Chapter 2
I reached the door before Dad could stop me.
For a second, my hand would not move on the lock.
I had imagined my mother’s voice thousands of times. Sometimes she sounded like the woman in the old answering machine message Dad had kept. Sometimes I heard my own voice speaking back to me.
Now a real woman stood on the porch, asking me to open the door.
I turned the lock.
Dad said my name behind me, but I pulled the door open.
The woman outside wore a dark coat and held her hands clasped at her waist. Her hair was threaded with gray. She had my eyes.
She looked at me as if she were afraid to blink.
“Grace?”
I nodded.
She put one hand against the porch rail. I thought she might fall.
“I’m Elena,” she said. “I’m your mother.”
I had carried anger into Dad’s house. At that moment I felt almost nothing. I stared at the small scar above her eyebrow, the shape of her mouth, the way she held herself when she was nervous.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to see David. I didn’t know you would be here.”
Dad appeared beside me.
“Elena, you need to leave.”
She looked past me at him.
“You said the box was gone.”
I turned toward Dad. “What box?”
“The letters,” she said. “I learned you still had them. I wanted them back.”
Dad opened his mouth, then closed it.
I stepped out onto the porch because the room behind me suddenly felt too small.
“How did you find out?” I asked her.
“My sister Ruth called me. David told her he was clearing the attic before repairs. She thought he might finally send you what I wrote.”
I remembered Aunt Ruth coming to Dad’s house the previous weekend. She was not my blood aunt; Dad had introduced her as an old family friend. She had watched me climb the attic stairs for holiday decorations and said nothing.
“She knew?” I asked.
Elena’s face tightened. “She found out a few months ago. She’s been trying to help me reach you.”
My phone was in my pocket. I had an address, a job, friends. Elena could have found me online.
“Why didn’t you call me yourself?”
“I tried, once I knew where you lived. I left a message with your office last month.”
I remembered it. A woman had called asking for Grace Bennett, refusing to say why. I had been in a meeting. By the time I returned the call, the number would not connect.
“I changed phones,” Elena said when I told her. “I should have tried again. I was afraid I’d make you feel hunted.”
Dad came onto the porch.
“There are things she doesn’t know,” he said.
“I’m standing right here,” I told him.
Elena lowered her gaze to the letter in my hand.
“May I ask which one you found?”
“My fifteenth birthday.”
She gave a small, pained smile.
“I sent one every year.”
“All of them?” I asked Dad.
He looked at the floorboards.
“I kept them.”
The empty feeling inside me gave way to heat.
“Did you read them?”
“Some.”
“Did you show me even one?”
“No.”
Elena pulled a folded photograph from her coat pocket. It showed me at a school concert when I was about ten. I was holding a paper star.
“Your grandmother sent me pictures,” she said. “Sometimes she asked for money. Sometimes she just wanted me to know she could still find you.”
I took the photograph. Dad made a sound behind me.
“You never told me that,” he said.
Elena faced him. “You never asked me.”
I wanted to hear everything and nothing. It was late. I had spent the day wondering whether my mother was alive, and now she stood close enough for me to touch.
“Start with the accident,” I said.
Elena leaned against the rail.
“There was no accident.”
I gripped the photograph.
“Where were you?”
“At first, in county jail. Then in prison. Your grandmother accused me of taking money from the family business.”
Dad said, “The records pointed to you.”
“Because she put my name on them.”
I looked between them. My father’s mother, Evelyn, had run a chain of small grocery stores. When I was a child, she bought me dresses and told me my mother had been lovely. She died three years ago. I had cried at her funeral.
“You told me Mom died,” I said to Dad. “You never told me she was in prison.”
“I didn’t want you hearing what people called her.”
“You could have told me she was alive.”
His voice broke. “I know.”
Elena took one step toward me, then stopped.
“I served four years. After that, I tried to see you. David had custody. There were court orders and arguments, and every time I thought I was close, the address changed or a letter came back.”
“I grew up in this house.”
“Your grandmother handled the mail for a while. When I finally learned you were here, David told me you knew about the case and didn’t want contact.”
I turned to Dad. “Did you say that?”
He shut his eyes.
“Yes.”
For the first time in my life, I wanted to leave him standing there.
Elena saw it on my face.
“You don’t have to decide anything tonight,” she said. “Ruth’s house is ten minutes away. I can give you the address.”
I took out my phone and typed it in as she spoke. My hands shook badly enough that I asked her to repeat the street number.
Then I walked down the porch steps.
Dad followed me to my car.
“Grace, I’ll tell you everything.”
“You had twenty-one years.”
I drove away with my mother’s letter on the seat beside me and her photograph in my coat pocket.
At the first traffic light, my phone rang.
It was Dad.
May you like
I let it ring. Then a message appeared.
There is something in that box Elena does not know I kept.
