Chapter 3: What the Letter Said
My daughter's name is Carol.
She is fifty-one years old and has never once in her life been at a loss for words.
She was at a loss for words now.
She set the letter down on the table between us and took a step back, as if it had burned her.
"Mom.
You need to read this yourself."
"Tell me what it says."
"I can't.
I — you need to read it."
I picked it up.
Thomas's handwriting was shaky in places, steady in others, as if he had written it over many days, putting it down and coming back to it.
The date at the top was eleven months ago.
Nearly a year before he called me.
*Eleanor,*
*I have started this letter more times than I can count.
I burned the first four.
I don't know if I'll send this one or burn it too.
But I am running out of time, and I find that I cannot leave without telling you what I did.*
*When I was twenty-two, your mother came to me.*
I stopped.
"Carol."
"Keep reading."
*She came to me three weeks after I ended things with you.
She told me you were pregnant.
She told me you didn't know yet — that she had only just found out herself, and that she had come to me before telling you because she wanted to give me the chance to do the right thing.*
*I asked her what she meant by the right thing.*
*She said: leave.
Disappear.
Give Eleanor a chance at a real life with someone who could provide for her.
She said I was too poor, too directionless, too young.
She said you deserved better and that you would never leave me on your own because you loved me too much.*
*She was not wrong about that last part.*
My hands had gone cold.
"Mom, sit down."
"I'm sitting."
"You're standing.
You stood up without noticing."
I looked down.
I had.
I pressed my hand flat against the table and made myself lower back into the chair.
*I told her I needed time to think.
She gave me forty-eight hours.
When she came back, I told her I would go.
I told myself I was doing it for you.
I have spent fifty-five years telling myself that.*
*The truth is that I was afraid.
Your mother gave me a reason to run, and I took it.*
*What I did not know — what I did not find out until six months ago, when my own doctor told me I was dying and I hired someone to help me put my affairs in order — is that the child existed.
That you carried him.
That you gave him up for adoption in the spring of 1969.*
*His name, at birth, was recorded as Daniel.*
*I never knew.
Eleanor, I swear to you on whatever time I have left — I never knew.*
The letter continued.
I couldn't read it yet.
I set it down and looked at Carol.
She was watching me with the expression she used to wear when she was small and had broken something and didn't know how bad the consequences would be.
"You had a baby," she said.
"Before me.
Before Dad."
"I didn't know." My voice didn't sound like mine.
"I genuinely did not know I was pregnant.
I was eighteen.
I didn't — I didn't know."
"What happened?
Do you remember anything?"
I remembered being ill that winter.
I remembered my mother sending me to stay with her sister in Vermont for what she called a rest.
I remembered coming home in April feeling hollowed out and not understanding why.
I remembered my mother saying the country air had done me good and never speaking of it again.
"She told me I had been sick," I said.
Carol sat down across from me.
Neither of us spoke for a long moment.
"Mom." She reached across and covered my hand with hers.
"There's more to the letter."
"I know."
"Do you want me to read it to you?"
I looked at Thomas's handwriting.
Fifty-five years of silence in every shaky line.
"No," I said.
"Give me a minute.
Then I'll finish it myself."
I turned the page.
At the bottom, in the steadiest handwriting of the whole letter, Thomas had written one final paragraph.
*His name now is Robert.
He is fifty-four years old.
He lives in Portland, Oregon.
He has been looking for you for eleven years.
I have enclosed the name of the investigator who found him.
He does not know I contacted her.
He does not know about this letter.
He only knows that his birth mother's name was Eleanor, and that she never stopped being worth finding.*
*The second photograph is him.
Age seven.
It was in his adoption file.*
*I am sorry, Eleanor.
For all of it.
For every year of it.*
*— Thomas*
Carol was watching my face.
"Mom?"
I picked up the second photograph.
The boy with the dark hair and the smile I hadn't been able to place.
I could place it now.
It was my smile.
Exactly my smile, on a face I had never been allowed to know.
"I have a son," I said.
May you like
The words felt like something breaking open.
"His name is Robert."
