up there. Then she unzipped her suitcase and unpacked it. She hung up her jeans and shirts and set a pair of boots and one of sandals on the floor. She remembered Miss Janie inspecting her room on Saturday back when she was in middle school. More tears flowed, and this time she sank down onto the floor and admitted to herself that the reason she hadn’t come back to Birthright was that she didn’t want Miss Janie to know that she’d failed. She had stopped going to classes and had gotten married before the first semester had even ended.
“So much for staying in school and getting my nursing degree like Miss Janie wanted me to,” she muttered.
The sound of uncontrollable weeping floated up the stairs, and she stepped out into the hallway. Noah’s deep tones in a muffled conversation and Miss Janie’s sobbing sent her down the stairs in a hurry.
She met Noah in the downstairs hallway. “This time I don’t know what to do with her. Can you go in there, please? Maybe seeing you will calm her down. Right now she’s sixteen, and today she arrived here to live with Aunt Ruthie. I swear she feels like she gave birth a couple of days ago and can hardly move. I’m going to call the doctor.”
Teresa left him standing in the hallway, rushed into the bedroom, sat down on the edge of the bed, and took Miss Janie’s hand in hers.
“What’s the matter, darlin’? What can I do to help?” she asked.
“I want to hold my babies again. I don’t want to give them away. Aunt Ruthie told me that she offered to help me raise them, but my parents won’t hear of it. I’ve shamed them, and they won’t let me keep my babies,” she said between bouts of sobbing. “Help me, please.”
Teresa remembered a patient in the nursing home who’d had dementia and had evidently lost a child when she was a young woman. Someone had finally had the foresight to give her a baby doll, and she had taken care of it like it was real until she’d died a few weeks later.
“If you won’t tell the head nurse on me, I will bring the babies,” Teresa whispered.
“For real?” Miss Janie’s eyes lit up. “You can do that?”
“Yes, I can, but you have to promise me that you won’t cry like that anymore. You break my heart when you do,” Teresa answered. “All you have to do is tell them to get me when you want to see the babies. I’ll sneak them out of the nursery and bring them right to you.”
Noah met her at the doorway and whispered, “Are you bat-crap crazy, woman? The only way we’re going to get two babies is to steal them from the hospital in Sulphur Springs, and I’m not going to jail for kidnapping.”
“I’m not crazy, and I know what I’m doin’.” Teresa brushed past him.
“I doubt that,” Noah called after her. “If there are babies upstairs, I’ll eat my socks.”
“You better take your shoes off and get out the mustard. I hear socks are a bit hard to get down without some mustard and a little pepper,” she shot back at him.
Hoping that Kayla hadn’t taken everything out of her room when she left, she went there first. Other than the fact that the walls in Kayla’s room were pale green and Teresa’s were light yellow, the rooms were exactly alike—her baby doll still slept in its little cradle. Teresa picked it up, made sure the blanket was wrapped neatly around it, and then retrieved the one from her room. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she cradled one in the crook of each of her arms and headed toward Miss Janie’s room.
Noah met her in the hallway again and held up a finger. “The doctor says the pain in her pelvic bones is probably what is causing that feeling that she had after giving birth. What are you doing with those dolls?”
“These are not dolls today. They are real babies, and don’t you say anything to contradict that. My heart breaks when she sobs for the babies that she can’t have, so we’re making substitutions,” Teresa answered. “Can she have more medicine for the pain?”
Noah shook his head. “She’s on the maximum dose that she can have without going to the hospital. She made me promise not to let her die anywhere but right here. The doctor says that she’ll probably spend more