The Years I Missed

The first photograph was of Maisie wearing a hat too large for her head.

“Ruth knitted it,” Ronan said. “She insisted babies grew quickly.”

I laughed through the ache in my throat. The next showed him asleep in a chair with Maisie against his chest. In the third, Gareth held her at arm’s length while she inspected his nose.

“She was deciding whether to eat it,” Ronan explained.

“Did she?”

“She made an attempt.”

We sat on the sitting-room floor, albums open between us. Maisie was in the garden with Ruth. Mara had advised us to speak to her together when we were calm enough to answer the questions she would actually ask.

I had expected the photographs to comfort me. They did, and they hurt so much I sometimes had to close the album.

A first tooth. A cake with one candle. A little girl taking two uncertain steps into Ronan’s waiting arms.

“Did she fall?”

“Immediately afterward.”

“Did she cry?”

“She was furious with the carpet.”

There were videos, too. Her first full shift had happened during a game of hide-and-seek. Ronan opened a cupboard, expecting to find his toddler, and discovered a tiny wolf sitting triumphantly in a saucepan.

I watched it three times.

Then I put the phone down and cried.

Ronan moved the albums out of reach of my tears. He did not tell me I would have other moments. I knew that. I needed to mourn these particular ones.

“I used to imagine her with someone who didn’t know what she liked,” I said. “I imagined her crying and nobody coming.”

“I came.”

I nodded, unable to say how much that mattered.

“I didn’t always know what to do,” he continued. “The first winter she had an ear infection. I walked until dawn because she stopped crying if I moved. Mara found me still walking when the medicine finally worked.”

“You could have called someone.”

“I had called everyone. They told me to keep walking.”

I laughed, then pressed a hand to my eyes again.

He waited.

“Were you angry with me?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he said after a moment. “At the woman I couldn’t find. At what I didn’t know. Then I would remember how frightened you were in that hotel room, and anger felt like a way to avoid being afraid for you.”

It was not a polished answer. I trusted it more for that.

“I thought you might have forgotten me.”

He looked at me. “I kept the note.”

From a drawer he brought a small envelope. Inside lay hotel stationery, creased and softened along the fold.

Thank you.

I touched my own handwriting.

“There should have been more.”

“There can be now.”

We called Mrs. Pike before lunch. I meant to speak clearly. Instead I said, “I found her,” and began crying again.

For several seconds there was no sound from the other end. Then Mrs. Pike said, fiercely, “Put that child on the telephone when she’s ready. I have been waiting four years to tell her about your terrible bread.”

That afternoon we brought Maisie into the sitting room.

She sensed the importance immediately and stood very straight.

“Am I in trouble?”

“No,” Ronan said. “Come sit with us.”

She climbed between us, clutching her cloth wolf by one leg.

I had practiced the words with Mara. They still felt enormous.

“Do you remember when I told you I was looking for my little girl?”

She nodded.

“When she was a tiny baby, some bad people made it very hard for me to get back to her. I kept trying to find her. Your daddy was looking for her mother, too.”

Maisie looked from me to him.

Ronan took a small photograph from the album. It showed me in a nursery chair the week before, Maisie asleep against my shoulder.

“We found out something important,” he said. “Nora is your mother.”

She frowned. “Nell?”

“Nora is my other name,” I said. “My real one.”

She stared at my face with a concentration that made my heart hurt.

“You mean when I was the baby?”

“Yes.”

“In your tummy?”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

Her gaze dropped to my stomach. Then she looked at Ronan.

“Did you know?”

“We both learned today.”

“But she was here before.”

“She was.”

I could see the effort of fitting it together.

“You don’t have to understand all of it today,” I told her. “You can ask us anything, whenever you want.”

She pulled one of the toy’s ears through her fingers.

“Are you still going out to look?”

The question was so practical, so entirely hers, that the answer finally came easily.

“No. I found you.”

“Then you’ll stay?”

“Yes.”

She leaned against me cautiously, as if the word needed testing.

“After breakfast, too?”

I kissed her hair.

“After breakfast, too.”