February 1947
North Smithfield, Rhode Island
“Sam, look out! Look out!” Cecily pointed through the flying snow at the taillights in the ditch ahead. Sam was a careful driver, even more so in these stormy conditions, and he eased the Chrysler to a stop on the edge of the road, angling slightly so his headlights were pointed toward the trouble. The storm had caught them by surprise, or they would’ve left the San and the Valentine’s Day party much earlier. Sam was driving Cecily back home to her Providence apartment; she had handmade 102 valentines for friends old and new on the wards, especially the single girls who didn’t have anybody visiting them.
Up till the moment Cecily cried out, they’d been quiet together in the car, lost in a feeling of bittersweetness, because they knew it might be one of their last parties at the San. Sam’s father had recently died; Sam had not attended the funeral, saying only that he was too busy at work. Cecily had been offended, on principle, but he said she didn’t know the full story, and, anyway, his patients needed him. A week later, a letter had arrived from his mother asking Sam to come home and take over his father’s practice. Itasca needs you, Sam. I know how you love to help people, and people here need help. People out there have other doctors, don’t they?
Cecily felt her throat constrict every time she thought of him leaving, but he hadn’t asked for her opinion, nor for her to go with him, nor proposed marriage again since she’d told him about Lucky and Tommy, months ago. Anyway, if he had, she would’ve said no. She loved him, of course, but she knew love didn’t last forever, not even close, and she wasn’t going to hang her hat on it, no, sir.
Still, sometimes she woke up crying, and, if Sam was there—if he ever had two days off in a row, he’d stay over at her apartment, making sure the neighbors didn’t see him come and go—he held her and didn’t say a word. He would run his finger over the ridge of the scar on her belly, give it a gentle kiss. They never spoke of it, of what it signified. She had let him see it—see her fully—only recently, only after she’d told him about Tommy. Even as her doctor, back at the San on his rounds, he had never seen her scar, and it had evidently not been noted on her chart, because, the first time he’d seen it, in the cool darkness of her bedroom, he’d flinched, drawn his breath sharply in—though, knowing the story, he shouldn’t have been surprised.
Traveling through the darkness with Sam quiet beside her, Cecily’s mind had had plenty of time to wander over such things. They’d seen no other cars on the road, as if everyone but them had known the storm was coming.
But now this car, in the ditch, smashed into a big oak in a patch of forest, a good quarter mile from the last house they’d passed.
“It looks like it just happened!” Cecily said. Sam nodded, and the two of them jumped out of the car.
The snow was blinding, cutting. Cecily shielded her eyes. Her overshoes did no good at all; the snow slid inside her short boots, cold at first, then instantly wet. The snow was deep, off the side of the road, and she struggled to get through. Sam, with his much longer legs, was ahead of her.
“Hello?” he called, plowing through to the driver’s side. There was no answer, no sound at all, just the whirling of the snow and the red of the taillights, the glow of Sam’s headlights across the scene. The car was a black Chevrolet. “Hello?” Sam leaned to peer in the window, then held out his hand for Cecily to stop. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Why, what’s wrong?” Cecily asked, though she should’ve known, and she was already at the window so she saw: man slumped over the steering wheel, his head smashed and bloody, neck obviously broken. She staggered.
“I’m going around!” Sam blurted, careening back toward Cecily, and she was startled at first, confused, until her mind’s eye reconstructed the scene: there’d been a woman, doubled over in the passenger seat, head against the dash. Cecily had not been able to take it all in at once, all that she had seen in a glance.
“Oh, God, Sam, help her!” she cried, as he struggled past, brushing Cecily’s elbow on the way, as he always did whenever he was near, as if to reassure her, I’m here, yes, I’m still here, and if anyone could save this poor woman it was Sam, who’d been an Army surgeon at the front lines all through the war. Cecily didn’t breathe as she watched him fade behind the scrim of blowing snow, hearing the rapid crunch of his feet punching through the snow crust as he made his way to the passenger’s side and wrestled open the door, which creaked and scraped through the drift.
She heard a strange sound, then. A sort of a mewling moan. Oh, the poor woman! “Sam? Sam, do you need help?”
No answer. It was hard to see through the snowy haze, but he was leaning over where the woman was—
“Cecily!” he yelled. “Cecily!”
It couldn’t have been three minutes later, she was back in Sam’s car, the baby in her arms. The baby, who was, miraculously, seemingly, unhurt.
Who had been riding, perhaps, in the arms of its mother, its mother who had shielded it from the impact that had killed her and the baby’s father both. Sam said there was no question. Neither had a pulse. They were already growing cold. “This baby would’ve died, too, if we hadn’t happened along,” he said, flexing his hands on the steering wheel. His eyes flashed to meet Cecily’s, and she didn’t know what he meant to say. What she knew was that, the instant he had placed this baby in her arms and she had carried it to the car through the blinding, whirling snow, this baby had become hers to take care of, to look out for, to keep safe. Forever.
“We could get married,” Sam said. “We could go to Minnesota.”
“Yes, all right,” Cecily said.
Sam closed his eyes for a moment, then looked at her with a tiny smile, though his eyes were very serious. “We’d better call the police first. Go through the right channels, you know?”
Cecily felt the flush of disappointment; the nearness of the crime she was ready to commit. She did not want to let the baby go, not for an instant. She did not want to chance it being taken from her.
But Sam was right, of course. They had to go through the proper channels. “All right,” she said. “Yes.”
