Carry Her Heart (3 page)

Needing to know he would never forget he was loved.

Rose continued to work at the hotel. Every month she sent Nettie money for Grandpa’s care. But she never managed to save any for her own passage to America.

Rose died twelve years later when Grandpa was seventeen.

She never knew that her dreams for him came to fruition. My grandfather loved his Aunt Nettie. He also loved books and went to college. He became a teacher.

I believe Rose would have been so proud, knowing her sacrifices gave him a good life.

Amanda, the question I kept coming back to throughout my pregnancy was, could I be as strong as Rose had been? Could I put your needs first?

All those times I asked myself what if I kept you, I never found a scenario where you’d have the childhood I wanted for you. My parents had offered to help me, but even with their help, I was afraid I’d shortchange you.

But what if I gave you up, like Rose? When I asked myself that question, I could picture so many scenarios in which you had a wonderful, happy childhood and grew into an amazing young woman.

What would be best for you?

I knew the answer the first time I asked myself that question.

And on that August day, I held you for an hour and, like Rose, I hugged you and sent you into someone else’s care. I gave you to your parents. I called out, ‘Goodbye, Amanda,’ as they took you home to a better life than I could have given you.

A life that wouldn’t include me.

And as I cried, I knew just how hard Rose’s decision must have been. I’d loved you for nine months and held you for one hour. Rose had loved and held my grandfather for five years.

I gave the adoption agency a letter for you. I hope your parents gave it to you when they felt you were old enough.

I put Rose’s locket inside the envelope, hoping you’d realize that, like Rose, I loved you enough to send you away.

I hoped you’d know that you were loved.

Are loved.

Love,

Piper Rose

Sophomore Year

Chapter Three

Another first day of school. It was hot for a school day. I was barefoot and wearing shorts and an old
Les Mis
T-shirt. I was drinking iced tea rather than hot tea.

I’d spent most of my day on the porch working. But the words had dried up a while ago. I’d been just going through the motions.

I glanced at the journal that was on the table next to me. I knew what I was going to write
today.

Dear Amanda,

It’s another first day of school here. This morning I sat on the front porch and watched all the students across the street arrive, ready to start the school year. It was such a hot summer, and summer wasn’t ready to release its grip on Erie just because it was the first day of school.

There were some familiar faces in the swarm of children. They waved and called out “good-mornings,” or “hey-Ms.-Pips.” And as always there are new ones—kindergarteners and older transfer students.

As I write to you, it’s almost time for the dismissal bell. I know the children will all rush out, their first day over.

Only one hundred and seventy-nine more to go.

You’re a sophomore this year. You’ll hopefully be returning to the same school as last year. You’ll be greeting old friends and going to those first classes and discovering what they will be like this year.

I always loved the first day of school. There’s such a sense of possibility about it. Anything can happen.

I adored when the teachers handed out textbooks. When I was lucky, it was a brand-new one. I loved the
creeeeek
sound the binding made when you opened it for the first time. I loved the smell. I loved writing my name in the box—the first one to proclaim I used that particular book and the years I used it.

Years.

I sat the journal on my lap and looked at the school across the street. Amanda had had ten first days of school.

No, eleven if you counted kindergarten.

More if she’d gone to preschool.

I wondered if she liked school. I hoped so.

I felt a wave of nostalgia for the moments that I’d never experienced with her and for all the talks we’d never had.

I picked up the journal again. It was my opportunity to talk to Amanda. Maybe it was a one-way conversation, but that made it easier in a way.

So many have passed since I held you. I knew you for only nine months, held you for one short hour, and yet I’ve built my life around you.

So what story should I start the school year off with?

I haven’t told you about what I do.

I don’t do what I thought I’d do. Maybe that’s a lesson for you. Choose a path, but don’t be afraid to change directions.

You see, I went to college to be a nurse.

And at first, I thought I’d work L&D . . . labor and delivery. But I did an externship on the pediatric floor and loved it. That’s where I worked after I graduated. For a while, I thought I’d spend my life working there.

