The first thing I saw when I woke up was the ceiling.
White tiles with little holes in them, the kind you only see in hospitals and school basements. A fluorescent light humming somewhere to my left. A machine beeping slowly beside my head.
The second thing I saw was a man in blue scrubs leaning over me.
He was young, maybe thirty, with dark hair and tired brown eyes. He had a stethoscope around his neck and a tablet in his hand. He was reading something on the tablet and frowning a little.
“Ms. Mercer?” he said gently. “Can you hear me? You’re in recovery. The surgery went well.”
I tried to say something. My throat was too dry.
He leaned closer to check the IV in my arm.
And a silver cross slipped out from under the collar of his scrubs.
It swung on a thin chain, right in front of my face, maybe twelve inches away. It caught the light from the fluorescent tube above us.
I recognized it before my brain could catch up.
The tiny nick on the left arm of the cross. A little notch in the silver, like somebody had bitten it.
It was the same cross I’d tucked into my newborn son’s blanket thirty-one years earlier.
“Where did you get that?” I whispered.
The doctor looked down at the cross hanging from his neck. Then back at me.
He stopped moving completely.
Then he asked me a question I’ll never forget as long as I live.
“Did anyone ever tell you,” he said slowly, “what really happened to your baby?”
My name is Anne Mercer. Everyone calls me Annie.
My story began thirty-one years before that hospital room, in my parents’ kitchen on Linden Street, on a Thursday night in October.
I was eighteen. A senior in high school.
And I was pregnant.
I’d known for three weeks. I’d taken four tests in the bathroom at the gas station on Route 30, because I was too scared to take one at home. All four were positive. I’d thrown up in that gas station bathroom, then sat on the floor and cried until the attendant knocked on the door to ask if I was okay.
I waited three weeks to tell my parents because I knew what would happen.
My father, Harold Mercer, was a deacon at First Methodist and the manager of the hardware store on Main Street. He was a large, quiet man who ironed his own shirts and went to bed at nine-thirty every night. He didn’t yell often. He didn’t need to. When he went quiet, the whole house went quiet with him.
My mother, Lorraine, did what my father wanted. She always had. She was small and nervous and kept the house so clean you could eat off the kitchen floor. She sang hymns while she ironed. She never once, in eighteen years, argued with him in front of me.
I told them on a Thursday because Thursday was meatloaf night, and my father was always in a good mood on meatloaf night.
I waited until dinner was over. My mother was standing at the sink drying a casserole dish with a yellow dish towel. My father was sitting at the head of the table with his reading glasses on, doing the crossword in the evening paper.
“Mom,” I said. “Dad. I need to tell you something.”
My mother turned around with the dish towel in her hands.
My father looked up over his glasses.
“I’m pregnant,” I said.
My mother dropped the dish towel.
It fell on the clean kitchen floor in a little yellow heap. She didn’t pick it up.
My father put down his pen. He took off his reading glasses very slowly and folded them and set them on the table next to the newspaper.
Then he pushed his chair back. It scraped across the linoleum. It was the loudest sound I’d ever heard in that kitchen.
“Who’s responsible?” he said.
“I’m not telling you,” I said.
I’d never defied him that openly. Not once in my whole life. I’d never even said no to second helpings.
My father stared at me across the kitchen table.
“Anne,” he said quietly. “Who is the father?”
“I’m not telling you, Dad.”
“I’ll find out.”
“Then you’ll have to find out without me.”
He stood up. My father is six foot three. When he stood up all the way, the top of his head almost touched the light fixture over the table.
“I am going to find out who did this to you,” he said. “And I am going to go to his house. And I am going to have a conversation with him and his parents. Do you understand me?”
“That’s exactly why I’m not telling you,” I said.
My father reminded me of everything I didn’t have.
I had no money. Two hundred and forty dollars in a savings account from babysitting. I had no car. I had no job. I had no place to live except his house. I hadn’t even graduated from high school yet.
“You have nothing, Anne,” he said. “You have nowhere to go.”
He was right about almost all of it.
But he was wrong about one thing.
I had Daniel.
Daniel Abbott was nineteen. He’d graduated the year before me. He worked at his uncle’s auto body shop on the edge of town and took night classes at the community college. He wanted to be a nurse. Everybody laughed at him for it. A boy wanting to be a nurse. He didn’t care.
We’d been together for a year and a half. We met at the public library, in the biology section. He was trying to find a book on anatomy for his class, and I was trying to find the same book for mine. There was only one copy. We ended up studying together at a table by the window. We studied together every Tuesday and Thursday after that for three months before he finally asked me to the movies.
He was gentle and funny and serious all at once. He had dark hair that fell in his eyes and grease under his fingernails that never quite came out. He read poetry. He hated it when people littered. 