happened in the hospital.
She was quiet for a while before saying she remembered the page. I asked why it was missing, and she told me my husband had removed it years ago. That was the first thing that bothered me because my husband had always claimed he never touched the baby book. I asked what had been written on it, but my sister wouldn’t tell me over the phone. Instead, she asked whether my son still had the hospital bracelet from when he was born. I told her I didn’t know, and she said I needed to find it before I asked anyone else questions.
I searched through the boxes in my attic and found the bracelet inside an envelope with my son’s name on it. The hospital number was different from the number written on his birth certificate. I called the hospital and asked whether that was normal, and the woman on the phone said she couldn’t discuss patient records from that far back. Then she asked me to send proof of identity and a copy of the birth certificate. Two days later, she called me back and said there was an additional record attached to my son’s file that had never been requested.
It was a correction made three days after his birth. The hospital had originally listed a different room number and a different attending nurse, then changed both without explanation. I asked my sister what she knew, and this time she finally told me the truth. She said that on the third night, a nurse came into the room carrying a second baby and told her something had gone wrong with the paperwork. My sister said she had never forgotten what happened next. Then she looked at me and said, “The baby they brought back to you wasn’t the baby they took out of the room.”:::
