Читать книгу Between You and Me - Susan Wiggs, Susan Wiggs - Страница 6

On the day you were born, when you were only a few hours in this world, I tucked you into an old apple crate and left you behind like a piece of my beating heart, like an offering to a god I didn’t believe in but didn’t dare not believe in. Some might say you were a human sacrifice, but in that moment, I felt as though I was the sacrifice, not you.

Because in that moment, something inside me died.

Though I was too young to know anything, I truly imagined I was leaving you to a better life … I didn’t want to walk away, but I was scared of what would happen if I didn’t.

After all we’d been through that year, I was self-aware enough to realize my youth and ignorance would be a danger to you, yet smart enough to figure out what to do. I didn’t know anything about the modern world, about the city, about the law, about the inexorable ties that bind the heart. All I knew was that you’d be better off with a different future. With some other family to guide you. With some other life, far from Middle Grove.

By that time, I understood very well what happens at a hospital. They save people. They saved me. So I took you to a place where I knew you’d be saved.

Of course, that’s not how the papers reported it. The news media focused on the most sensational aspect of the case—an abandoned baby, a mysterious puzzle to be solved, a terrible family secret hidden by a distrustful, closed community that walled itself off from the rest of the world.

But the papers got it wrong.