Our Fragile Hearts. Buffy Andrews

       Prologue

      Mary

       June 30, 1957

       I hate Mother. I hate Father. They’re sending me away. They said I brought shame to the family, that no decent man will want me. They have forbidden me to see Teddy. He doesn’t know I’m carrying his child. He thinks I don’t love him. My life is over.

       Love, Mary Katherine

      ***

      I lay in my hospital bed trying to remember. I remembered the cold, sterile delivery room and the doctors and nurses dressed in white and wearing masks. I remembered seeing the delivery table and the bassinet, the sterile towels and drapes and rubber gloves. I even remembered seeing the scissors and string the doctor would use to tie my baby’s umbilical cord.

      But I didn’t remember seeing my baby.

      I didn’t even know if I’d had a boy or a girl. The nurse had given me something for my pain, and when I woke up I was in this hospital room with another mother who had given birth to a stillborn. I listened to her cry for the child she’d lost. And she listened to me cry for the child I had but would never see.

      My baby was in someone else’s arms. My father, who was an attorney, had arranged a private adoption. “You shamed our family,” he’d said. “Your baby is a bastard.”

      So he sent me away to a strange place in a strange town where no one knew me and few, except for the other “troubled girls,” cared.

      I was alone and sad and I wondered if I’d ever see Teddy again. Probably not after writing the letter my father had forced me to write. Father even read the letter afterward to make sure it said what he’d dictated. I was certain Teddy would hate me forever.

      I heard my mother’s voice before I saw her. She was coming to take me home. I’d been in the hospital for days waiting for her.

      “How’s Mary Katherine today?” She walked over and kissed my cheek as if she were greeting me after a week at church camp.

      My chin wobbled and I could feel tears gathering in the corners of my eyes. “How could you?”

      A flurry of emotion ripped through my broken body and I shook uncontrollably as I sobbed.

      Mother patted my back, but her hand felt as hard as the wooden paddle she used on me when I misbehaved as a child. “It’s all over now. Everything will be fine. You’ll see.”

      I narrowed my eyes. “Nothing will ever be fine, Mother. I wish I was dead.”

      “Oh, now, Mary Katherine. You don’t mean that.”

      I slammed my hand into the bed. “Stop telling me how I feel. You have no idea how I feel. You made me give up my baby.”

      Mother sighed. “You can always have another one.”

      I felt my anger boil in the pit of my stomach and it inched its way up and exploded in fits and bursts from my mouth. “I don’t want another one. I wanted this one.”

      “Well, she’s gone.”

      Tears stung my eyes and my mouth dropped open. “I had a daughter?”

      Mother mashed her ruby lips together. “I don’t know if the baby was a boy or a girl.”

      She was lying. I could tell by the red blotchiness spreading over her narrow neck. I had a daughter. And I knew that for the rest of my life, everywhere I went I’d look for her.

      Would she have my blonde hair and blue eyes? Or Teddy’s dark hair and dark eyes?

      I blew my nose into the tissues Mother had handed me. “Did he come?”

      Mother shook her head. “Your father was too busy.”

      “He’s always been too busy for me.”

      “Now, Mary