Now Walter was telling me that perhaps the truth was more complicated.
“Did she ever look for me?”
Walter nodded.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“More than once.”
“How could she not find me?”
“The adoption was closed. We didn’t know what name you’d been given or where the family lived. Kate tried when you were older. Margaret tried again later. They made calls, wrote letters, followed every lead they could find. Nothing went anywhere.”
“Then where is Kate?”
That question finally broke him.
Walter lowered his gaze.
“She died nine years ago.”
I sat down.
For more than 40 years, my biological mother had existed somewhere in the abstract.
Maybe she was alive.
Maybe she was dead.
Maybe she was happy or miserable.
Maybe she wondered about me.
Maybe she never thought about me at all.
Now she had a name.
Kate.
And she had been dead for nine years.
“You expect me to believe she searched for me?”
“No,” Walter said. “I expect you to ask me to prove it.”
I looked at him.
He stood.
“I have something at my house.”
“I’ll come.”
My husband began getting up, but I shook my head.
“I need to do this.”
Walter and I walked next door in silence.
I had been inside his house hundreds of times.
Now it suddenly felt completely unfamiliar.
He disappeared into his bedroom and came back carrying an old cardboard box.
He placed it on the coffee table.
Inside were documents, faded photographs, envelopes, and a tiny hospital bracelet.
The first thing he handed me was a photograph.
A young woman held a newborn baby.
I knew before Walter said a word.
Kate had my chin.
Or maybe I had hers.
“That’s you,” Walter said.
I touched the edge of the photograph.
Then I discovered the letters.
Several were addressed simply to “My daughter.”
“She couldn’t send them,” Walter said. “For a while, she wrote anyway.”
“Did you read them?”
“Not all of them.”
I opened one.
Kate had written it when I was six years old.
She wondered if I liked books.
She wondered what color my bedroom was and whether I slept with a night-light.
She hoped my adoptive parents celebrated birthdays in a big way and had family traditions that were already becoming part of my childhood.
More than anything, she hoped someone was always waiting for me when I came home.
I couldn’t keep reading.
By six, I had already left the home that was supposed to be permanent.
By eight, I packed my belongings more carefully than most children because I already understood how quickly another move could happen.
Kate hadn’t known.
In her mind, I was safe.
That knowledge didn’t erase the choice she had made.
