My six-year-old tugged my sleeve in the gravel lot at my brother’s club breakfast, pointed at a boy on a stranger’s motorcycle, and said, “Mom, he was in your tummy with me.” Six years ago a doctor told me his twin never took a breath. I never told Mateo there was a twin.
The labor went thirty-one hours, and two heartbeats went in while only one came out.
A little boy doesn’t need to carry a grave.
So Mateo got all of it. Everything meant for two.
Every first Saturday my brother Rory rides with his club to the pancake breakfast at the Pueblo fairgrounds, and we meet him there.
Mateo counts the bikes. That morning, thirty-four, backed in along the fence.
The ninth one had a boy on the seat.
“He was in your tummy,” Mateo said again, flat.
My lungs quit working right.
The boy wore mismatched sneakers and a hoodie with a hole at the cuff.
Same brown curls. Same eyebrows tipping up at the ends. Same chewing on the inside of his cheek while he worked out the handlebars.
Under his left ear, a strawberry mark the size of a dime.
Mateo has that mark. Exactly there.
I signed papers for the second one.
So who was on the ninth bike?
“That’s him,” Mateo said. “The one who talks to me when I’m asleep.”
“Mateo, quit it.” I made my voice bored. “We’re going to the car.”
“No. I KNOW HIM.”
He dropped my hand and RAN between the bikes. I opened my mouth and nothing came.
Rory set his coffee on his tank and went after him slow, like walking up on a strange dog.
The boy looked up. Neither of them said a word.
Then the boy put his arms out, and Mateo walked into them.
They grinned at each other with the SAME CROOKED GRIN, left side first.
I got there with syrup on my wrist. “Ma’am, I’m so sorry, I think the boys just…”
My voice quit on me.
I knew the woman standing next to that motorcycle.
And when she opened her mouth to answer me, my knees went OUT FROM UNDER ME.
The ninth bike
It was Noreen Ayala. My ex-husband’s mother. Mateo’s grandmother.
The woman who sat on a plastic chair beside my bed for thirty-one hours and let me squeeze her hand until her rings left marks.
I hadn’t seen her in five years.
She looked down at me on the gravel, then at the two boys, and she smiled the way she used to smile at the nurses when she wanted a warm blanket brought in.
“Hi, Jina,” she said. “Ian, honey, this is your cousin Mateo. Remember I told you that you had a cousin?”
The boy on the ninth bike said, “He’s not my cousin.”
Rory got a hand under my arm and stood me up like a sack of feed. The syrup on my wrist stuck to the leather of his vest.
“You okay?” he said.
I didn’t answer him. Noreen had both hands on the boy’s shoulders now, from behind, the way you hold a kid at a parade so he doesn’t step off the curb.
Cousin.
Noreen had two children. Eduardo, who I married. And Kiara, who tried for nine years to have a baby and never got one.
So whose boy was Ian?
The Parkview folder
There’s a boot box on the top shelf of my hall closet. Red Wing, size eleven, Rory’s old pair. Inside it is a blue folder from Parkview Medical Center, and I had opened that folder exactly once in six years.
Noreen worked twenty-six years on the maternity floor at Parkview. She got me the corner room. She knew every nurse by her kids’ names. When the labor went past twenty hours and Eduardo went out to the truck to sleep, Noreen stayed.
Mateo came at 11:52 at night on March eighteenth.
Then the room filled up. Somebody pulled the curtain. Somebody put a mask on my face. The last thing I heard before it went dark was a doctor at the foot of the bed saying, “Baby B never took a breath.”
When I woke up it was light out and Noreen was there.
At some point that morning she had a clipboard. The top sheet was folded back over the clip so all I could see was a line and a pink copy underneath. She put the pen in my fingers.
“It’s so they can take care of him,” she said. “You don’t have to see him, honey. You shouldn’t have to. Sign right there.”
I signed right there. She tore off the pink copy and slid it into the blue folder without unfolding it, and she put Mateo’s footprint card on top.
I asked her once, a week later, why there was only one card. She said they don’t do prints on the ones who don’t make it.
I believed her. She’d worked there twenty-six years.
Rory was there that night too. He slept in the waiting room in his riding jacket. He tells it every Thanksgiving like it’s a joke on himself, how Noreen came out around four in the morning and said, “She’s asleep, go home, I’ve got her,” and he went home.
“Fell for it,” he always says. “Woman had a clipboard.”
He has a key to my house on his ring with a green rubber cap on it, so he can get in to fix my furnace when it quits.
Eduardo left fourteen months after Mateo was born. He moved to Albuquerque and sends child support when he remembers. Noreen came around for a while after that, and then she didn’t. Every March a card shows up for Mateo with a twenty-dollar bill in it, signed Grandma Noreen, no return address.
The only other person who ever went in that boot box was Mateo. Last winter, playing hide-and-seek. I found him on the closet floor holding the ultrasound printout from twenty weeks, the grainy one with two gray shapes curled up close.
“That’s just you, baby,” I said, and put it back.