My mother believed I was punishing myself for giving you up by working with children on a daily basis. But that wasn’t it at all. I never felt I needed to be punished for giving you a better life. I truly believed then—and now—that giving you to a family who was better equipped to care of you was an act of love. Like Grandmother Rose—it was my gift to you. I gave you a family who could give you the life I wanted for you but couldn’t have given you myself.

No, working with children wasn’t me punishing myself. It was my solace. Every time I comforted a crying baby, I comforted you. Every time I held a sick, lonely child, I held you.

You led me to nursing, and nursing led me to my real passion—telling stories.

How? I’d been working on the pediatric floor for about two years, and I had a five-year-old patient who visited our unit frequently. I can’t tell you her name or why she was a regular because of patient confidentiality, but she was precocious and most days she meandered somewhere between a delight and a holy terror.

One night she asked me, “Miss Piper, do you have a little girl?”

I felt as if the earth had stopped spinning for a moment. Everything seemed to come to a screeching halt. Everything around me was perfectly still. I was immobile. I thought my heart had stopped beating at the reminder of what I’d lost.

No, not lost. What I’d willingly given away.

Then slowly, I felt my heart begin to beat again. Its first thump filled my ears to the point of being almost deafening.

But slowly, I reacquainted myself with the sound of my heartbeats, and the earth started spinning as well. Still, I didn’t know how to answer this simplest of questions. So I asked her a question instead. “Why, honey?”

“’Cause you’d be a good mom.”

This time I was ready for the pain. I was braced. The world and my heart continued their rhythms as I let that innocent comment rip through me.

“Thank you.” She’d wounded me, tearing loose the scab on my heart. No matter how many times I thought I’d thoroughly healed, the scab always ended up ripped away by sometimes the smallest actions or words.

Still, her compliment helped staunch the bleeding from the now-open wound. Like I said, I believed giving you up was indeed the mark of a good mom, but that never stopped me from missing you. From hurting.

“Can you tell me a story?” she asked, not noticing my pain.

My shift was almost over, so I nodded. “Let me go find Nurse Abbey and then I’ll come back and bring a book.”

She shook her head. “No, not a book story. One from your head.”

I came back ten minutes later with a book in hand, despite her decree. “This is a very good story—” I started.

She shook her head again and reiterated, “No, from your head. Those are the best kinds of stories,” she added, as if anyone with any sense should know that.

She gave me a look that said only the best would be good enough for her.

Bowing to the inevitable, I said, “There was a—”

“No. Stories start with
Once Upon a Time
.”

“Once Upon a Time there was a girl named,” I tried to think of a name, and from nowhere, I found one. “Belinda Mae Abernathy.”

“That’s a very long name,” she said, all sympathetic.

“Yes, yes it is. And you see, that was the problem . . .”

That’s how Belinda Mae was born. I’m not sure where the name came from, but suddenly it was there, and I could see the little girl I was inventing. Over the next year, I made up stories for a lot of patients about Belinda Mae’s very long name, about her learning to tie her shoes, and about her frenemy, Sophia Tanya.

And one day, I was telling the story to a new patient, when her mother came in. I didn’t know then that her mother was the sister of an editor for a children’s book publisher. The mother called her sister and told her the story, and then the editor asked the mother to have me call her.

After all the times I’d told those stories, it should have been easy to capture them on paper, but it wasn’t. But a couple months later, I sent that editor the first two Belinda Mae stories, and after that . . .

That first editor took me under her wing and taught me a lot about the craft of writing.

I still volunteer as a nurse at a local clinic when they need me, but I’m a full-time writer now.

Thanks to you.

And tonight . . . that will be thanks to you, too.

Love,

Piper

I set the journal aside. I started it the day Ned moved in next door. Was that only a year ago?

Coop was teaching across the street this year. She swore I was going to get sick of her, but I knew I wouldn’t. She’d already asked me about helping her with a creative writing class.

The end-of-day bell rang, signaling that the first day of the new school year had officially ended. The front doors of the school burst open and students of every size flew down the steps. Screaming, laughing, running, shouting. As if a day of sitting in their classrooms had taxed them beyond all endurance and that pent-up energy needed some immediate release.

I wondered if that was how it was for Amanda at the end of the school day. Did she walk out of her high school with a group of friends, laughing and talking about their day?

