"The girls had a thing they did," he went on. "It started before her, she said, and she just kept it going. Before a girl went home, she'd tell somebody what she'd called her baby. Not the name the agency gave it. Her name. The one she'd been saying in her head for nine months. And the boy-or-girl, and the date, if she knew it. She'd tell it to one of the other girls, so it would be someplace in the world besides inside her. And by the time Ivy got there, the girls had figured out she had the best memory of any of them, so they started telling it all to her. She was the youngest. They called her the Book." He swallowed. "Thirty girls, the seven months she was there. She learned every one. Name, initial, boy or girl, birthday, and the name the mama gave it. She used to say them over at night like the begats."
"Wade," said Carla, very softly.
"In 1973 the Bethany Home burned. Electrical fire in the office wing." He said this flatly, professionally, and I knew without asking that he had looked it up, that he had read some old newspaper account and judged the wiring. "Took every record they had. All the files. So when the laws changed and those babies grew up and started asking the state who their mothers were, there wasn't anything to give them. Bethany babies were just gone. Every one of them hit a wall." He turned onto Church Street. "And Ivy knew. She read about it in the Herald-Leader in the nineties, some woman who'd been born at Bethany and was looking, and the paper said there were no records anywhere. And Ivy sat at her kitchen table and thought, that's not true. There's me."
"Then why didn't she just tell somebody?" I said. "Why didn't she write it down?"
"Because she'd promised. Those girls went home and married and had other children and some of them never told a living soul. Not their husbands. Not anybody. Ivy said she couldn't put thirty women's secrets in a notebook in a kitchen drawer, where anybody could find it after she was gone and read it at the dinner table. But she couldn't let it die with her either. The ones who were looking had a right." He breathed out. "So she did what she knew how to do."