Then I unfolded the slip of paper and dialed.
Chapter 3: The Girl in Room 4B
Alicia Cormier answered on the first ring.
“This is Alicia.”
She sounded like someone who had been waiting at a phone for ten years.
“My name is Liza Sheehan,” I said. “I think we need to talk.”
There was a long silence.
Then a small, wrecked laugh.
“I’m at Lakeside Children’s. Room 4B. Come whenever you can.”
I went the next morning with my mother, four days after giving birth, moving like a woman made of broken glass.
Alicia was waiting in the family lounge with a cup of cold coffee gone untouched.
She was thirty-three, with a ponytail, dark circles under her eyes, and the faded blue scrubs of a night-shift pharmacy tech who hadn’t gone home.
We looked at each other.
“You have his nose,” I said, because I had no idea what else to say. “Addie, I mean. I haven’t met her.”
Alicia pressed her fist to her mouth.
“I never wanted a baby for this,” she said. “I need you to know that, Mrs. Sheehan. Before anything else.”
“It’s Liza.”
“I wrote to Ian because he’s her father. The registry failed, and the doctors said he should be typed. That’s all I asked. A cheek swab.”
She wiped her eyes angrily with the back of her wrist.
“Then his mother’s lawyer called me. She said the agreement I signed at twenty-four forbade me to contact the family. She said if I spoke to anyone, the group health plan that covers Addie through Sheehan Medical Supply would be reviewed.”
“Reviewed.”
“I’ve been a pharmacy tech for eleven years. I know what ‘reviewed’ means.”
My mother put an arm around her shoulders.
“Honey,” she said. “Nobody’s reviewing anything.”
A woman in a white coat appeared at the door.
She was tall, in her fifties, with short gray hair and a stethoscope looped around her neck like a scarf.
“I’m Dr. Kathleen Zimmerman,” she said. “I run the pediatric transplant program here. Mrs. Sheehan, may I speak plainly?”
“Please.”
