Paula Webb’s Notebook
Chapter 04 - Paula Webb’s Notebook
Paula Webb lived in a brick duplex behind a Baptist church in Larkspur County, forty minutes from the Mercer house and thirty-five years from the night Lydia gave birth.
She was seventy-eight now, widowed, thin, and attached to an oxygen tube that hissed softly when she opened the door.
Evelyn Pike had called ahead.
Lydia stood on the porch with the burned blanket in a preservation bag borrowed from Nora’s aunt, who turned out to be Deputy Sandra Vale and had arrived at the Mercer house with more competence than all the rich men combined.
Thomas stood beside the car, not invited onto the porch.
He had asked to come.
Lydia had said he could drive.
That was all.
Paula Webb looked at Lydia for a long moment.
Then she began to cry.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “You have your mother’s eyes.”
Lydia gripped the railing.
“My mother died before the baby.”
“I know.” Paula wiped her face with a tissue tucked into her sleeve. “Your father brought me peaches once after I called him. Said his wife would have done better than peaches if she were alive.”
Evelyn touched Lydia’s elbow.
“May we come in?”
Paula nodded.
Her living room held crocheted blankets, pill bottles, framed grandchildren, and a small cabinet filled with notebooks. Nurses, Lydia thought, often keep records even after the world stops paying them to.
Paula saw her looking.
“I wrote things down,” she said. “Not everything. Enough to sleep badly instead of not at all.”
Lydia sat on the edge of a floral sofa.
Thomas remained standing near the doorway until Paula pointed at a chair and said, “If you hover, sit. If you lie, leave.”
He sat.
Evelyn almost smiled.
Paula pulled a blue notebook from the cabinet.
“I was on night rotation when you delivered,” she said. “St. Brigid’s had rules, and Mercers had their own hallway. That was how it felt. Your mother-in-law came in before dawn with Dr. Crowe and a woman I did not know.”
Lydia leaned forward.
“What woman?”
“Dark hair. Late twenties. Expensive coat. Crying, but not like a grieving person. Like someone afraid she might not get what was promised.”
Thomas closed his eyes.
Evelyn said, “Name?”
Paula opened the notebook and found the page.
“I wrote V. Mercer plus E. Harlow? I wasn’t sure.”
Thomas’s head lifted.
“Harlow.”
Lydia looked at him.
“Who is that?”
He swallowed.
“My cousin Elaine. Elaine Harlow. She couldn’t have children.”
The room changed.
Lydia heard the oxygen machine hiss.
Elaine Harlow.
Vivian’s niece.
The woman who sent Christmas cards from Oregon for years with no children pictured until, suddenly, a toddler appeared in matching velvet. A girl named Mara, they were told, adopted privately after Elaine’s miracle paperwork came through.
Lydia had seen those cards.
She had even said once, with a pain she tried to hide, “What a pretty child.”
Vivian had taken the card from her hand and said, “Do not torture yourself.”
Lydia pressed one hand to her stomach.
“Where did they take my baby?”
Paula’s eyes filled.
“I tried to stop it.”
Thomas made a sound.
Paula turned on him.
“No. You don’t get comfort from my failure.”
He looked down.
Good, Lydia thought.
Let him have nothing soft for a while.
Paula continued.
“The baby cried. Strong lungs. Pink after suction. They took her to the nursery because you had hemorrhaged. Standard. Then Dr. Crowe ordered a restricted transfer. Said the infant had complications and needed observation. But there were no complications in the chart.”
She pointed to the notebook.
“I wrote her weight. Six pounds, eight ounces. A little dark hair. One dimple on the left cheek.”
Lydia’s body shook.
A dimple.
Not a concept.
Not a grief.
A dimple.
Paula swallowed.
“By morning, the baby was gone. Your chart said fetal demise. That was false. I confronted Dr. Crowe. He told me I was tired and emotional. Then Vivian Mercer came to the nurses’ station and said if I valued my license, I would stop inventing tragedies for women who already had them.”
Evelyn asked, “Why not go to the police?”
Paula looked at her hands.
