The first Saturday after the funeral, Ellen brought Paul to my house.
He was a tall man with a slow smile.
He took off his shoes at the door without being asked.
“I hope it's all right,” he said. “Ellen tells me you like a clean floor.”
“I like a clean floor because I don't have time to clean it twice.”
He laughed.
Ellen smiled as if she'd been waiting for us to get along.
He carried a tin of biscuits he'd made before they drove over.
They were still warm.
We ate them with strawberry preserves while the ceiling fan creaked above the table.
Paul didn't try to ask me difficult questions.
He told me about their garden and the dog they had adopted from a shelter.
He said Ellen always grew too many tomatoes.
“You can stop talking about me as if I'm not here,” she told him.
“I'm trying to make a good impression.”
“You've already brought biscuits.”
I laughed.
It felt strange, laughing in Mama's kitchen with the daughter Mama had hidden from me.
Then Ellen opened the small case she'd brought.
Inside was a folder of letters from Miriam Rountree.
She'd found them among her mother's belongings when she started looking for her birth family.
“I brought copies,” she said. “You can read them whenever you want.”
I told her I wanted to start now.
The first letter was from 1971.
Miriam wrote to Mama about the baby's weight and the way she liked to sleep with one fist tucked under her chin.
She thanked Mama for helping them become parents.
At the bottom, in careful handwriting, Miriam added a question.
Has Ona been told about the placement? I would sleep better knowing she understands and has had a chance to make her own choice.
There was no reply in the folder.
A second letter, sent six weeks later, was more direct.
Walter says the agency assures us the paperwork is proper, but I have never heard from Ona herself. Please tell me whether she is well.
I read that sentence aloud.
“They knew something was wrong.”
Ellen shook her head.
“They suspected something. That's not the same as knowing.”
I looked at her.
I didn't want her defending her adoptive parents out of habit.
But I didn't want to accuse people who couldn't answer either.
“I don't know what they were told,” Ellen continued. “They might have been lied to too.”
Paul put down his mug.
“Ellen's mother spent years worrying about the way she came into the family,” he said. “She told me that once. But she didn't know how to fix what had happened.”
“What did you say to her?”
“I said Ellen deserved the truth. Miriam agreed. She just didn't have all of it.”
We read the remaining letters.
A note from Mama told Miriam to stop asking about me.
It said I was recovering and would not welcome contact.
Another letter from Walter said they would comply with the agreement made through the hospital.
He wrote that they had moved to give the child a quiet home.
Then the correspondence stopped.
I turned the papers face down.
“My mother didn't only lie to me,” I said.
“She may have lied to them,” Ellen said.
I looked at the empty chair where Mama used to sit.
There had been no grand conspiracy in that kitchen.
Just a woman who thought she could control a shameful story by refusing to speak its name.
But a lie didn't need to be grand to ruin a lifetime.
I stood to wash the dishes.
Ellen came beside me.
“Let me dry.”
I handed her a towel.
She put the plates away in the wrong cupboard.
I almost corrected her.
Then I decided the plates could stay there until morning.
At noon Paul went out to see whether my Buick's brake noise was something simple.
He took a look and told me it needed a mechanic, not a driveway guess.
I appreciated that.
Too many people had been certain about things they didn't understand.
Ellen helped me carry Mama's birthday-card box to the table.
I had put all fifty-three cards in order.
She looked at the lid.
“Are those for me?”
“I found them in her room.”
“Did she send any?”
“No.”
I gave her the first one.
She read it without speaking.
Then she picked up another.
I watched her face change with each year.
There was a card from when she turned eighteen.
Mama had written, You may be setting out on your own now.
There was one from her thirtieth birthday.
Mama had wondered whether she had children.
Ellen stopped reading.
“She knew my name,” she said.
“She knew from the beginning.”
“Did she ever ask about my life?”
I showed her the letters.
There were not many answers to that question.
For decades Mama seemed to have known only the fact of Ellen's existence.
Then, in the last two years, she had learned about her family.
Ellen touched one card with her thumb.
“I don't know whether I want these.”
“You don't have to take them.”
“They make me sad.”
“Me too.”
She closed the box.
We left it on the table.
Later we walked to the memorial garden.
Paul stayed near the church entrance, giving us room.
Ellen had brought a single pink rose.
I carried the old white carnations from the stone to the trash bin because they had begun to wilt.
I hesitated before placing the pink rose down.
“Would you mind?” I asked.
“What?”
