“I took it from her because I knew she couldn’t fight me.” I picked up the key to the desk in the study. The recording had been silent for a while, but Ruth started speaking again, her voice softer now. “Eleanor,” Ruth said, “I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m asking you to find her. Her last address that I know of is in the letters.” The letters that weren’t in the safe anymore. “I knew she couldn’t fight me.” I had to find them! “I owe her a daughter. I owe you a mother. I’m sorry I waited until I was dead to give you both back.” The tape clicked off. I thought Grandma Ruth’s
confession was the biggest secret I’d face that day. It hadn’t occurred to me yet that she might not have acted alone. “I’m asking you to find her.” I sat there a long time, then I heard the front door open downstairs. Aunt Diane’s voice called my name. I stumbled downstairs carrying the
cassette player, the key, and the bracelet. When I entered the kitchen, Diane took one look at me and her eyes went wide. Then she saw what I was carrying. “You know, don’t you?” she said. Aunt Diane’s voice called my name. “You knew?”
She pulled out a chair and sat. “I knew enough. It might sound harsh, but Mom did the right thing.”
“How can you say that?”
Diane folded her hands on the table. “Your mother was a mess, Eleanor. She couldn’t hold a job. She was twenty years old and barely keeping herself alive.”
“Mom did the right thing.”
I felt something hot rise behind my ribs, and I pushed it down.
“Where are the letters, Diane? The ones from my mother.”
Diane’s mouth tightened. “I’m telling you now, as someone who loves you, leave it alone.”
“I can’t.” I lifted the key. “They’re in the study, aren’t they? That’s why she left the key in the safe.”
Eleanor rose faster than I expected for a woman of sixty.
“Where are the letters, Diane?”
“Forget about those letters, or you’ll lose everything. The house. The trust. Me. All of it.” Her voice cracked just slightly. “Is a stranger worth that to you?”
“She is not a stranger.”
I walked past her into the study.
I slid the key into the desk drawer.
Diane appeared in the doorway behind me. “Don’t.”
“Is a stranger worth that to you?”
The drawer opened.
Inside was a folder filled with bundles of envelopes.
Dozens of them.
I picked up the top one.
The postmark was from 1993.
I opened it.
Inside was a folder filled with bundles of envelopes.
Please just tell me she is alive, Ruth.
Just send me one photo of my little girl.
My hands shook so badly that I had to set it down.
“Some people leave because they are empty,” Grandma had said, but Sarah hadn’t left at all.
“She wrote for years, Diane,” I lifted another letter. “She wanted me. I have to find her.”
“I have to find her.”
For thirty-two years I thought my mother chose absence.
The truth was she had been choosing me all along.
I turned the letter over to look at the return address.
Diane stepped closer, and her voice dropped low.
“If you contact that woman, I will contest the will,” Diane said.
“I will contest the will,”
“Do it.” I gathered the letters into my arms. “Take the house. Take the money. I do not want any of it.”
“You are being a child.”
“I am being honest.”
“She might not even live there anymore,” she said.
“Then I will find out where she went.”
“She might not even live there anymore,”
“And if she doesn’t want to see you?”
I paused at the door with the letters pressed against my chest.
“Then at least she will know I came looking.”
I walked out of the yellow house, and got into my car.
