Carry Her Heart Read Online Free Page B

life working there.
My mother believed I was punishing myself for giving you up by working with children on a daily basis. But that wasn’t it at all. I never felt I needed to be punished for giving you a better life. I truly believed then—and now—that giving you to a family who was better equipped to care of you was an act of love. Like Grandmother Rose—it was my gift to you. I gave you a family who could give you the life I wanted for you but couldn’t have given you myself.
No, working with children wasn’t me punishing myself. It was my solace. Every time I comforted a crying baby, I comforted you. Every time I held a sick, lonely child, I held you.
You led me to nursing, and nursing led me to my real passion—telling stories.
How? I’d been working on the pediatric floor for about two years, and I had a five-year-old patient who visited our unit frequently. I can’t tell you her name or why she was a regular because of patient confidentiality, but she was precocious and most days she meandered somewhere between a delight and a holy terror.
One night she asked me, “Miss Piper, do you have a little girl?”
I felt as if the earth had stopped spinning for a moment. Everything seemed to come to a screeching halt. Everything around me was perfectly still. I was immobile. I thought my heart had stopped beating at the reminder of what I’d lost.
No, not lost. What I’d willingly given away.
Then slowly, I felt my heart begin to beat again. Its first thump filled my ears to the point of being almost deafening.
But slowly, I reacquainted myself with the sound of my heartbeats, and the earth started spinning as well. Still, I didn’t know how to answer this simplest of questions. So I asked her a question instead. “Why, honey?”
“’Cause you’d be a good mom.”
This time I was ready for the pain. I was braced. The world and my heart continued their rhythms as I let that innocent comment rip through me.
“Thank you.” She’d wounded me, tearing loose the scab on my heart. No matter how many times I thought I’d thoroughly healed, the scab always ended up ripped away by sometimes the smallest actions or words.
Still, her compliment helped staunch the bleeding from the now-open wound. Like I said, I believed giving you up was indeed the mark of a good mom, but that never stopped me from missing you. From hurting.
“Can you tell me a story?” she asked, not noticing my pain.
My shift was almost over, so I nodded. “Let me go find Nurse Abbey and then I’ll come back and bring a book.”
She shook her head. “No, not a book story. One from your head.”
I came back ten minutes later with a book in hand, despite her decree. “This is a very good story—” I started.
She shook her head again and reiterated, “No, from your head. Those are the best kinds of stories,” she added, as if anyone with any sense should know that.
She gave me a look that said only the best would be good enough for her.
Bowing to the inevitable, I said, “There was a—”
“No. Stories start with Once Upon a Time .”
“Once Upon a Time there was a girl named,” I tried to think of a name, and from nowhere, I found one. “Belinda Mae Abernathy.”
“That’s a very long name,” she said, all sympathetic.
“Yes, yes it is. And you see, that was the problem . . .”
That’s how Belinda Mae was born. I’m not sure where the name came from, but suddenly it was there, and I could see the little girl I was inventing. Over the next year, I made up stories for a lot of patients about Belinda Mae’s very long name, about her learning to tie her shoes, and about her frenemy, Sophia Tanya.
And one day, I was telling the story to a new patient, when her mother came in. I didn’t know then that her mother was the sister of an editor for a children’s book publisher. The mother called her sister and told her the story, and then the editor asked the mother to have me call her.
After all the times I’d told those stories, it