The Sailboat Towels
The towel was so faded you could barely see the sailboats anymore.
It used to be white. Now it was the soft gray-cream of something washed a thousand times. The little blue sailboats embroidered along the edge had faded to the palest blue, like veins under skin. One of them had come unstitched. A loose blue thread hung from its sail.
I’d know that towel anywhere.
For eighteen years, it had lived in a cedar box at the top of my closet. Next to its twin. A pink one with the same sailboats.
And now my daughters had set them both on the kitchen table in front of me. On their eighteenth birthday. Next to the remains of the chocolate cake I’d baked that afternoon.
Chloe reached across the table and took my hand.
“Dad,” she said. “Please don’t hate us for what you’re about to see.”
Maya nodded. She was crying. “We’ve been hiding something from you.”
My heart started racing.
I picked up the white towel. My hands were shaking. I didn’t know why.
I unfolded it.
Something dropped out onto the table.
A photograph. Old. Square. The kind that came out of the drugstore photo machines in the early 2000s, with a white border and the date printed in orange in the corner.
06 · 14 · 08
I picked it up.
A girl. Seventeen, maybe. Standing on a beach at sunset, with the ocean behind her. Long dark hair blowing across her face. Very pregnant. Enormously pregnant. One hand on her belly.
In her other hand, she was holding two towels.
One white. One pink.
With little blue sailboats along the edges.
And I knew her face.
I’d sat across from that face at a Thanksgiving table in 2004. I’d watched it blow out sixteen birthday candles in a beach house in North Carolina. I’d heard my best friend talk about that face with tears in his eyes, late at night, when he’d had too many beers.
My little sister. Wren. She ran off. California, I think. I don’t even know if she’s alive.
The moment I saw who was in that photograph, every bit of color drained from my face.
But you need to know how I got here.
You need to know about the nursery.
Eighteen years ago, I buried my pregnant fiancée.
Her name was Natalie Brooks. She was twenty-seven years old. She taught second grade at an elementary school in Pittsburgh. She had red hair she hated and freckles she hated more and a laugh that sounded like somebody had dropped a box of silverware.
We’d been together four years. We were getting married in September. We’d already picked the venue. A barn outside Sewickley with string lights in the rafters.
She was thirty-six weeks pregnant.
With our daughter. Grace.
We’d spent months painting the nursery.
Pale yellow. Natalie picked the color. Butter Cream, it was called. She said yellow was the color of a good morning. She said she wanted our daughter to wake up every day to a good morning.
I painted it three times because she kept changing her mind about the shade. Then I built the crib myself. From a kit. It took me a whole weekend and I swore at it the entire time and Natalie sat on the floor eating ice cream out of the carton and laughing at me.
We hung a mobile over it. Little felt sailboats. Blue and white. Natalie found it at a craft fair.
“Because she’s going to love the ocean,” Natalie said. “Like me.”
On May twenty-second, Natalie woke up with a headache.
A bad one. She said it felt like somebody was squeezing her skull. She said she was seeing little sparkles at the edge of her vision.
I wanted to take her to the hospital. She said it was just a pregnancy headache. She said she’d call her doctor after breakfast.
She stood up from the bed.
And she collapsed.
Preeclampsia, they told me later. It turned into something called eclampsia. A seizure. Then a stroke.
They did an emergency C-section in the ambulance bay. I wasn’t allowed in. I stood in a hallway with my hands pressed against a wall.
Grace was stillborn.
Natalie died two hours later. On an operating table. Without waking up.
I never got to say goodbye to either of them.
I buried them together. One casket. Grace in Natalie’s arms.
It was the worst day of my life. I don’t remember most of it. I remember the rain. I remember Natalie’s mother screaming at the graveside. I remember the tiny white bundle in the crook of Natalie’s arm when they let me see them one last time.
I remember coming home.
I remember standing in the nursery. In the doorway. With the yellow walls and the crib I’d built and the little felt sailboats turning slowly in the air from the vent.
Staring at a crib that would never hold our baby.
For weeks, I barely spoke.
I stopped answering calls. I stopped going to work. I’m a high school chemistry teacher. Was. I didn’t go back after spring break. The principal called. I didn’t answer.
I stopped eating.
I stopped showering.
Most days, I sat on the floor of the nursery with my back against the crib and stared at the sailboats.