Sam drove slowly, carefully, away, leaving the red of the taillights behind them. They went to the nearest farmhouse and pounded on the door, asked to use the telephone. While Sam drove back out to meet the police at the site of the accident, Cecily sat in the warm kitchen, holding and crooning to the fussing baby. The lady of the house had made coffee, and sat across the table from Cecily, watching with a kind of longing. Her own children were asleep upstairs; almost grown, she’d said.
“I’m going to adopt this baby,” Cecily said.
“Lucky little thing,” the woman said, and sipped her coffee, as Cecily blinked back tears.
The baby was a gift from God, Cecily decided, and, when a policewoman came to the farmhouse in the morning and took the baby out of her arms, she started to cry and couldn’t stop. Sam spoke quietly to the policewoman. “We want . . . soon . . . please,” was all Cecily heard, and the policewoman in her skirt was a black triangle against the white of the new-fallen snow, carrying the baby out to the waiting police car.
Cecily cried for a week. Day by day, Sam would update her. The baby’s name was Mary Elizabeth Myer. Little Mary’s father, Paul, had been in the Navy, stationed in Newport. The night of the accident, he and his wife, Helen—plus baby Mary, of course—had been driving back to Newport after visiting Helen’s aunt and uncle, who had raised Helen and her younger brother from the time they were orphaned, when Helen was ten. (“What?” Cecily said, looking up, and Sam just shushed her, caressed her hair.) The heartbroken aunt and uncle had not hesitated to take in the baby of their beloved niece—but perhaps, the policewoman had whispered to Sam, they would consider giving little Mary up for adoption. They were both sixty-five years old, the uncle had crippling arthritis, they had so little money and no hope of earning more. Helen’s younger brother was only twenty years old, unmarried, stationed in Okinawa.
A letter had been written to the family of little Mary’s father in Bismarck, North Dakota.
“If we get married,” Sam told Cecily, “we’ll have a better chance.”
Three days later, a courthouse wedding. And a visit to the aunt and uncle, who lived in Burrillville, near the San.
It took ten visits, over the course of two months. It took Cecily, after she and Sam had befriended the couple, staying three weekends to help care for little Mary. (The aunt, Mae, and uncle, Arnold, were exhausted, grateful for the help. They saw how much Cecily loved the child. Arnold, especially, did not enjoy having a baby in the house, though he tried his best, but little Mary was his wife’s sister’s grandchild, and Arnold had devoted his life already to raising his wife’s sister’s children, and his arthritis had him in constant, excruciating pain.)
It took a letter arriving from North Dakota, saying that little Mary’s father’s family could not take her in. The grandfather was a widower, managing a large farm on his own, with his sons all away in the service.
The adoption was rushed through by a Rhode Island state official who was pleased to think that the orphaned baby would not become a drain on the state’s strained resources. Mae cried when she signed the papers, but she hugged Cecily and said she knew it was for the absolute best.
The baby gripped Cecily’s finger, and, Cecily was sure, smiled.
Sam finished out two final weeks of work. Cecily set her mind to learning how to cook, to shop for groceries, to scrub out little diapers by hand. She danced around the Providence apartment with the sweet baby in her arms, singing: “M-M-M-Mary, beautiful Mary, you’re the only girl that I adore!”
Of course, they had decided not to call her Mary, though they would keep Elizabeth, out of respect for her birth parents. “A fresh start for a new life!” Cecily had insisted. (Deep down, she was terrified. Mae and Arnold could change their minds! A North Dakota relative could show up on the doorstep and demand that the baby be handed over! Cecily woke up at night in cold sweats; the sound of the baby crying was always such a relief. A new name was, in Cecily’s mind, a safety measure.)
A new birth certificate arrived in the mail; the original would be sealed away in some dusty file drawer in the Providence courthouse. It was standard practice in Rhode Island for an official birth certificate to be created listing the adoptive parents just as if the child had been born to them originally, and so the certificate read: Elizabeth Grace Larson, born to Cecily DuMonde Larson and Samuel Eric Larson on September 15, 1946 (which was, indeed, the child’s true birthday). Cecily pressed the document to her heart. “We’re official!” she told little Liz, who blinked in seeming approval.
Cecily convinced Sam: they would tell everyone in Minnesota, in their new life, that they’d been married a year and a half already, and that the baby was theirs by birth. It would save poor little Liz such heartache, in the future, if she never had to know the way her birth parents had so tragically died!
“Are you sure?” Sam asked Cecily, more than once.
“Yes! Because I know what it’s like! Not to know where you came from! To feel unwanted and heartbroken! And you know what it’s like to be disappointed and hurt and grieving for things you’ve lost, or things you never had but should’ve! We don’t want her to experience any of that, do we?”
“No, that’s true,” Sam said. “Though it isn’t as though her parents wanted to give her up. You don’t think it would be all right for her to know that her mother died trying to protect her?”
“No,” Cecily said. All Liz need ever know, Cecily imagined, was that she was wanted, and loved, and wanted, and loved, and loved, and loved, and loved, and that would be the beginning and the end of everything. Anything else was too heartbreaking, too altogether much, for any child just starting out in life.
She managed to convince Sam: even his mother didn’t have to know the truth! Sam was famously reticent, and did not write to his mother often. It would be just like him to get married and have a baby and not think to mention it.
She and Sam were laughing together, a little nervously, about this, as they set out for Minnesota in the Chrysler, all their worldly possessions—they didn’t have much—inside. Sam drove, in his careful way. Cecily held the baby, little Liz, in her arms.
They didn’t have much, but it was more than enough. They had everything.