Denise arranged for us to review the documents she'd been permitted to obtain.
She asked us to meet at her office instead of trying to explain everything by telephone.
Ellen and I drove to Louisiana again.
This time Paul came with us.
He stayed outside with a book while we met the attorney.
“I don't want to crowd you,” he said.
I told him his company on the drive was plenty.
Denise laid the papers on a clean desk.
She gave us time to look before explaining them.
The adoption order was dated months after Ellen's birth.
It showed the Rountrees had become her legal parents through a court process.
The consent document was shorter.
My name appeared near the bottom.
Under it was a signature.
I recognized the first letter.
The rest was an uneven scrawl.
I had once signed library cards, school forms, and pay slips in a hurry.
I could not say with certainty whether that mark was mine.
“Was I awake when this was signed?” I asked.
Denise shook her head.
“The form alone doesn't answer that.”
“Was Mama there?”
“There is a witness name and an official stamp. Neither proves where your mother was standing at the time.”
I looked at Ellen.
She was studying the page as though she could hear a voice inside it.
“We need the witness records,” she said.
“If any survive,” Denise replied.
She explained that challenging an adoption finalized more than five decades earlier would be complicated and might have limited practical value now.
Ellen was an adult with an established legal family.
Neither of us was asking the court to take that family away.
Our immediate goal was to understand the circumstances and preserve what could be documented.
“Could we prove the signature was forged?” I asked.
“Possibly with expert analysis and comparison samples, if there is enough reliable material. But no one can guarantee a conclusion from one old copy.”
I asked whether we needed that answer to confirm Ellen was my daughter.
“No,” she said. “The parentage evidence and the adoption paperwork address different questions.”
I let those words settle.
I had wanted a single document to explain everything.
There wasn't one.
We would have to live with degrees of knowledge.
Some facts were firm.
Some were uncertain.
Some might remain uncertain forever.
Ellen asked for copies of everything we were entitled to keep.
Denise provided them.
She also told us that a local historical researcher had found a newspaper notice about Harold Franklin retiring from a community agency in the early eighties.
He had died many years ago.
His papers in the historical collection were incomplete.
There was no surviving interview with him about our case.
I looked at the photocopied signature again.
I wanted to ask a dead man what he'd seen.
I wanted to ask Mama why she'd told me the baby died instead of telling me there had been an adoption.
I wanted to ask Aunt Lydia why she had stayed silent.
None of them could answer now.
Outside, Paul rose from his chair when he saw us.
He didn't ask whether we'd found the truth.
He asked whether we wanted lunch.
We went to a cafe where the waitress brought three glasses of water without being asked.
Ellen barely touched her sandwich.
I slid half my biscuit toward her.
“Eat something.”
She laughed weakly.
“You sound like a mother.”
I wasn't sure whether to smile.
Then I did.
“That's because I am one.”
Later we drove past the neighborhood where Aunt Lydia had lived.
Her house had been replaced by a newer one.
The oak tree at the corner still stood.
I remembered sitting under it during my pregnancy.
I had been afraid to go outside where neighbors could see me.
Lydia told me to stay inside after dark.
She didn't want gossip.
I had spent months learning to make myself small.
I already stood only four foot eleven.
There hadn't been much of me left to shrink.
Ellen asked if I wanted to stop.
“Not today.”
On the drive home we talked about whether to pursue a handwriting expert.
I said I wanted time to decide.
Ellen said the same.
We didn't need to turn every remaining question into a legal battle.
Still, there were practical things to do.
Denise advised us to preserve the originals we possessed, record their sources, and avoid writing notes on them.
I bought a packet of protective sleeves at an office-supply store.
I put Mama's letters inside.
Ellen kept copies of the documents she'd received.
We made a list of who had each item.
It was not exciting work.
But after fifty-five years of silence, even careful filing felt like a kind of respect.
Two days later I found my old high-school yearbook.
I had kept it in a trunk with Roy's military-style work jackets and our wedding album.
Inside the back cover were my signatures on notes I had written to friends.
One looked similar to the consent form.
Another did not.
I photographed both for Denise, then put the yearbook away.
I refused to announce a conclusion from two scrawls.
Ellen called that evening.
“I've been thinking about Miriam,” she said.
“What about her?”
