The first thing I saw was a date.
April 14, 1986.
I knew that date.
Every mother knows the dates.
It was the birthday of the daughter we’d lost.
Not Kate. Not the daughter who’d called me last week from Denver, who’d hugged me in this kitchen yesterday, who had Arthur’s laugh.
The other one.
The one we’d buried.
Her name was Rose Marie Delaney.
She was born on April 14, 1986, at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton. She weighed five pounds, eleven ounces. She had dark hair like Arthur’s and tiny fingers that curled around his thumb.
She had a heart defect. Hypoplastic left heart syndrome, the doctors called it. The left side of her heart had never developed properly. In 1986, there was almost nothing they could do.
She lived for three days.
I’d had an emergency C-section. Something had gone wrong during labor. They put me under. When I woke up, Rose had already been taken to the neonatal unit.
I held her once. On the second day, for about twenty minutes, with tubes and wires everywhere. She opened her eyes and looked at me.
On the morning of the third day, I had a high fever. An infection from the surgery. They wouldn’t let me out of bed. They gave me something for the pain that made the room spin.
Arthur was with Rose when she died.
I wasn’t.
