It was a family.
Standing around the same hospital bed. The man in the middle. A woman next to him. His age. Gray hair. Kind face. A younger woman, thirty-something, with two little kids. A boy and a girl. Maybe six and eight.
And my mother.
Standing at the end of the bed. In her navy coat. Looking small and tired and sad.
But the little girl had her arms around my mother’s waist.
Hugging her.
And my mother had her hand on the little girl’s head.
I sat back on my heels.
I looked at the man in the hospital bed.
At his face. Thin and pale and bald.
At his eyes.
Dark. Deep-set. A little crooked when he smiled.
My mother’s eyes.
My eyes.
I clicked to the fourth photograph.
The final one.
It was just him.
The man in the hospital bed. Alone. Sitting up against the pillows. Looking straight at the camera.
He was holding a piece of paper. A sheet of printer paper. Held up in front of his chest with both hands. Like a sign.
Written on it, in black marker, in big shaky letters:
HI ANNIE.
I’M SAM.
I’M YOUR BROTHER.
I’D REALLY LIKE TO MEET YOU.
ROOM 612
UPMC SHADYSIDE
PITTSBURGH
(PLEASE HURRY)
The camera went dark.
The battery died.
I sat on my mother’s bedroom floor with a dead camera in my hand.
And I knew exactly where I needed to go.
But I didn’t grab my car keys.
Not yet.
First, I went back into the living room.
My mother was awake.
She was sitting up in the blue recliner. Wrapped in the quilt. Looking at me.
Looking at the camera in my hand.
Her face crumpled.
“You found it,” she said.
“Who is he?” I said.
My voice was shaking. My whole body was shaking.
Mom didn’t answer.
“Mom. Who is Samuel Reiner? Who is the man in the hospital bed holding a sign that says he’s my brother?”
She closed her eyes.
“Sit down, Annie,” she said quietly. “Please. Sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“Please,” she said. “I can’t tell you if you’re standing over me. I can’t. I need you to sit.”
I sat.
On the floral couch. Across from her. With the dead camera in my lap.
Mom looked at her hands for a long time.
“His name was Michael,” she said finally. “When he was born. I named him Michael. After my father.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He was born on March 3, 1963,” Mom said. “At St. Brigid’s Home for Unwed Mothers in Erie, Pennsylvania. At four-fifteen in the morning. He weighed seven pounds, two ounces.”
She looked up at me.
Tears were running down her sunken cheeks.
“I was seventeen,” she said.
I couldn’t breathe.
“His father was a boy named Danny Reilly,” Mom said. “From Plum Street. Three houses down from mine. We’d known each other since we were little. We were going to get married.”
She swallowed.
“He enlisted in the Navy in the summer of 1962,” she said. “He was eighteen. He shipped out to Norfolk in August. He didn’t know I was pregnant. I didn’t know yet either.”
“What happened to him?”
Mom closed her eyes.
“His ship was the USS Thresher,” she said. “A submarine. It sank in April of 1963. Off Cape Cod. During a test dive. A hundred and twenty-nine men. Nobody survived.”
She opened her eyes.
“Michael was five weeks old,” she said. “Danny never knew he had a son.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“My parents found out I was pregnant in October,” Mom said. “My mother cried for three days. My father didn’t speak to me for a month. Then they sent me away.”
“To St. Brigid’s.”
“To St. Brigid’s,” Mom said. “In Erie. Run by the Sisters of Mercy. I told everybody on Plum Street I was going to stay with an aunt in Buffalo. That’s what all the girls said. An aunt in Buffalo. Or an aunt in Pittsburgh. Everybody knew. Nobody said anything.”
She wiped her eyes with the corner of the quilt.
“That’s where I met Margaret,” she said.
“Margaret Feeney was there too,” Mom said. “She was sixteen. From Erie. She had a little girl in February. Three weeks before Michael.”
“Margaret wasn’t your childhood friend,” I said slowly. “From Plum Street.”
“No,” Mom said. “I lied about that too. I met her at St. Brigid’s. In the laundry room. We folded sheets together. Every day. For five months. She was the only one who knew. The only one in my whole life.”
She looked at me.
“She was my best friend, Annie,” she said. “We wrote letters for fifty-five years. Every month. Until she died.”
“They let me keep him for three days,” Mom said.
Her voice was very quiet now.
“That was the rule. Three days. Then the adoptive family came. The sisters said it was better that way. A clean break. They said if you held them too long, you’d never be able to let go.”
She was crying harder now.
“I held him for three days,” she said. “I fed him. I changed him. I sang to him. I wrapped him in the blanket I’d knitted. Yellow. With ducks. I’d been knitting it the whole time I was pregnant. In the laundry room. Margaret helped me with the border.”
She put her hand over her mouth.
“And on the third day,” she whispered, “Sister Agnes came and took him out of my arms. And I never saw him again.”
I was crying now too.
I didn’t know when I’d started.
“The adoptive family was from Pittsburgh,” Mom said. “That’s all they told me. A good Catholic family. A doctor and his wife. They couldn’t have children. They’d been waiting four years.”
“Reiner,” I said.
“Reiner,” Mom said. “I didn’t know that until this spring.”
“I went home,” Mom said. “In April. Two weeks after Danny’s ship went down. My parents told everybody I’d had a nice time in Buffalo. Nobody asked any questions.”
She looked at the framed wedding photo on the wall. Her and Dad. 1965.
“I met your father the next year,” she said. “At a church dance. He was the kindest man I’d ever met.”
“Did he know?”
Mom nodded.
“I told him before he proposed,” she said. “I thought he’d leave. I sat in his car outside my parents’ house and told him everything. Danny. St. Brigid’s. Michael.”
“What did he say?”
Mom smiled. Through her tears.
“He said, June, that’s the bravest thing I’ve ever heard. And then he asked me to marry him. Right there. In the car.”