Now, in the gravel lot, Noreen squeezed the boy’s shoulders.
“Let’s go find your mom,” she said.
The boy didn’t move. “Mom’s in the pancake line.”
Wilson Huynh
Rory looked at the ninth bike like he’d only now seen it.
“That’s Wilson’s,” he said.
Wilson Huynh started riding with the club in the spring. Quiet guy. Brings a thermos, never takes the pancakes. Rory had told me about him once, that he brought his kid every month to sit on the bikes and that the kid could name every part on a carburetor.
I had never put a face on that kid.
Wilson came across the lot right then with two paper plates in one hand and a cup in the other. He saw Noreen’s hands on his son. He saw me, and Mateo still standing with his arms half around the boy.
“Everything good?” he said.
“Jina’s had a shock,” Noreen said. “She lost a baby a long time ago. The boys look a little alike. She’s confused.”
She said it to Wilson the way you explain a dog that barks at the mailman.
“I’m not confused,” I said.
Wilson set the plates down on the seat of the next bike over. He wasn’t mean about it. He just stepped between me and the two boys and put his hand on top of his son’s head.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I don’t know what this is. But you need to give my son some room.”
“He’s my son,” I said.
It came out of me before I could stop it. Mateo looked up at me. So did the other boy.
Wilson’s face shut like a garage door.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re going.”
He lifted Ian off the bike. Ian kept hold of Mateo’s hoodie until the last second and then let go.
“Wilson.” Rory said it quiet. “Hold up a minute. For me.”
Wilson stopped. They’d ridden two hundred miles together in August, to Ouray and back. I don’t know what that buys between men like them, but it bought something.
“One minute,” Wilson said. “Then I’m taking my kid home.”
He carried Ian to a blue Silverado parked at the end of the fence and set him on the passenger seat.
He left the door hanging open.
March nineteenth
Mateo went right after him and stood in the open truck door. Nobody stopped him. The two boys looked at each other and didn’t say anything, and Ian chewed the inside of his cheek.
I went too. Wilson didn’t like it.
“Ian,” I said. “When’s your birthday?”
“Jina,” Noreen said.
“March nineteenth,” Ian said.
Mateo was born at 11:52 at night on the eighteenth. The doctor said Baby B twenty-eight minutes later. I had done that math every March for six years, standing over a cake with one name on it.
Twenty minutes after midnight.
“Lots of babies get born on the nineteenth,” Noreen said. “Wilson, take him home.”
“Mom?”
A woman in a fleece vest came across the lot with a tray of three coffees. Kiara. Older, thinner. She’d cut her hair to her chin. She looked at her mother, then at me, and it took her a second to place me. When she did, her face closed up.
“Jina?” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Kiara, honey, let’s go,” Noreen said. “I’ll explain in the car.”
Kiara didn’t go. She was looking at Mateo now, standing in her husband’s truck door beside her son. She looked at him a long time. Then she looked at Ian’s ear, and then at Mateo’s.
“Where did you get him?” I said.
Kiara’s mouth opened, and Noreen said, “That is none of your business,” and Kiara talked over her.
“It was private,” she said. “A girl in Grand Junction. Seventeen. She couldn’t keep him. Mom knew a lawyer from the hospital who did those. We paid eleven thousand dollars.”
“Grand Junction,” I said.
“We’ve got his footprint card,” Kiara said. She said it to her mother, not to me. “It’s in his baby book. It says Parkview on it, Mom. Why would a girl from Grand Junction have him in Pueblo?”
Noreen didn’t answer that one.
“There’s one footprint card in my folder,” I said. “Just one. She told me they don’t do them for the babies who don’t make it.”
Rory had come up behind me. He didn’t ask what folder. He’d carried that boot box up to my closet himself when I moved.
“Hall closet?” he said.
“Top shelf.”
He already had his keys out, the green rubber cap between his fingers. He looked at Wilson.
“Twelve minutes there,” Rory said. “Twelve back. Nobody goes anywhere.”
The pink copy
Rory’s bike went out of the lot loud, and then the lot was quiet except for a man at a card table selling raffle tickets for a grill shaped like a Harley.
Noreen took her car keys out of her coat pocket.
Her car was a silver Buick, parked four spaces down from Wilson’s truck. She walked to it like she was walking to the mailbox. I walked faster and got there first and put my back against the driver’s door.
“Move, Jina.”
I didn’t move.
“You’re making a scene in front of the children,” she said. “You were always like this. Eduardo said you were like this.”
I didn’t say anything to that. Over her shoulder, Kiara had both boys sitting on the running board of the truck. She was holding a coffee she wasn’t drinking. Wilson stood next to her with his arms crossed, and he wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking at Noreen.
It was twenty-six minutes. I know because the raffle man called a number at the start and another one at the end, and he said “twenty-six minutes, folks, get your tickets” in between.
Rory came back in through the gate and didn’t bother backing in. He killed the engine, reached inside his vest and pulled out the blue folder, bent from riding against his chest.
I laid it open on the hood of the Buick.