“I was twenty-three. My mother was on my insurance. My brother had just been arrested. Dr. Crowe was the hospital board chair’s friend. Vivian Mercer owned half the town’s charitable foundations. I called Mr. Ashford instead.”
Lydia looked at the notebook.
“My father believed you.”
“He did. He came to the hospital. By then records had been altered. Your discharge was signed. You were already home sedated. He fought for weeks. Then he had the stroke.”
Lydia remembered.
Her father collapsed three months after the baby’s death. He died before Christmas. Vivian called it “merciful timing” because Lydia could grieve everything at once.
The cruelty of that sentence returned now with teeth.
Paula rose slowly and opened another drawer.
“I kept one thing.”
She brought back a hospital bracelet sealed in an old plastic bag.
The ink had faded, but the number remained.
89-417-M.
Baby Girl Mercer.
Lydia reached for it and stopped.
“May I?”
Paula nodded.
The bracelet weighed almost nothing.
Still, Lydia needed both hands.
Thomas whispered, “Oh God.”
Lydia turned.
“No. Do not bring God in only when papers turn against your mother.”
He flinched.
Paula looked at Thomas.
“Did you know?”
He shook his head.
“Not then.”
The last two words entered the room and sat down.
Lydia stared at him.
“Not then?”
Thomas closed his eyes.
Evelyn’s face hardened.
Paula sat very still.
Thomas opened his mouth.
Lydia stood.
“When?”
He rubbed both hands over his face.
“Seven years later. Maybe eight. I found a letter from your father in Mother’s desk. It said he knew the baby was alive and that he would not stop.”
Lydia could not speak.
Thomas continued, voice breaking.
“I confronted her. She said Calvin was delusional after the stroke. She said you would break if I reopened it. She said even if there had been some irregular placement, no court would undo years of adoption. She said the child was safe.”
The child.
Not our daughter.
The child.
Lydia placed the hospital bracelet on the coffee table carefully.
“You suspected our daughter lived for twenty-seven years.”
Thomas’s face crumpled.
“I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Losing you.”
She laughed then.
Not loudly.
That would have been easier for him.
A quiet, disbelieving laugh.
“You chose a lie because you were afraid truth might cost you me. Thomas, truth was the only thing that could have kept me.”
He bent forward, sobbing.
Lydia felt nothing soft move toward him.
That frightened her less than she expected.
Paula opened the notebook again.
“I heard one more thing that night.”
Lydia turned back.
“What?”
“Vivian told Elaine, ‘No birth mother, no Ashford guardian. We keep the land until the girl is old enough to be useful.’”
Evelyn wrote that down.
Thomas looked up, shattered.
Lydia held the burned blanket, the bracelet, and her father’s letter in her mind like three points on a map.
“Where is Elaine now?” she asked.
Evelyn answered.
“Oregon address inactive. Husband deceased. But the daughter—Mara Harlow—lives in Seattle. Thirty-four. Pediatric physical therapist.”
Lydia gripped the sofa.
Mara.
A living name.
Her daughter had a living name.
Paula reached across the table and touched Lydia’s wrist gently.
“There is something else.”
Lydia almost said no.
There had been enough something else for one life.
But she nodded.
Paula said, “When they took her, she was wrapped in a hospital blanket. Not yours. Dr. Crowe told us yours was destroyed.”
Lydia looked at the scorched flannel.
“Then how did I get it back?”
Paula’s eyes moved toward Thomas.
“I don’t know. But someone kept it, hid that label inside, and returned it to you.”
Thomas lifted his head.
His face changed slowly.
“My father,” he whispered.
Lydia stared.
“Your father?”
Thomas nodded.
“Before he died, he gave me the hospital box. Mother said he was being sentimental. I never opened it. I gave it to you.”
Evelyn’s pen stopped.
Lydia looked down at the blanket.
For thirty-five years, the Mercers had called it her sickness.
May you like
But one Mercer, maybe the only one with enough shame left, had made sure the blanket came home.
To be continued in chapter 05, where Lydia finds the woman who may be her daughter and must decide whether to knock.
