They never established for certain whether my mother was the specific woman who carried him.
The records didn’t exist; that had been the point.
But Dr. Okafor said something that I’ve thought about every day since.
“It doesn’t matter if it was you specifically,” he told her. “You went back forty-one times. Whoever carried me went back for the next child after me. That was you, even if it wasn’t your hands.
You’re all the same woman to me.
I’ve spent fifty years wanting to say thank you to a blue flower.
I finally get to say it to a face.”
And he did.
He said thank you, and my mother held the doctor she’d maybe saved, and I stood in the corner of a hospital room and watched my entire understanding of my mother rebuild itself into something enormous.
Word spread through the hospital, quietly, the way these things do.
