I asked Dale if he remembered anything else. Anything at all. He said the woman was in her late twenties, dark hair, thin. He said she’d been calm during the delivery in a way that surprised him, calmer than he expected given the circumstances, and that afterward she held the baby and looked at her for a while.

He said that. She held me and looked at me for a while. He remembered that specifically.

I don’t know what to do with that.

He also told me he’d thought about that night a lot over the years. Not obsessively, he said, but it had stuck with him the way first experiences stick. He’d never delivered another baby on the side of a road in a snowstorm. He said he’d always hoped the baby was okay. I told him the baby was mostly okay. He nodded like that was enough, but his eyes were doing something I couldn’t quite read.

Before he left, he wrote down the name Mercy General on the back of a hospital business card. “They’d have intake records from that night,” he said. “Even with a false name, there might be something. The year, the date, the route they came from. It’s not nothing.” He handed it to me and then he left to finish his shift.

I sat in that bay for another two hours waiting for my wrist to get X-rayed and wrapped. Two hours with that card in my non-broken hand, reading his handwriting over and over. I called my cousin Renee, Carol’s daughter, and asked her if her mom had ever said anything to her about how I came to live with them. Renee went quiet for a second. “She said your mom dropped you off,” she said. “I was little. I always thought she meant like, dropped you off, like left you with her on purpose. I didn’t know what it meant. I was five.”

Dropped you off. Not died. Dropped you off.

I’ve been sitting with that for three weeks now. The card is on my kitchen table. I’ve picked it up probably forty times. I even drove past Mercy General once, just drove past it, didn’t stop. It’s about an hour from me. I don’t know if their records from 1995 would even still exist. I don’t know if I want them to.

Because here’s what I can’t get past. She held me. She looked at me. And then the next morning she gave a fake name and walked out the door and let my aunt tell me for twenty-some years that she was dead. Those two things are both true at the same time and I can’t make them fit together into anything that makes sense.