“But you didn’t.”
“Because a little old lady who couldn’t remember her own husband told me where mothers keep their babies,” he said.
I lay there in the dark of Room 18, holding my husband’s hand.
I thought about Jean. Fifty-one years old. Five foot two. Running down an outdoor walkway in her nightgown in a tornado. Toward a scream.
I thought about her in the bathtub with a mattress over her head and a flashlight in her teeth and a stranger’s baby in her hands.
I thought about her thirty years later. Barefoot in a supply closet in the middle of the night. Folding towels. Getting ready.
The disease took everything from her. Her daughter. Her husband’s face. Her own name.
But it couldn’t take Room 18.
Because Room 18 wasn’t a memory.
It was who she was.
People ask me sometimes what I learned from that night in Kansas.