“She asked your mother whether you'd chosen the adoption. I spent years wishing she'd asked harder.”
I took a long breath.
“She may have been afraid of losing you.”
“I know.”
“That doesn't make it right to ignore a question.”
“I know that too.”
We sat quietly on the line.
Then Ellen said something that eased the ache in my chest.
“I can love her and still wish she'd done more.”
“That's how I feel about Mama.”
It was the first time we'd spoken plainly about loving people who had failed us.
Neither feeling canceled the other.
I carried the telephone into the living room.
Mama's empty chair faced the window.
I put a clean cover over it.
I wasn't ready to give the chair away.
But I was ready to stop pretending it still belonged to the person who would come through the door at any minute.
When I told Ellen that, she said she understood.
She'd kept Miriam's favorite apron for six years after her death.
“I finally wore it last Christmas,” she said. “I got gravy on it.”
“Good,” I told her.
“Good?”
“Aprons are made to get gravy on.”
She laughed.
And for a moment, our past was only one part of the conversation.
Back in Texas, June came over with a small tin box she'd found in the garage.
It had belonged to Aunt Lydia.
The lock was broken and the lid came off with a soft squeak.
Inside were postcards, recipes, and a handful of letters tied with string.
June had already checked that none belonged to a living person who might have expected privacy.
She gave me the letters with Lydia's handwriting on them.
One was addressed to Mama but had never been mailed.
I read it at the kitchen table while June made coffee.
Lydia wrote that the young girl in her house had asked again to hold her baby.
She wrote that she couldn't bear another night of hearing me cry.
She urged Mama to come back and tell me what had happened.
The letter stopped there.
It didn't say whether Lydia ever sent a different version.
It didn't tell me what Mama replied.
But it showed that someone had known I wanted my daughter.
I sat with the paper flat beneath my hands.
June brought two cups over.
“I wish she'd told you,” she said.
“So do I.”
“Are you angry with her?”
“Yes.”
“I'm angry too.”
We drank our coffee while the afternoon light moved across the table.
I remembered Aunt Lydia as a woman who kept a spotless house and knew how to make biscuits without measuring flour.
I also remembered the way she had checked the curtains before allowing me to sit near the window.
People could be generous in one room and cowardly in another.
I didn't know whether that made them difficult to love or just human.
June asked whether I thought the letter would help if we ever pursued the signature question.
“Maybe as context,” I said. “Denise will know better.”
I photographed both sides and wrote down where the original came from.
Then I put it in a protective sleeve.
June watched me.
“You've become very organized.”
“I wasn't given much information for fifty-five years. I intend to keep track of what I have now.”
She nodded.
After she left, I looked through Roy's photographs.
I found one of us at the state fair the year we married.
He had an arm around my shoulders and a paper cup in his other hand.
I was laughing.
I tried to remember what we'd said before the picture was taken.
I couldn't.
That frightened me for a moment.
The past didn't keep every detail simply because I wanted it to.
I sat down and wrote what I remembered of the hospital.
The white curtain.
The nurse's soft voice.
Aunt Lydia's blue dress.
Mama's purse in her lap.
The moment I asked to see my daughter.
I put question marks beside things I wasn't certain about.
I didn't want my memory to become another story that shut out questions.
When I finished, I called Ellen.
I told her about Lydia's letter and the notes I'd written.
She asked whether she could have copies.
“Of course.”
Then she asked whether I was all right.
“Not completely.”
“Do you want company?”
“I think I want a quiet night.”
“All right.”
She sounded neither offended nor disappointed.
“I'll call tomorrow.”
I set the phone down.
For years the people around me had made choices because they claimed to know what would spare me pain.
Now I could say I wanted quiet, and someone would believe me.
That was a kind of safety I'd never thought to ask for.
I took my notebook into the bedroom.
Before turning out the light, I wrote one more sentence.
If we cannot know everything, we can at least tell each other what we do know.
I put the notebook beside my bed so I could add questions without losing sleep over them.
Click here to continue reading: PART 10: I LOST HOURS AT WORK, BUT MY DAUGHTER HELPED ME FIND A FUTURE THAT WAS STILL MY OWN
THE WOMAN IN THE BACK PEW WALKED TOWARD ME WHILE MY MOTHER WAITED TO BE BURIED
Part 9 of 12
