Family Tree Read online

  “It isn’t much,” she said quickly, “just something small to work on, you know, if things are slow.”

  “Small?” he asked as he tucked in the yarn. “What are there, eight balls here?”

  “Six, but it’s heavy worsted, which means not much yardage, and I didn’t want to risk running out. Don’t be impatient, Hugh. Knitting comforts me.”

  He shot a do-tell look at the closet. There were bags of yarn on the shelf above, the floor below. Most closets in the house were the same.

  “My stash is not as big as some,” she reasoned. “Besides, what harm is there in making the most of my time at the hospital? Gram wants this pattern for the fall season, and what if there’s down time after the baby’s born? Some women bring books or magazines. This is my thing.”

  “How long did they say you would be in the hospital?” he asked. They both knew that, barring complications, she would be home the next day.

  “You’re not a knitter. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “No argument there.” Squeezing the water bottles into the bag, he zipped it, put the strap on his shoulder, and helped her out the front door. They crossed the porch to the cobblestone drive where Hugh’s car was parked.

  Rather than think about how she was trembling or, worse, when the next pain would hit, Dana thought about the little cotton onesies in that bag. They were store-bought, but everything else was homemade. Hugh thought she had packed too much, but how to choose between those tiny knitted caps and booties, all cotton for August and exquisitely done? They took up no space. Her baby deserved choices.

  Of course, her in-laws hadn’t been any wilder about these items than they had about the nursery décor. They had provided a layette from Neiman Marcus, and didn’t understand why the baby wouldn’t be wearing those things home.

  Dana let it pass. To explain would have offended them. Hand-knit to her meant memories of her mother, the love of her grandmother, and the caring of a surrogate family of yarn-store friends. Hand-knit was personal in ways her husband’s family couldn’t understand. The Clarkes knew their place in society, and much as Dana loved being Hugh’s wife, much as she admired the Clarke confidence and envied their past, she couldn’t forget who she was.

  “Doin’ okay?” Hugh asked as he eased her into the car.

  “Doin’ okay,” she managed.

  She adjusted the seat belt so that the baby wouldn’t be hurt if they stopped short, though there was little chance of that. For an antsy man, Hugh drove with care, so much so that as time passed and the contractions grew more intense, she wished he would go faster.

  But he knew what he was doing. Hugh always knew what he was doing. Moreover, there were few other cars on the road, and they had green lights all the way.

  Having pre-registered at the hospital, he had barely given their name when they were admitted. In no time flat, Dana was in a hospital gown, with a fetal monitor strapped around her middle and the resident-on-call examining her. The contractions were coming every three minutes, then every two minutes, literally taking her breath.

  The next few hours passed in a blur, though more than once, when the progress slowed, she wondered if the baby was having a final qualm itself. She knit for a while until the strength of the contractions zapped her, at which point Hugh became her sole source of comfort. He massaged her neck and her back and peeled her hair from her face, and all the while, he told her how beautiful she was.

  Beautiful? Her insides were a mass of pain, her skin wet, her hair matted. Beautiful? She was a mess! But she clung to her husband, trying to believe every word he said.

  All in all, their baby came relatively quickly. Less than six hours after Dana’s water had broken, the nurse declared her fully dilated and they relocated to the delivery room. Hugh took pictures—Dana thought she remembered that, though the memory may well have been created later by the pictures themselves. She pushed for what seemed forever but was considerably shorter, so much so that her obstetrician nearly missed the baby’s birth. The woman had barely arrived when the baby emerged.

  Hugh cut the cord and, within seconds, placed the wailing baby on her stomach—the most beautiful, perfectly formed little girl she had ever seen. Dana didn’t know whether to laugh at the baby’s high-pitched crying or gasp in amazement at little fingers and toes. She seemed to have dark hair—Dana immediately imagined a head of fine, dark-brown Clarke hair—though it was hard to see with traces of milky-white film on her body.

  “Who does she look like?” Dana asked, unable to see through her tears.

