Chapter 4: The Box Under the Bed
I opened the box the next morning.
Tom had gone to work.
Max was at nursery.
Riley was still asleep — she didn't have school until ten, and I hadn't woken her.
I carried the box to the kitchen table and made myself a cup of tea first.
I don't know why.
Some kind of preparation.
Like I needed to be doing something ordinary with my hands before I did something that wasn't.
The cards were bundled in rubber bands by year.
Riley had written the years on small pieces of paper and tucked them in between each bundle.
Her handwriting changed as the years went on — big and looping at first, then smaller and more controlled, the handwriting of someone who had learned to take up less space.
I started at the beginning.
The first card was a birthday card.
Riley had just turned nine.
My mother's handwriting was the same as it always was — slightly forward-leaning, the letters never quite touching each other, like they were being careful.
*Happy birthday, my darling girl.
I'll always find you.
— Gran.*
That was all.
No long message.
Just that.
I sat with it for a while.
Then I kept going.
Christmas cards.
Easter cards.
Cards with no occasion at all, just because.
One that said: *I was thinking about you today and thought you should know.* One that said: *You are braver than you look, and you look very brave.* One from two years ago that said: *Don't let anyone make you small.
Not even yourself.*
I didn't know she sent these.
I didn't know any of this was happening — this quiet, steady correspondence between my mother and my daughter, conducted entirely without me.
I wasn't hurt by it.
I want to be clear about that.
I was something else.
Something I don't have a clean word for.
Moved, maybe.
Undone.
I heard Riley on the stairs before I saw her.
She stopped in the kitchen doorway when she saw the box open on the table.
"Sorry," I said.
"I should have asked."
"No." She came in and sat across from me.
She was still in her pajamas, her hair loose.
She looked younger than sixteen.
She looked like the child who had kept every card in a shoebox for seven years.
"It's okay."
"She never told me she sent these."
"I think she thought you'd worry," Riley said.
"About whether she was lonely.
She wasn't.
She just — liked writing to me."
"Did you write back?"
"Sometimes.
Mostly I'd call her." She pulled one knee up to her chest.
"We talked every Sunday.
After lunch.
You were usually napping."
I was usually napping.
Sunday afternoons, the one hour of the week I let myself go horizontal, and in the next room my daughter was on the phone with my mother, talking about things I hadn't known to ask about.
"What did you talk about?" I asked.
Riley thought about it.
"Everything.
School.
Boys, sometimes.
What she was watching on TV.
She loved that detective show — the one with the woman who never apologizes."
"She watched that for fifteen years."
"She told me." Riley almost smiled.
"She said the woman reminded her of her own mother."
I looked down at the card in my hand.
*I'll always find you.*
"She was scared," Riley said.
"Toward the end.
Not of — not of being gone.
More of being forgotten.
Of people remembering the wrong version of her.
The old lady version.
She wanted someone to remember who she actually was."
"And she chose you."
"She said I was the only one who already saw her that way." Riley's voice was steady, but her hands weren't.
She pressed them flat against the table.
"She said adults forget how to look at people properly.
That kids still do it."
I didn't say anything.
"She was right about that," Riley said.
"No offense."
"None taken."
We sat in the kitchen for a long time after that.
The tea went cold.
I didn't make more.
Outside, a neighbor's car started up and pulled away, and the street went quiet again, and neither of us moved to fill the silence.
Then Riley said, "She talked about you a lot, you know."
I looked up.
"She was proud of you." Her voice was careful.
"She said you'd had a harder life than you let on and that you'd never once asked anyone to notice."
My throat closed.
"She said she wished she'd told you more often." Riley's eyes were wet now — the first time, the very first time I had seen that in two weeks.
"She said she kept meaning to and then the days went fast."
May you like
I reached across the table and took her hand.
She let me.