Mateo’s footprint card on top. Two tiny gray feet, and his name, and 11:52 PM. Under it, the ultrasound picture, the two shapes. Under that, folded once, the pink copy.
I had never unfolded it.
The paper was thin and the ink had gone pale, but it was a carbon, and carbons don’t lie about what was written on the top sheet. Across the top, in capitals: CONSENT TO RELINQUISHMENT OF PARENTAL RIGHTS AND PLACEMENT FOR ADOPTION.
Under that, a typed line. Infant male, Baby B, born 03/19/2020, 12:20 AM, Parkview Medical Center. Status at time of consent: NICU, stable.
Stable.
Then my signature, crooked, the way you sign when you can’t feel your hand. And a time written next to it in somebody else’s neat handwriting. 4:10 AM.
And under that, on the line for the witness, the same neat hand.
N. Ayala, RN.
The Buick
Kiara came over and I held the paper out and she read it standing at the fender of her mother’s car. She read it twice. I could see her lips go over the word stable.
Noreen started talking before Kiara finished.
“He came back at four minutes,” she said. “Four minutes. They bagged him and he came back, and he was the size of a cantaloupe, and they had him on a CPAP in the NICU, and she was on the table bleeding out of every part of her. You don’t remember that part, Jina. I do. I was there. Where was your husband? Asleep in the truck. Where was your brother? In a chair.”
She pointed at Rory with her car keys.
“Eduardo was already halfway gone. I know my own son. You think I didn’t know? She was going to be alone with two babies, one of them sick, on what she made at the title company. And my daughter had cried every month for nine years. Nine years, Kiara. I sat on your bathroom floor.”
Kiara didn’t look up from the paper.
“So I made one good thing out of a bad night,” Noreen said. “One. He got two parents. He got a house with a yard. She got Mateo and she got to grieve and get over it. And she signed. That’s her name. Nobody held her hand on the pen.”
“Four-ten,” I said.
“What?”
“Where was I at four-ten?”
Noreen opened her mouth. Rory answered first.
“Asleep,” he said. “You came out to the waiting room at four and told me she was asleep and to go home. You had a clipboard.”
“She woke up long enough to sign,” Noreen said.
“You told me she was seventeen,” Kiara said. She said it to the paper. “You told me she was a girl in Grand Junction who wanted him to have a better life. I wrote her a letter, Mom. I gave you a letter to give her. Every birthday.”
Noreen didn’t have anything for that. She looked at Wilson like he’d help her. Wilson held his hand out, palm up.
“Keys, Noreen.”
“Wilson.”
“You’re not driving off before Kiara gets her answers,” he said. He kept his hand out.
She put the keys in it.
Over at the truck, Mateo had gotten up off the running board. He came across the gravel and stood next to me and looked at the ultrasound picture on the hood.
“I saw that one,” he said. “In the box. There were two.”
“There were two,” I said.
That was it. That was me telling him. Six years I kept it off him, and I told him on the hood of a Buick at a pancake breakfast with syrup still on my wrist.
He nodded like I’d told him the time.
Kiara folded the pink copy and held it out to me.
“Keep it,” I said. “I’ve got a phone. Take a picture of it, then give it to whoever you call first.”
She looked at me a long time.
“I’m not handing him to you,” she said. “I can’t. You understand that? He doesn’t know you. He’s mine.”
I looked at the truck. Ian was still on the running board, swinging his mismatched sneakers, watching us.
I could have said a lot of things. I had six years of them.
“Not today,” I said. “Take him home.”
Kiara went to the truck. Wilson put Noreen’s keys in his pocket and walked with his wife. He lifted Ian up onto the seat, and this time he shut the door.
First Saturday in November
The swab came back on a Tuesday. Ninety-nine point nine something. I’d paid for it myself, two kits from the pharmacy and the lab fee, and I took the letter from the lab to a lawyer on Abriendo Avenue who read the pink copy and said a word I won’t put here.
Kiara has the other copy of the letter. We talk on the phone on Sundays. Not long.
Noreen’s card came for Mateo in March, like always. Twenty dollars, Grandma Noreen. I wrote return to sender on it and put it back in the box.
The first Saturday in November it was cold, and the bikes came in late. Mateo stood at the fence with his hands in his hoodie and counted out loud.
Wilson backed in ninth. He always does now.
Ian was on the seat before the kickstand was all the way down. Mateo climbed up behind him. Kiara came and stood next to me with two coffees and handed me one, and we didn’t say much. Rory set his on his tank.
“Thirty-eight,” Mateo said.
Ian twisted around on the seat and tugged my sleeve.
“He counted Rory’s twice,” he said.
If somebody in your family rides out to a breakfast like this every month, send this one to them.
For more stories of family secrets and unexpected truths, read The $310 a Week My Husband Saved Us by Keeping Our Daughter Home and My Mother Is Ninety-Three and Still Says My Sister’s Name Hurts Her. And for another family story with a revelation that changes everything, see The Check Was Still on Our Kitchen Table When His Mother Called.
