Johnson continued, “I stayed close because I loved Leo, but also because I felt guilty. I thought helping you was the only way I could make up for my silence.”
“What gave either of you the right to decide what I could handle?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I had no right.”
Leo finally spoke.
“So she left just after I was born? Did she even know my name?”
The question silenced us.
“Yes,” I said. “She chose it with me.”
“Did she ever hold me?”
I remembered Goldi standing over his bassinet in the darkness.
“Yes. When you were born, she did hold you.”
“So she didn’t leave because I have Down syndrome?”
“No. I thought so, too, but no.”
“She came to me the night before she left,” she said. “She showed me a letter from her doctor. She said the cancer had already spread.”
“You knew for 18 years?”