Natalie’s mother called every day. My mother called every day. I let them all go to voicemail.
I lost twenty-three pounds in four weeks.
I wasn’t trying to die. Not exactly. I just didn’t see any reason to keep living.
My best friend, Julian Ashford, finally showed up on June eleventh.
We’d been friends since freshman year at Penn State. Roommates. He was a big guy. Six-three. Played rugby. Laughed loud. Cried at movies and didn’t care who saw.
He let himself in with the spare key I’d given him years ago.
He found me on the nursery floor.
He stood in the doorway for a long time and didn’t say anything.
Then he went into my bedroom. He pulled a duffel bag out of my closet. He threw some clothes into it. Underwear. Jeans. T-shirts. My toothbrush.
He came back to the nursery. He grabbed me under the arms and hauled me to my feet. I didn’t fight him. I didn’t have anything left to fight with.
He walked me out to his truck. He threw the duffel bag in the back.
“Get in,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
He started the engine.
“If I leave you here another day,” Julian said, “you’ll bury yourself too.”
He drove for nine hours.
South. Through West Virginia. Through Virginia. Into North Carolina. I slept most of the way. When I wasn’t sleeping, I stared out the window.
He didn’t try to make me talk. He played the radio. Old country. Merle Haggard. Johnny Cash. Natalie hated country music. I didn’t tell him that.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, we crossed a long bridge over a sound. Flat water on both sides. Marsh grass. Pelicans.
The Outer Banks.
“Kill Devil Hills,” Julian said. “My grandparents had a place here. When I was a kid. We came every summer.”
“I know,” I said. “I came once. Remember? Your sister’s sixteenth birthday.”
Julian’s hands tightened on the wheel. Just for a second.
“Right,” he said. “I forgot.”
He’d rented a little cottage on stilts a few blocks from the beach. Cheap. Two bedrooms. A screened porch.
We dropped our bags.
Then he walked me down to the ocean.
We spent the afternoon walking in silence.
Up the beach. Down the beach. The sand was hot. The water was cold. Julian took his shoes off. I didn’t.
There were people around. Families with umbrellas. Kids building sandcastles. A guy flying a kite shaped like a shark.
Every time I saw a pregnant woman, I had to look away.
Every time I saw a father carrying a baby, I had to sit down.
Julian sat with me. Every time. He didn’t say anything. He just sat.
As the sun began to set, the beach emptied out.
The families packed up their umbrellas and went back to their rental houses. The kite guy left. The lifeguard climbed down from his chair and walked away.
Julian said he needed to make a phone call. He walked up the dune toward the parking lot.
I stayed on the beach. Alone.
The sky was orange and pink. The ocean was going purple. The wind picked up.
I drifted down the beach. Not going anywhere in particular. Just walking.
And I came to a row of beach changing cubicles.
They were old. Wooden. Painted white a long time ago, now peeling. Six of them in a row at the base of a dune. Little stalls with canvas curtains instead of doors. The kind of thing you change out of your wet swimsuit in.
The curtains were all closed. Flapping a little in the wind.
I stood there looking at them. I don’t know why.
That’s when I heard it.
A baby crying.
At first, I thought I’d imagined it. I’d been hearing babies cry for weeks. In my sleep. In the shower. In the nursery at three in the morning.
Then I heard it again.
Thin. High. Desperate.
Then another one.
Two babies. Crying. Different voices. Overlapping.
Coming from inside the last changing cubicle.
I walked over.
My heart was pounding.
I pulled the curtain aside.
Two newborn girls lay on the sand floor of the changing cubicle.
Tiny. So tiny. Red-faced and screaming. Their eyes squeezed shut. Their little fists waving.
They were wrapped in towels.
One white. One soft pink.
Each embroidered with tiny blue sailboats along the edges.
I stood there in the doorway of that cubicle and couldn’t breathe.
Blue sailboats. Like the mobile over the crib. In the yellow nursery. In Pittsburgh.
I looked around.
There was no one else. The beach was empty. The parking lot up the dune was empty except for Julian’s truck. No footprints leading away. The wind had already smoothed the sand.
No note.
No bag.
Nothing.
Just two babies. Hours old. Maybe less. Lying on the sand in a beach changing room at sunset.
I knelt down.
I didn’t think. I just did it.
