Page 46 of The Other Mother
“I need to know what happened. Please.”
We stare at each other across the parking lot. A dust devil spins lazily between the cars, picking up scraps of paper and dead leaves. The air smells like creosote and car exhaust.
“Then follow me,” she says finally.
We walk around the corner of the building, past a dumpster and into a small courtyard with concrete benches and struggling oleander bushes. It’s private here, shielded from the street by a cinderblock wall painted the color of sand.
Mara sits on one of the benches and pulls a worncanvas tote into her lap. Her hands shake as she reaches inside.
“You said you didn’t remember. Maybe this will help.”
She pulls out a folded photo, creased from handling. The paper feels soft between my fingers.
It’s grainy, clearly printed from a phone, but the image is unmistakable, a hospital bassinet with metal rails, a swaddled newborn with a shock of dark hair, and draped over the baby’s body, a pink blanket with an intricate rosebud pattern embroidered along the edge.
My breath catches.
It’s my blanket. The one my mother spent months working on during her final chemo treatments, her fingers moving the needle even when the drugs made her hands shake. She pressed it into my hands the week before she died.
"For when you have a daughter," she'd whispered. "So she'll always have something from her grandmother who loved her before she was even born."
I'd packed it carefully in my hospital bag, imagining the moment I'd wrap my baby in it for the first time. But in all the chaos of the delivery, the emergency C-section, the long recovery, I'd forgotten about it entirely.
“That’s mine,” I whisper. “It was in my room. In my bag.”
Mara swallows. “Then someone took it.” Her gaze goes distant, like she’s replaying the night. “Before dawn they rolled a bassinet past my door. That blanket wasdraped over the baby. She was mine, but that blanket wasn’t. I’d never seen anything like it.”
“They didn’t even tell me,” she continues, voice tightening. “They just took her. Said something went wrong, that she wasn’t breathing. Shoved forms at me while I was still bleeding, still numb from the epidural.”
She stands abruptly and paces the small space. “But I kept hearing crying down the hall. All night. A baby crying, and I knew it was her. A mother knows.”
I think of all those nights I’ve stood in Eva’s nursery, waiting for a certainty that never arrived.
“And then the next morning,” Mara says, turning back to me, “I saw you. Walking out of the hospital with my baby in your arms, wrapped in your embroidered blanket like she’d always been yours.”
“So, where is my baby then?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
I can’t breathe. The desert air feels too thin, too hot. I remember leaving the hospital. Adam carried the car seat while I walked slowly beside him, my incision pulling with each step. I remember feeling disconnected, like I was watching someone else live my life.
“I didn’t know,” I say, but even to me it sounds hollow. “I swear to you, I didn’t know.”
“But you do now.”
The photo trembles in my hands. Fragments click into place like snapped bones, the sedative burning in my arm and a nurse with red-painted nails murmuring, “She doesn’t look like you, does she?” The way Adamdeflected every question, insisting I just needed rest. A pattern I didn’t want to see.
“They used me,” I whisper.
Mara’s face softens a fraction. “Theyused both of us.”
We stand in silence, the desert buzzing faintly and then going still. Somewhere in the oleanders, a cicada starts up, then cuts off, leaving only our breathing.
I try to hand the photo back, but my hands won’t let go. It’s proof. The blanket my dying mother made, wrapped around a baby who isn’t mine, cradled in arms that should have been Mara’s.
“Can I keep it?” I ask.
Mara doesn’t answer. She lifts her bag and walks away, leaving me alone in the courtyard with the photo pressed to my chest.
