SABINA
NESKOWIN, OREGON
It wasn’t her.
The body the Ogden Police had recovered wasn’t my Andrea.
I shook my head over and over as I held the letter out to Joel so he could read it himself, while I turned my eyes to the tiny blue flowers in the wallpaper. They were forget-me-nots. I hadn’t even realized that until that very moment.
“Oh, thank God,” Joel breathed, as relieved as I was numb. “This is … this is …” He let the sentence fade, giving up on finding the right words. “I’m so glad it wasn’t her.”
When he said that, I finally felt the tears start to burn behind my eyes. I tore my gaze away from those forget-me-nots blurring on the walls and looked at him. “She was supposed to … I thought I was giving her a better life than …”
I couldn’t complete the thought. Couldn’t even feel the relief of knowing that the body I’d pictured mangled and bloody was not, in fact, my daughter.
I was grateful it wasn’t.
But nothing felt remotely okay.
The horror had just shifted gears. And all I could think about was the face of that little girl with enormous hazel eyes. The baby I’d last held against my chest in the basement of my parent’s house a little more than seventeen years ago.
Andrea had cried nearly every moment she was awake for three months, from the day she was born.
So did I. Silently, in contrast with her loud, hiccupping, machine-gun wails pinging off my eardrums as I held her against my shoulder and patted her back, trying to help her find the burp that would ease her tummy.
I paced back and forth, back and forth, while I held her in the tiny basement bedroom I’d slept in since I was a baby, desperately trying to lull her back to sleep.
My mom wanted to help me during those first dark weeks after Andrea arrived, but my dad stopped her every time. “She has to do this on her own, Janine. This is the bed she made. She’s gotta sleep in it now.”
It nearly made me laugh out loud when he said that, because I was getting so little sleep at the time. All I wanted was a bed to lay in—made or unmade—where I could close my eyes, knowing I’d get a few hours of uninterrupted rest.
When Andrea wasn’t crying, she was nursing. It was the only thing that seemed to soothe her, so I fed her as often as she’d latch until my nipples cracked and bled.
By the end of those first three months, I was desperate. For sleep, for someone to tell me that things would get better, for someone to hold me while I cried.
The first time my baby girl smiled at me—docile for once, hazel eyes clear and searching instead of scrunched and angry—I burst into loud tears I couldn’t turn off.
She was just so beautiful. That smile broke my heart and lifted it up at the same time.
It also told me how depressed and awful I felt, if one small smile could shatter me like glass.
I knew I couldn’t survive on a smile, even one so perfect.
That day, the heavy footsteps on the stairs made me wipe my eyes as quickly as I could.
From the clomping rhythm, I knew it was my dad, not my mom.
I pulled my maternity shirt down to cover myself up and wiped Andrea’s milky mouth with my sleeve.
She puckered her lips in frustration and prepared to scream, not finished nursing yet.
The footsteps came down the hall then stopped.
The door to the basement nursery stayed closed.
After a few seconds, a red-and-white striped envelope I recognized from my mom’s collection of stationery came through the crack beneath the door. Then the footsteps thumped back down the hall and upstairs.
Not daring to put Andrea down in her crib for fear she’d let loose the wail building in her throat, I tucked her against my shoulder and bent to pick up the letter lying on the floor.
The note was in my dad’s handwriting. As I read the words, I imagined his low, gentle voice that called our backyard chickens into the coop at sundown every night.
To Our Dearest Sabina,
Your mother and I want what’s best for you. You understand that now, because of the beautiful little girl you’ve brought into the world. I know you want what’s best for her, too. You are a good girl, and you want to be a good mother.
But sometimes wanting the best for our children isn’t enough. Not when you’re sixteen.
Watching you struggle through a pregnancy and now motherhood hasn’t been easy. There have been so many times we’ve wanted to step in and save you from your choices. However, being a parent means making tough decisions.
Andrea deserves the best life with a mother and a father.
A stable home. There are so many parents who desperately want a baby.
You can give her that life. You won’t be giving her up.
You’ll be giving her more. And someday, when you’re truly ready, you will have the opportunity to be a mother in the correct way.
We love you. And we love Andrea. We know you’ll do the right thing.
Love, your parents
As I read the letter a second time, Andrea made an unhappy squawking noise against my chest, and I realized I was gripping her chubby thigh too tightly. She hiccuped, then squealed, and I sank to the carpet, looking at the letter in my hand.
My parents had tried to tell me the same thing before the baby came. They warned me that as an unwed mother who hadn’t even managed to finish high school, my life would be difficult.
