Chapter 4: The Address on the Paper
None of us recognized it.
Leila read it aloud twice.
A street name, a town about forty minutes from where we grew up, and a name written above it in Nora's handwriting.
*Aunt Ruth.*
Mom's chair scraped back from the table.
"Mom." I reached toward her.
"Who is Aunt Ruth?"
She was already standing, her hand pressed flat against the kitchen counter, her back to us.
"Mom," Leila said.
"We don't have an aunt named Ruth."
"You don't know her," Mom said.
Her voice had changed.
Something had closed off in it.
"Nora did," I said.
"Nora knew her well enough to write down her address and put it in the box."
Mom turned around.
Her eyes were dry now, which somehow made it worse.
"She was my sister," Mom said.
"We stopped speaking before you were born.
Long before."
Leila and I looked at each other.
"You have a sister," Leila said slowly.
"Had.
Have.
I don't know what we are to each other anymore." Mom sat back down.
"We had a falling out.
It was serious.
I made a decision and Ruth disagreed with it and we said things that couldn't be unsaid.
That was over twenty-five years ago."
"Did Nora know about her?" I asked.
Mom was quiet for a moment too long.
"She overheard a phone call," Mom finally said.
"When she was in the hospital.
Ruth called to ask about her.
I didn't know Nora was awake." Mom looked at the address in Leila's hand.
"I didn't know she had heard enough to remember a street address."
"She didn't just remember it," Leila said.
"She wrote it down and put it in the box.
She wanted us to find it."
"Why?" I asked.
"What was the falling out about?"
Mom shook her head.
"That is between Ruth and me."
"Nora made it our business," I said.
"She put that address in the box she left us.
She had a reason."
"You don't know that."
"I know Nora," I said.
"She didn't do anything without a reason."
The table went quiet.
The photograph was still face-up between us.
Nora in the middle, smiling, arms around both of us.
Leila set the paper down on the table beside the photograph.
"I want to go," Leila said.
"I want to go to that address."
"Leila—"
"She put it there for us, Mom.
Not for you.
For us." Leila's voice was steady but her jaw was tight.
"You kept a whole person from us our entire lives.
We had an aunt and we didn't know she existed.
Nora knew.
Nora thought it was important enough to include in the only thing she ever left us." Leila looked at Mom directly.
"I want to know why."
Mom didn't answer immediately.
She looked at the address.
She looked at the photograph.
Something moved across her face — not quite guilt, not quite grief, something that sat between the two.
"Ruth doesn't know about the box," Mom said quietly.
"Then we'll tell her," I said.
"She may not want to see you.
She may not want to revisit any of this."
"That's her choice to make," Leila said.
"Not yours."
Mom pressed both hands flat on the table.
A long exhale.
"If you go," she said, "I need to come with you."
Leila and I both looked at her.
"There are things Ruth needs to hear from me first," Mom said.
"Before she hears anything from you.
I owe her that much." She picked up her own unopened envelope from the table.
She turned it over in her hands.
"And I think Nora knew that too."
We left within the hour.
The drive was mostly silent.
Mom sat in the back seat with her envelope in her lap, unopened still.
Leila drove.
I watched the towns pass outside the window and thought about a ten-year-old girl in a hospital bed, listening to a phone call, quietly writing down an address she had no reason to believe she would ever be able to deliver herself.
She had trusted us to deliver it instead.
The house at the address was a small white one on a quiet street.
A garden out front.
A light on inside even though it was still morning.
Mom got out of the car first.
She stood on the pavement for a moment, looking at the front door.
"I don't know if she'll open it," Mom said.
"Only one way to find out," Leila said.
Mom walked up the path.
She knocked.
We waited.
The door opened — and the woman standing there looked at our mother and went completely still.
Then she looked past Mom at the two of us, and something shifted in her expression that I didn't have a word for yet.
"Carol," the woman said.
Her voice was careful.
Controlled.
"Who are they?"
"My daughters," Mom said.
"Two of them."
Ruth looked at us for a long moment.
"You said two of them," she said.
Mom's breath caught.
May you like
"Come inside," Ruth said quietly.
"All of you."
