Chapter 6: The Photograph on the Step
I called David the next morning.
"Did you read it?" he asked.
He picked up on the second ring, which meant he had been waiting.
"Yes."
"Are you all right?"
"I don't know yet." I moved to the window.
My daughter was in the garden with my husband, pulling at the deflated paddling pool.
"Who is Margaret Elise Calloway?"
A pause.
"She told you about Margaret."
"She wrote about her.
Do you know who she is?"
"I know what Mum told me," he said.
"Years ago.
Not everything.
Just that there was a woman in the ward.
That she d*ed.
That Mum never forgot her."
"Did she ever try to find the daughter?"
"I don't think so.
I think she felt it wasn't her place." Another pause.
"Why?"
"I want to find her."
Silence.
"The daughter," I said.
"Margaret's daughter.
I want to find her."
"That was thirty years ago," David said.
"You don't even have a surname for the daughter.
You only have the mother's name."
"I know."
"It might not be possible."
"I know that too."
He was quiet for a moment.
Outside, my daughter had sat down directly on top of the deflated paddling pool and was looking very pleased with herself.
"Does this have something to do with the treatment?" David asked carefully.
"The calls that stopped."
"Grandma wrote it because she wanted me to know someone was listening," I said.
"I think that woman's daughter never got to know that.
I think she's been carrying that for thirty years."
David didn't answer right away.
"You're very like her," he said finally.
"You know that."
I drove to Grandma's house that afternoon.
She was in her chair by the window, the one she mentioned in the letter.
The photograph was on the table beside her — me at four, on the front step, in the dress.
I sat down across from her.
"I read it," I said.
She nodded.
"All of it."
"I know.
Your voice sounds different."
"Does it?"
"Lighter," she said.
"A little lighter."
I looked at the photograph.
"Can I ask you something about Margaret?"
Her hands shifted in her lap.
"You can ask."
"Did she know you were listening?
When she called her daughter every evening.
Did she know you could hear?"
Grandma was quiet for a long moment.
"We never spoke about it directly," she said.
"But one evening her daughter must have said something difficult on the telephone, because Margaret was very quiet afterward.
And I said, through the curtain — I didn't pull it back, I just said through it — I said, 'She loves you.
You can hear it even from here.'"
I waited.
"Margaret said, 'Thank you.' That was all.
Just thank you." She paused.
"But she said it like it mattered."
I looked at the photograph again.
The small girl in the ivory dress on the front step, squinting into the sun.
"I want to try to find her daughter," I said.
Grandma turned her face toward me.
She couldn't see my expression clearly, I knew that.
She was working from the shape of me and the sound of my voice and thirty-eight years of knowing me.
"I thought you might," she said.
"You wrote it hoping I would."
The corner of her mouth moved.
"I wrote it because it was true.
What you do with true things is your own business."
I reached across and took her hand.
"The stitching on the left side of the collar," I said.
"I looked this morning.
You can't tell."
"I can tell."
"Grandma.
You cannot tell."
"I made it," she said.
"I can tell."
We sat like that for a while.
The afternoon light came through the window the way it always had in that room.
The photograph sat on the table between us, the small girl and the dress and the front step, and for the first time in my life I understood that the story behind it was longer and older and more layered than I had ever imagined.
"Will you help me?" I asked.
"Finding her.
Will you tell me anything else you remember about Margaret?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"She had red hair," she said.
"Going gray at the temples.
She was younger than me — I think she was in her fifties.
She talked about her daughter like she was the best thing she'd ever done." A pause.
"She said her daughter's name once.
On the phone.
She said it the way you say a name when you're relieved to hear the voice."
"What was the name?"
May you like
Grandma turned toward the window.
"Nora," she said.
