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“So, this one was a girl, baby number four, stillborn?” Mandy asked.
“Yes.”
“So, each line is a child?” Mandy pointed at a line.
“Yes.”
She looked up at Tess. “Which one is you?”
“Second to the last.” Tess pointed at her line; all it said was girl.
How old was your mother when you were born?” Mandy leaned back after reading the short line.
“Forty-two.” Tess knew that answer before the phone call with her sister; it was a well-known fact in the family.
“How about the last one?” Mandy looked at the paper again.
“Forty-three.” Tess smiled, though she didn’t know why.
“The final one was stillborn. Do you know why?”
“No, she would never have said if she knew. Ilya did not know either,” Tess replied, worrying what Mandy was asking about.
“Ilya?” Mandy asked.
“My sister.”
“Which line is she?” Mandy again looked at the paper.
Tess looked at the paper and pointed. “This one. She is my only sister.”
“How were her pregnancies?” Mandy questioned before adding, “No, you said hers were great. No miscarriages or stillbirths?”
Tess didn’t open the file and hand over that paper. She wanted to focus more on her mother’s past since that was closer to her future. “Just one, when she was in her twenties.”
“Was it her first, second, last?” Mandy took out her pen and started to write on Tess’s paper.
“No,” was all Tess said as Mandy’s black pen wrote on her blue-inked paper.
Mandy looked up at her. “Which birth then?”
“Sorry,” she said and opened her file and looked. “Fifth pregnancy.”
“I have some questions. You only have one sister? But this one was a live birth girl a few years before your sister’s birth.”
Tess looked. “Yes, she died before I was born.”
“How?” Mandy wrote something on the paper.
“Measles.”
“How?”
“I do not know, the usual way you die of measles. I never really heard. I was not there,” Tess said, looking at Mandy, who should know how a person dies of such diseases.
“How many others died of something after the age of, say, a week?” Mandy asked.
Tess leaned over and pointed, and Mandy marked them also. “These two also died of measles, and this one of mumps. These two died after I was born, but I do not remember them.”
