“Immediately?” I said.
“Before they could hold them,” Dr. Hale said. “Before they could even see their faces. That was the policy. They said it was kinder that way. A clean break.”
“It wasn’t kinder,” Grandma said. “It was cruel. I’d hear those girls crying all night long through the wall. Seventeen years old. Eighteen. Asking over and over, was it a boy or a girl? Is it healthy? Can I just see it once? And the nurses would say, ‘It’s better if you don’t know, sweetheart. Get some rest.’”
She looked at me.
“That’s why I put the window there, Daniel. Not for me. For them. So at least they’d have something to look at besides a blank wall while their hearts broke.”
“Ruth Calloway came in through that side door on April 19th, 1975,” Grandma said.
She picked up the photograph again and looked at the young girl in it.
