Chapter 3 - What the Letter Said
My daughter Nancy is fifty-one, and in all that time I have never once seen her stuck for something to say.
She was stuck now.
She laid the letter on the table between us and stepped back from it like it was hot. "You have to read this yourself, Mom."
"Just tell me."
"I can't. You need to see his words."
I picked it up. Walter's handwriting wandered — shaky in one line, firm in the next, the writing of a man who kept setting the pen down and coming back days later. The date at the top was eleven months old. Almost a year before he ever called me.
Ruth,
I've started this letter more times than I can count. I burned the first four. I still don't know if I'll mail this one or burn it too. But my time is running out, and I've found I can't go without telling you what I did.
When I was twenty-two, your mother came to see me.
I stopped. "Nancy."
"Keep going."
She came to me about three weeks after I broke it off with you. She said you were pregnant. She said you didn't know yet — that she'd only just realized it herself, and she wanted to come to me first, to give me a chance to do right by you.
I asked her what "doing right" meant.
She said: leave. Vanish. Give Ruth a shot at a real life with a man who could take care of her. She said I was broke, aimless, and too young to be anyone's husband. She said you deserved more, and that you'd never leave me yourself because you loved me too much to do it.
She wasn't wrong about that last part.
My fingers had gone cold.
"Mom, sit down."
"I am sitting."
"You're standing. You stood up and didn't notice."
I looked down. She was right. I flattened my hand on the table and lowered myself back into the chair.
She gave me two days to think. When she came back, I told her I'd go. I told myself it was for you. I've spent fifty-five years telling myself that.
The truth is I was scared. Your mother handed me an excuse to run, and I ran.
What I didn't know — what I didn't learn until six months ago, when a doctor told me I was dying and I hired a woman to help me sort out my affairs — was that there really was a child. That you carried him. That you gave him up in the spring of 1969.
At birth, they wrote his name down as Peter.
I never knew, Ruth. I swear it on what's left of my life. I never knew.
There was more. I couldn't get to it yet. I set the letter down.
Nancy was watching me the way she used to as a girl when she'd broken something and was waiting to hear how much trouble she was in.
"You had a baby," she said. "Before me. Before Dad."
"I didn't know." My voice sounded borrowed. "I was eighteen, Nancy. I did not know I was pregnant."
"What happened to you? Do you remember any of it?"
I remembered being sick that winter. I remembered my mother packing me off to stay with her sister in New Hampshire for what she called a rest cure. I remembered coming home in April scooped out and empty and not understanding the feeling. I remembered her saying the mountain air had done me a world of good, and never once mentioning it again.
"She told me I'd been ill," I said.
Nancy sat down across from me. For a long minute, neither of us said anything.
"There's more, Mom."
"I know."
"Do you want me to read the rest to you?"
I looked at all those shaky lines. Fifty-five years of silence in every one.
"No. Give me a minute. Then I'll finish it myself."
I turned the page. At the bottom, in the steadiest hand in the whole letter, Walter had written one last paragraph.
His name now is Andrew. He's fifty-four. He lives in Spokane, Washington. He has been looking for you for eleven years. I've written down the name of the investigator who found him. He doesn't know I contacted her. He doesn't know this letter exists. All he knows is that his birth mother's name was Ruth, and that she was always worth finding.
The second photo is him at seven. It was in his adoption file.
I'm sorry, Ruth. For every year of it.
— Walter
Nancy was watching my face. "Mom?"
I picked up the second photograph again. The boy with the dark hair and the grin I couldn't place.
May you like
I could place it now. It was mine. My exact smile, sitting on a face I'd never been allowed to know.
"I have a son," I said. The words felt like something cracking open in my chest. "His name is Andrew."