  “No one I’ve ever seen,” he remarked with a delighted laugh and took several more pictures before the nurse stole the infant away, “but she’s beautiful.” He smiled teasingly. “You did want a girl.”

  “I did,” Dana confessed. “I wanted someone to take my mother’s name.” Incredibly—and later she did remember this with utter clarity—she pictured her mother as she had last seen her, vibrant and alive that sunny afternoon at the beach. Dana had always imagined that mother and daughter would have grown to be best of friends, in which case Elizabeth Joseph would have been there in the delivery room with them. Of the many occasions in Dana’s life when she desperately missed her mother, this was a big one. That was one reason why naming the baby after her meant so much. “It’s a little like being given her back.”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Lizzie. She looks like a Lizzie, doesn’t she?”

  Hugh was still smiling, holding Dana’s hand to his mouth. “Hard to tell yet. But ‘Elizabeth’ is an elegant name.”

  “Next one’ll be a boy,” Dana promised, craning her neck to see the baby. “What are they doing to her?”

  Hugh rose off the stool to see. “Suctioning,” he reported. “Drying her off. Putting on an ID band.”

  “Your parents wanted a boy.”

  “It’s not my parents’ baby.”

  “Call them, Hugh. They’ll be so excited. And call my grandmother. And the others.”

  “Soon,” Hugh said. He focused on Dana, so intent that she started crying again. “I love you,” he whispered.

  Unable to answer, she just wrapped her arms around his neck and held on tightly.

  “Here she is,” came a kindly voice, and suddenly the baby was in Dana’s arms, clean and lightly swaddled.

  Dana knew she was probably imagining it—infants couldn’t really focus—but she could have sworn the baby was looking at her as if she knew that Dana was her mother, would love her forever, would guard her with her life.

  The baby had a delicate little nose and pink mouth, and an every-bit-as-delicate chin. Dana peered under the pink cap. The baby’s hair was still damp, but it was definitely dark—with wispy little curls, lots of little curls, which was a surprise. Both she and Hugh had straight hair.

  “Where did she get these?”

  “Beats me,” Hugh said, sounding suddenly alarmed. “But look at her skin.”

  “It’s so smooth.”

  “It’s so dark.” He raised fear-filled eyes toward the doctor. “Is she all right? I think she’s turning blue.”

  Dana’s heart nearly stopped. She hadn’t seen any blue, but given the speed with which the baby was snatched from them and checked, she barely breathed herself until the staff pediatrician had done a thorough exam, given the baby a resoundingly high Apgar score, and pronounced her a hearty, healthy seven pounds.

  No, her skin wasn’t blue, Dana decided when Lizzie was back in her arms. Nor, though, was it the pale pink she had expected. Her face had a coppery tint that was as lovely as it was puzzling. Curious, she eased the blanket aside to uncover a tiny arm. The skin there was the same light brown, all the more marked in contrast to the pale white nails at the tips of her fingers.

  “Who does she look like?” Dana murmured, mystified.

  “Not a Clarke,” Hugh said. “Not a Joseph. Maybe someone on your father’s side of the family?”

  Dana couldn’t say. She knew her father’s name, but little
else.

  “She looks healthy,” she reasoned.

  “I didn’t read anything about skin being darker at birth.”

  “Me, neither. She looks tanned.”

  “More than tanned. Look at her palms, Dee. They’re lighter, like her fingernails.”

  “She looks Mediterranean.”

  “No. Not Mediterranean.”

  “Indian?”

  “Not that, either. Dana, she looks black.”

  Chapter 2

  Hugh hoped he was being facetious. He and Dana were white. Their baby couldn’t be black.

  Still, standing there in the delivery room, scrutinizing the infant in Dana’s arms, he felt a tremor of fear. Lizzie’s skin was a whole lot darker than any other Clarke baby he had ever seen, and he had seen plenty of those. Clarkes took pride in their offspring, as evidenced by the flood of holiday pictures from relatives each year. His brother had four children, all of the pale white Anglo-Saxon type, their first cousins had upward of sixteen. Not a one was dark.