I picked them up. One in each arm. The white towel in my left. The pink towel in my right.
They were so light. Lighter than anything. Warm. Damp. Smelling like salt and something sweet I didn’t have a name for.
The second I picked them up, they stopped crying.
Both of them.
At the same time.
They opened their eyes. Dark eyes. Unfocused. Looking up at me.
I sat down on the sand in that cubicle with two newborn babies in my arms.
And for the first time in five weeks, I cried.
Not the way I’d been crying. Not the empty, hollow crying. Something else. Something that came from somewhere deep, somewhere that had been frozen since May twenty-second.
I cried and I held them and I said, over and over, “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
Julian found me there.
He came down the dune at a run. I’d never seen him run that fast.
He stopped in the doorway of the cubicle. He looked at me. At the babies in my arms. At the towels.
His face went completely white.
“Will,” he said. “Oh my God. Will.”
“Call 911,” I said. “Somebody left them. Somebody just left them here.”
Julian didn’t move.
He just stood there in the doorway, staring at the babies. His mouth was open. His hands were shaking.
“Julian,” I said. “Call 911.”
He blinked.
He pulled out his phone.
The police came. Then an ambulance.
The paramedics took the babies. I didn’t want to let go. A paramedic, a kind older woman with gray braids, had to gently pry my fingers loose.
“They’re okay,” she said. “They’re healthy. They’re going to be okay. You did good, honey. You did real good.”
They took them to the hospital in Nags Head.
I rode in the ambulance. I don’t know why. Nobody stopped me.
Julian followed in his truck.
The police searched for weeks.
They checked every hospital in the Outer Banks. Every clinic. Every pharmacy. They put out a statewide alert. They interviewed every rental house on the beach. They checked the security cameras at the gas stations on the bypass.
Nothing.
No missing mother. No pregnant girl who’d stopped showing up to prenatal appointments. No one came forward.
The babies went into foster care. A nice older couple in Manteo who’d been fostering newborns for twenty years.
Julian drove back to Pittsburgh after a week. He had to work.
I didn’t go.
I rented the cottage for another month.
Then another.
I visited those girls every single day.
The foster mother, a woman named Delphine, let me hold them. She showed me how to feed them. How to burp them. How to swaddle them in those sailboat towels, which they’d washed and kept, because Delphine said the girls cried less when they were wrapped in them.
I learned which one liked to be rocked and which one liked to be bounced. I learned that the one in the white towel had a little birthmark on her ankle shaped like a comma. I learned that the one in the pink towel sneezed every time she finished a bottle.
I sang to them. Badly. The only song I could think of. A song Natalie used to sing to her belly every night.
You are my sunshine.
In August, a social worker named Rhonda came to Delphine’s house while I was there.
She watched me feed the girl in the pink towel. She watched me change the girl in the white towel. She watched me sing.
Afterward, she asked me to step outside onto the porch.
“Mr. Harper,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“You’ve been here every day for two months.”
“Yes.”
“You moved down here from Pennsylvania. You left your job.”
“I didn’t have much of a job to leave.”
She looked at me for a long time.
“Have you thought about adopting them?” she asked.
I stood on Delphine’s porch with the screen door creaking behind me.
I looked through the window. At the two tiny girls asleep in a bassinet together. Side by side. Wrapped in their sailboat towels.
I thought about the yellow nursery. The crib I built. The felt sailboats turning in the air from the vent.
I thought about Natalie. She’s going to love the ocean. Like me.
I looked at their tiny faces.
And for the first time since losing my fiancée, I felt something other than grief.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. I have.”
It took eleven months.
Home studies. Background checks. Interviews. Classes. Paperwork. More paperwork. A judge in Dare County who looked at me over his reading glasses and asked why a grieving single man of twenty-nine wanted to adopt two newborn girls he found on a beach.
“Because I found them,” I said. “And they stopped crying when I picked them up. And so did I.”
The judge was quiet for a long time.
Then he signed the papers.
I named them Chloe and Maya.
Chloe, the one in the white towel. With the comma birthmark on her ankle. It means green shoot. New growth. Something that comes up out of the ground after winter.
Maya, the one in the pink towel. Who sneezed after every bottle. It means water. For the ocean.
Their middle names were both Grace.
Chloe Grace Harper.
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