She was a sophomore this year, so the school wouldn’t be so strange and foreign . . . unless they’d moved.

Oh, I hope her family didn’t move around a lot. I hope she lived in the same house her parents had brought her home to from the hospital and that she had friends from grade school who were still friends in high school.

I could picture a doorway where her mother dutifully marked her height each year on her birthday. And there would be dings and dents throughout the house that would become family stories.

“Do you remember . . . ?” they’d ask each other, and then laugh at the retelling.

I hoped . . .

Those two words pretty much summed it up. I hoped.

I rubbed the soft leather cover of the journal I’d been filling for the last year. It was full of my hopes for Amanda as well as stories.

I didn’t write in it daily. No, writing in it was too painful for that. But every few weeks, or sometimes months, I put something down in it. Someday I hoped Amanda would read it and some of these stories would become family stories. “Do you remember . . . ?” she’d ask.

Today, I really didn’t have time for writing in it, but still that story about my first sale insisted it go in the book.

To a non-writer a sentence like that would sound insane, but I’d been writing since I was twenty-five. Granted, that was only six years ago. Still, I understood the siren call of a certain story or scene. When that call came, there was no putting it off, or waiting until later. I had a notebook on my nightstand for scenes that came to me in the wee hours. I—

“Hey, Pip,” Ned called as he walked across the driveway to my front porch, interrupting my musings.

In the year since he’d moved in, I’d had to admit defeat when it came to getting him to call me by my full first name. I’d been
Pip
to him from the first.

But though I couldn’t sway him, the last year had taught me how to tease him appropriately in return.

“Catch any bank robbers?” I asked.

He sighed. “So it’s one of those days?” He glanced at the notebook that was still in my hand.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Whenever you’re working on your laptop, you’re all smiles and happiness. Sometimes, I swear butterflies are going to start sliding down rainbows from your keyboard. But on the days you sit here scribbling in that, you’re . . . not.” Before I could protest, he held up his hand. “Whenever you write in there, it reminds me of a man who’s stuck in a bear trap.”

That was an analogy I’d never heard before. And frankly, I had no idea how bear traps and journals could connect. “Pardon?”

He looked as if he’d won our sparring match as he explained, “Pulling that trap off hurts, but in the end, he’s better for it. Whatever you write in that notebook hurts, but when you’re done, you’re better . . . until the next time.”

I couldn’t think of a response to that because the truth of the matter was, he was right.

We’d become friendly, Ned and I. He was the kind of neighbor I could run to for a cup of sugar. If he had it, he’d share with me. But odds are he’d be more apt to run over to my house for sugar, like that first time, or any other pantry item.

That’s not to say our neighborliness was one-sided. Ned had been the one who figured out how to open my car door after I accidentally locked my keys in it a few months ago. And when the snow was very heavy and high last winter, he’d sometimes surprise me by snowblowing my sidewalk and driveway, as well as Mrs. W.’s, my elderly neighbor on the other side.

I’d been right that first day . . . he was a good neighbor.

But it was these little front-porch chats—which had morphed into on-the-couch chats when it had become too cold for the porch over winter—that had moved him beyond just a regular wave-at-him neighbor. I might shovel for Mrs. W., but we rarely visited. I’m not even sure if she knew I was a writer. No, it was different with Ned than with the rest of my neighbors.

Soon after the car incident, I’d had a spare set of keys made and kept them at his place, and he gave me his spares, just in case. But we both knew the odds of Ned forgetting his keys or anything else were slim. He was an organized, by-the-book kind of guy.

“Okay, so let’s move away from talks of books and bear traps,” I said. “You’ll be there tonight?”

He nodded. “I will. My boss bought a table for the firm.”

Over the last year and our chats, I’d learned that Ned was a retired cop. Not that he was old. He wasn’t. But he’d left the police force in Detroit, gotten his private investigator’s license here in Pennsylvania, and gone to work for a local Erie law firm. I occasionally teased him by comparing him to
Colombo
or
Magnum, P.I.,
and he habitually tried to convince me his job was nothing like those television detectives. He did all the investigative legwork for the attorneys at the firm. He located and interviewed witnesses and made sure they were at court. He photographed scenes—accident scenes and crime scenes.