  Hugh was a lawyer. He spent his days arguing facts, and, in this case, there were none to suggest that his baby should be anything but Caucasian. He had to be imagining it—had to be blowing things out of proportion. And who could blame him? He was tired. He had been late coming to bed after watching the Sox play Oakland, then awake an hour later and keyed up ever since. But boy, he wouldn’t have missed a minute of that delivery. Watching the baby come out—cutting the cord—it didn’t get much better than that. Talk about emotional highs!

  Now, though, he felt oddly deflated. This was his child—his family, his genes. She was supposed to look familiar.

  He had read about what babies went through getting out of the womb, and had been prepared to see a pointy head, blotchy skin, or even bruises. This baby’s head was round and her skin perfect.

  But she didn’t have the fine, straight hair or widow’s peak that marked the Clarke babies, or Dana’s blond coloring and blue eyes.

  She looked like a stranger.

  Maybe this was a natural letdown after months of buildup. Maybe it was what the books meant about not always loving your baby on sight. She was an individual. She would grow to have her own likes and dislikes, her own strengths, her own temperament, all of which might be totally different from Dana’s and his.

  He did love her. She was his child. She just didn’t look it.

  That said, she was his responsibility. So he followed the nurse when she took the baby to the nursery, and he watched through the window while the staff put drops in her eyes and gave her a real sponge bath.

  Her skin still seemed coppery. If anything, juxtaposed with a pale pink blanket and hat, it was more marked than before.

  The nurses seemed oblivious to the skin tone. Biracial marriages were common. These women didn’t know that Hugh’s wife was white. Moreover, there were far darker infants in the nursery. By comparison to some, Elizabeth Ames Clarke was light-skinned.

  Clinging to that thought, he returned to Dana’s room and began making calls. She was right about his parents’ wanting a boy—having had two boys themselves, they were partial to children who passed on the name—but they were excited by his news, as was his brother, and by the time he called Dana’s grandmother, he was feeling better.

  Eleanor Joseph was a remarkable woman. After losing her daughter and her husband in tragic accidents four years apart, she had raised her granddaughter alone, and through it all she built a thriving business. Its official name was The Stitchery, though no one ever called it anything but Ellie Jo’s.

  Prior to meeting Dana, Hugh knew next to nothing about yarn, much less the people who used it. He still couldn’t even remember what SKP was, though Dana had explained it to him more than once. But he could appreciate the warmth of his favorite alpaca scarf, which she had hand-knit and which was more handsome than anything he had seen in a store—and he could feel the appeal of the yarn shop. During these final weeks of Dana’s pregnancy, as she cut back on her own work, she spent more time there. He dropped in often, ostensibly to check on his pregnant wife, but also to enjoy the calm atmosphere. When a client was lying to him, or an associate botched a brief, or a judge ruled against him, he found that the yarn store offered a respite.

  Maybe it was the locale. What could be better than overlooking an apple orchard? More likely, though, Hugh sensed, it was the people. Dana didn’t need her husband checking up on her when she was at the shop. The place was a haven for women who cared. Many of those women had been through childbirth themselves. And they showed their feelings. He had walked in on conversations having to do with sex, and it struck him that knitting was an excuse. These women gave each other something that was missing from their lives.

  And Ellie Jo led the way. Genuine to the extreme, she was delighted when he told her they had a girl, and began to cry when he told her the name. Tara Saxe, Dana’s best friend, did the same.

  He called his two law partners—the Calli and Kohn of Calli, Kohn, and Clarke—and called his secretary, who promised to pass the news on to the associates. He called David, their neighbor. He called a handful of other friends, called his brother and the two Clarke cousins with whom he was closest.

  Then Dana was wheeled back to the room, wanting to know what the baby was doing and when she could have her back. She wanted to talk herself with her grandmother and Tara, though both were already on their way.

  Hugh’s parents arrived first. Though it was barely nine in the morning, they were impeccably dressed, his father in a navy blazer and rep tie, his mother in Chanel. Hugh had never seen either of them looking disheveled.