It wasn’t that I thought they were wrong, before. I was terrified to have a baby while I was still a kid myself. But I was already falling in love with that miraculous moving blurry blob I’d seen on the ultrasound screen at my first doctor’s appointment.
Still, the love I felt for my baby when she arrived was more complicated and painful than I could have imagined. And the threads of doubt and terror that had grown while I paced and nursed and cried and longed to sleep, quickly turned into what felt like a rope around my neck.
For the first time, I looked down at my baby’s chubby, tear-stained cheeks and let myself feel the horror of the decision I’d made.
I wasn’t enough for her.
I was never meant to be a mother like this.
She deserved the world. And all I had to offer her was this cramped basement room with faded wallpaper and a low supply of milk.
I held her to my heart and stumbled upstairs before I could change my mind.
Before the voice in the back of my head begging no, no, no, could convince me otherwise.
That voice had started as a scream when my parents first brought up the idea of adoption.
Now it had dwindled to a frantic, threadbare whisper.
“Okay,” I told my dad, even though the word burned like acid in my mouth.
He nodded sadly then reached out his arms, beckoning for the baby. “I’m proud of you, Sabina. That’s real love right there.”
I just nodded again, because I couldn’t speak.
Andrea nuzzled her cheek against his shoulder and sighed, calming down, like she’d been waiting for me to come to my senses this whole time.
My dad smiled. “Why don’t you get some sleep for a few hours while I hold the baby? We’ll sort it all out with your mother when she gets home from the grocery store.”
* * *
After I read the letter from the lab declaring my DNA was not a match to the girl the Ogden police had recovered, I went outside and sat on the back deck facing the ocean. Then I watched as the sky darkened, wind churning the waves in the distance like frothed cream.
The irony was, even though Joel and I had wanted them, I hadn’t been able to have more children.
I’d just assumed I would be able to get pregnant easily when the time was right, since I’d done so at sixteen by accident.
That was before a diagnosis of endometriosis in my late twenties.
The doctor assured me it had nothing to do with my earlier pregnancy as a teen.
And I knew, logically, that it had nothing to do with my decision to give my baby up for adoption.
But that didn’t stop it from feeling that way.
Like the universe had meted out yet another punishment.
Joel sat next to me on the swing, leg touching mine, until I fought through the haze of my memories and turned to look at him. There was a thought pushing its way to the front of my brain that I couldn’t ignore any longer.
“I have to know what happened to her. I owe her that,” I said, finding my voice for the first time since I read the letter an hour earlier.
He turned his hand palm up and beckoned to me, slowly, gently, like he might approach a frightened feral animal. “This isn’t your fault.”
“I know that,” I said so sharply that it was clear I knew nothing of the sort. Whatever had happened to Andrea was my fault. It was one thousand percent my fault. She was my baby first.
“What can I do to help?” Joel asked, his voice low and kind, his eyes clear blue like sea glass in the sun.
I took his warm hand in my freezing one and closed my eyes as the first drops of rain tapped on the porch roof. “Tell me I’m allowed to get involved.”
He huffed, taken aback. “Allowed? What do you mean?”
“I’m not her mother anymore,” I said, feeling my body shake as the wind rustled the leaves of the potted plants creeping along the deck boards at our feet. “I gave her away when she was a baby.”
Joel squeezed my hand. “You’ve carried that little girl with you every day of your life. She’s part of you. You’re still her mother, and you love her,” he said with so much conviction I actually believed him.
I blinked rapidly, but it didn’t stop the warm tears from spilling down my cheeks.
A clap of thunder rolled, and a second later lightning split the clouds hanging heavy over the surf.
“I need to go to Utah,” I whispered, making my decision the second I said the words out loud.
Joel drew me closer, and I let him pull me against his chest. “I’ll come with you, then.”
I shook my head. “No.” I shifted to face him as the wind swept sideways, sending cold drops of rain onto my cheeks where they mingled with the warm tears. “Your mom needs you here.”
Joel was the primary caregiver for his mother, Irene. Part of the reason we’d moved to Neskowin was to be near her as she got older. Then, last month, she’d broken her hip in a bad fall. The idea that both of us might leave the state right now was out of the question.
“I won’t be gone long,” I added. It was the first lie I’d ever told him. I had no idea how long I might be gone.
I didn’t even know where to start.
Didn’t even know what I thought I’d find.
I wasn’t the police. I wasn’t an investigator. And I had zero legal claim to that child.
But within the hour, I was racing the storm to Ogden.