“I know,” I said, which was half true. I knew Leo had been bringing someone. I knew she had no identification. He had told me that much on the phone. I had said it automatically, filling in the blank, and the doctor took it to mean that I knew this woman, which was not what I had meant at all. But I was not thinking clearly. I was not thinking in any linear way. I was just standing there in the corridor while the world rearranged itself around me into something unfamiliar.
After the doctor left, a nurse appeared beside me and held out a small plastic bag, the kind hospitals use for personal effects. “The woman’s belongings,” she said. She handed it to me the way you hand something to next of kin, gently, as though the contents were breakable. Again I did not correct the assumption. I took the bag.
Inside there were sunglasses with a small scratch on the left lens. A half-empty sleeve of peppermint mints. And a silver locket on a thin chain, the kind of jewelry that costs almost nothing but gets worn every day, worn until the silver goes slightly dull at the edges from constant contact with skin.
I don’t know how long I stood there holding it before I opened it. The clasp was stiff. I had to press the small release twice before the two halves separated, and even then I hesitated, not entirely sure why, only aware of a reluctance I couldn’t explain, a sensation that was almost physical, as though something inside me already knew and was trying to give me one more moment before I had to know it too.
I opened the locket.
The photograph inside was small and worn at the edges, the kind of photo that had been handled many times over many years. It showed a young woman sitting on a hospital bed, her hair pulled back loosely, her eyes visibly swollen. She was holding a newborn against her chest with both arms, the baby wrapped in a white hospital blanket, the young woman’s face turned slightly downward, looking at the child with an expression that was not quite love and not quite grief but something in between that had no clean name.
I recognized the room. I recognized the blanket pattern. I recognized the particular way the young woman’s hair had come loose from the elastic and fell across the side of her face.
I recognized her face because it was my face. My face at eighteen years old, on the worst and strangest day of my life.