“If I stopped putting birthday flowers here.”
Ellen looked at the stone.
“I think the flowers helped you survive.”
“They did.”
“You don't have to keep doing something that hurts you now.”
I nodded.
We stayed in the garden until the church bells struck two.
The following week I visited my husband's grave.
Roy was buried on the other side of the cemetery.
I told him the news out loud.
“You were right about one thing,” I said. “Some things we can't understand while we're living them.”
Then I shook my head.
“No. You weren't right about everything. We should have asked harder questions.”
Roy had believed Mama because I believed Mama.
We had never requested a death certificate for a baby who had supposedly died somewhere else.
There had always been another bill or a long workday or a reason not to reopen the wound.
I didn't blame him for that.
I simply wished he'd been alive to meet Ellen.
Back home, I found a message from Denise.
She had located an old register showing a family-services employee named Harold Franklin associated with St. Anne's in 1971.
It was only a directory entry.
It did not prove what he did.
But there was a chance his papers had been donated to a county historical collection after his death.
A librarian would check the inventory.
I called Ellen.
“There's another box somewhere,” I told her.
She was quiet for a moment.
“Doll, don't go looking at it by yourself.”
“I won't.”
I sat at Mama's kitchen table afterward and thought about what that promise meant.
I had spent my life being the person who managed hard things alone.
Now there was someone I could ask to sit beside me.
I wasn't used to it.
But I was willing to learn.
I thought about it all morning before saying yes.
Nancy met us in a coffee shop near Ellen's home.
She was eighty-one and walked with a cane.
She greeted Ellen with the ease of someone who'd known her forever.
Then she turned to me.
“I have wanted to meet you for a long time,” she said.
I asked how much she knew.
“Not enough to make judgments,” she answered.
That was a good beginning.
Nancy remembered Miriam bringing a baby home in a satin gown.
She remembered Walter putting together a crib in their rented house.
She remembered the couple being nervous because the paperwork hadn't been completed.
“Did Miriam say who the birth mother was?” I asked.
“She said there was a young woman in Louisiana who needed help.”
“Did she say the girl wanted an adoption?”
Nancy shook her head.
“She never told me that.”
I studied my coffee.
“So nobody asked?”
“Miriam asked the people arranging it,” Nancy replied. “I know because she worried about it. But I don't know what answer she was given.”
Ellen listened without interrupting.
Nancy told us that Miriam had once considered contacting the birth family.
Walter had discouraged it because he feared upsetting a situation they believed was settled.
I felt anger rise again.
But Nancy wasn't defending him.
She was describing a frightened young father who'd finally been given the chance to raise a child.
“I wish he'd been braver,” I said.
“So do I,” Nancy answered.
We sat in silence for a moment.
Then she told Ellen a story about the first time she brought a school friend home.
Miriam had baked a cake for no reason at all.
Ellen groaned.
“She baked cakes for everything.”
“She wanted you to feel celebrated,” Nancy said.
I could hear affection in her voice.
I wanted to resent every happy memory of my child with the Rountrees.
I couldn't.
She had been loved.
That was a mercy in the middle of what had been taken from me.
After Nancy left, Ellen and I stayed at the table.
“Was that too hard?” she asked.
“It was hard. I'm still glad we did it.”
“Did you mind hearing about Mother?”
“No. I mind that I wasn't told the truth. That's different.”
Ellen nodded.
We talked about the way families can pass down silence as if it were a good habit.
She told me Miriam would change the subject when adoption came up.
I told her Mama did the same whenever anybody said Rountree.
The similarity was painful.
Two women who loved the same child had both been afraid of questions.
We agreed not to let that happen between us.
If either of us needed time before answering, we could say so plainly.
If a question hurt, we could admit that without pretending it had not been asked.
In the car, Ellen turned to me.
“Can I tell you something that might be difficult?”
“Go ahead.”
“I don't wish I had been raised somewhere else.”
I felt the words settle.
“I understand.”
“I wish you had been told I was alive. I wish someone had let you know me.”
I looked out at the traffic.
“That's what I wish too.”
It was one of the few things we could agree on without having to choose between the people who had raised us.
Click here to continue reading: PART 6: THE OLD HOSPITAL LEDGER GAVE US A DATE, BUT THE MISSING CONSENT PAPER STILL HAD NO ANSWER
THE WOMAN IN THE BACK PEW WALKED TOWARD ME WHILE MY MOTHER WAITED TO BE BURIED
Part 5 of 12