  They brought a large vase filled with hydrangea. “From the yard,” his mother said unnecessarily, since hydrangea was her gift for any occasion that occurred from midsummer to first frost. Chattering on about the good fortune that this year’s batch contained more whites than blues, for a girl, she passed Hugh the vase and offered her cheek for a kiss, then did the same to Dana. Hugh’s father gave them both surprisingly vigorous hugs before looking expectantly around.

  With his mother still marveling about the speed of the delivery and the many advances in obstetric care from when her children were born, Hugh led them down the hall to the nursery. His father immediately spotted the name on a crib at the window, and said, “There she is.”

  At that point, Hugh hoped for excited exclamations on the sweetness and beauty of his daughter. He wanted his parents to tell him that she looked like his mother’s favorite great-aunt or his father’s second cousin or, simply, that she was strikingly unique.

  But his parents stood silent until his father said gravely, “This can’t be her.”

  His mother was frowning, trying to read names on other cribs. “It’s the only Clarke.”

  “This baby can’t be Hugh’s.”

  “Eaton, it says Baby Girl Clarke.”

  “Then it’s mismarked,” Eaton reasoned. A historian by occupation, both teacher and author, he was as reliant on fact as Hugh was.

  “She has an ID band,” Dorothy noted, “but you never know about those. Oprah had a pair of parents on whose babies were mislabeled. Go ask, Hugh. This doesn’t look like your child.”

  “It’s her,” Hugh said, trying to sound surprised by their doubt.

  Dorothy was confused. “But she doesn’t look anything like you.”

  “Do I look like you?” he asked. “No. I look like Dad. Well, this baby is half Dana, too.”

  “But she doesn’t look like Dana, either.”

  Another couple came down the hall and pressed their faces to the window.

  Eaton lowered his voice. “I’d check this out, Hugh. Mix-ups happen.”

  Dorothy added, “The newspaper just ran a story about a woman who gave birth to twins from someone else’s vial, and you can almost understand it—how can they possibly keep all those microscopic things apart?”

  “Dorothy, that was in vitro.”

  “Maybe. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t mix-ups.
Besides, how one becomes pregnant isn’t something sons would necessarily share with their mothers.” She shot Hugh a sheepish look.

  “No, Mom,” Hugh said. “This wasn’t in vitro. Forget mix-ups. I was in the delivery room. This was the child I saw born. I cut the cord.”

  Eaton remained doubtful. “And you’re sure it was this child?”

  “Positive.”

  “Well,” Dorothy said quietly, “what we see here doesn’t resemble you or anyone else in our family. This baby has to look like Dana’s family. Her grandmother rarely talks about relatives—what, were there three Josephs all told at the wedding, counting the bride?—but the grandmother must have family, and then there’s Dana’s father, who is a bigger mystery. Does Dana even know his name?”

  “She knows his name,” Hugh said and met his father’s eyes. He knew what Eaton was thinking. His parents were nothing if not consistent. Pedigree mattered.

  “We discussed this three years ago, Hugh,” the older man reminded him, low but edgy. “I told you to have him investigated.”

  “And I said I wouldn’t. There was no point.”

  “You would have known what you were marrying.”

  “I didn’t marry a ‘what.’” Hugh argued, “I married a ‘who.’ I thought we beat this issue to death back then. I married Dana. I didn’t marry her father.”

  “You can’t always separate the two,” Eaton countered. “I’d say this is a case in point.”

  Hugh was saved a reply by the nurse, who waved at him and wheeled the crib toward the door.

  This baby was his child. He had helped conceive her, had helped bring her into the world. He had cut the cord tying her to her mother. There was symbolism in that. Dana wasn’t her sole caretaker anymore. He had a part to play now and for years to come. It was an awesome thought under even the most ordinary of circumstances, and these didn’t feel ordinary in the least.

  “Are either of you pleased?” he asked. “At the very least, happy for me? This is my baby.”