By sunrise I had convinced myself that the letter meant nothing.
R could have stood for a caseworker, an attorney, an agency clerk, or some administrative notation whose meaning had disappeared with time.
That explanation would have been easier to accept if Rebecca’s adoption had been handled through a conventional agency.
It hadn’t.
Carol had always described it as a private placement arranged through people her family trusted.
At the time, I considered that good fortune.
Now I sat at the kitchen table with the folder spread before me, rereading documents I had signed almost four decades earlier.
The names were familiar.
The facts were not.
Or perhaps I had simply never looked closely enough.
Rebecca had come to us when she was only weeks old. The biological parents were listed as confidential. The attorney handling the placement was Franklin Dale, a Millfield lawyer who had died more than fifteen years earlier.
I remembered him mainly as a bald man who smelled of peppermint and wore three-piece suits even in July.
There was nothing visibly improper in the papers.
Yet the phrase Carol had used for years returned to me.
Your mother knew somebody.
I had never asked who.
Why would I?
We wanted a child. A child needed a home. Adults we trusted handled the paperwork.
That had been enough.
I poured coffee and left it untouched.
At eight thirty, the phone rang.
Rebecca.
I stared at the screen before answering.
“You’re awake,” she said.
“I’m seventy-two, not seventeen.”
“You were always up before me even when I was seventeen.”
“You considered noon early.”
“Did you eat breakfast?”
“Coffee.”
“Coffee is not breakfast.”
“It contains beans.”
“That joke was bad when Mom used it.”
The silence that followed was small but painful.
Rebecca recovered first. “I was thinking of coming back next weekend.”
“You don’t need to.”
“I wasn’t asking permission.”
I smiled faintly. “That sounds familiar.”
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“What did Mom mean?”
I looked down at the adoption folder.
“What are you talking about?”
“At the hospital. She told me I deserved the truth.”
“She was fading in and out.”
“No. She looked straight at me.”
I rubbed my forehead.
“Do you know something?”
“No.”
The lie came too quickly.
Rebecca heard it.
“Dad.”
“I found something strange in an old file.”
“What file?”
I hesitated.
“Your adoption papers.”
Silence.
Rebecca had always known she was adopted. Carol and I agreed before bringing her home that there would be no dramatic revelation someday. Adoption was simply part of her history.
She had never seemed troubled by it.
“What’s strange?” she asked.
“Probably nothing.”
“What?”
“A handwritten note.”
“What does it say?”
I read the line.
“Who’s R?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think it means Grandma Ruth?”
“I don’t know.”
Another silence.
“You said ‘probably nothing,’ but you don’t sound like you believe that.”
I pushed the papers away. “Your mother asked me to do something before she died.”
“What?”
I closed my eyes.
There was no good reason to keep Anna secret now.
“She asked me to find somebody.”
“Who?”
“A woman named Anna Mercer.”
Rebecca waited.
“She was someone I knew before your mother.”
“Knew how?”
I almost laughed at the directness.
“We were engaged.”
“Oh.”
“Long before Carol and I got married.”
“I understand chronological order, Dad.”
“Right.”
Rebecca breathed out slowly. “Why would Mom ask you to find your former fiancée?”
“That is precisely the question.”
“And she asked you right before she died?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“She said I would understand after I found Anna.”
Rebecca went quiet again.
I did not tell her the final sentence.
Forgive me in advance.
Not yet.
“Are you going to look for her?” Rebecca asked.
“I don’t know.”
“That means yes.”
“I buried my wife four days ago.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to turn her last hours into some investigation.”
“Maybe Mom wanted you to.”
I looked toward Carol’s empty chair.
“What if I find something I would rather not know?”
Rebecca answered without hesitation.
“That doesn’t make it untrue.”
After we hung up, I sat there for nearly an hour.
Rebecca had inherited that stubborn insistence on uncomfortable facts from somewhere.
Until that week, I would have said Carol.
By noon, I drove to the cemetery.
The fresh soil above Carol’s grave was darker than the surrounding earth. Funeral flowers lay against the temporary marker, their petals already curling at the edges.
I stood with my hands in my coat pockets.
“You left me a mess,” I said.
Wind moved across the cemetery grass.
“I know that sounds selfish.”
A pickup passed on the road beyond the fence.
“Thirty-six years, Carol.”
My voice failed on her name.
I stared at the flowers until my vision cleared.
“Why couldn’t you tell me?”
No answer came.
I felt foolish expecting one.
Then anger rose again, quiet and dense.
“If this was something small, you would have told me yourself.”
That was the problem.
Carol had never been dramatic.
She did not manufacture mysteries.
If she believed I needed to find Anna after forty years, then Anna knew something Carol could not bring herself to say.
I returned home and took out my laptop.
Searching for Anna should have been simple in an age when strangers could locate one another through school groups, public records, photographs, and social media.
It wasn’t.
Anna Mercer was not an unusual name.
The college alumni directory listed no current address.
Old classmates produced marriages, divorces, deaths, and changed surnames.
I spent five hours following people who turned out to be unrelated.
Near dusk, I found a scanned photograph from our graduating class.
There she was.
Twenty years old.
Dark hair to her shoulders.
A serious mouth that always looked on the verge of smiling.
And those eyes.
I enlarged the image.
Green.
My fingers froze on the keyboard.
I leaned closer.
Green eyes were not evidence of anything.
Millions of people had green eyes.
Anna’s were darker than Rebecca’s anyway.
Still, I heard myself say, “No.”
I shut the laptop.
The house felt too warm.
I opened the back door and stood on the porch until cold air cleared my head.
That was when another memory surfaced.
The summer before Anna disappeared, my mother had invited her to dinner.
Ruth had been polite all evening.
Too polite, I now realized.
Afterward, while Anna helped Carol clear dishes at a church event several weeks later, my mother had made some remark I could no longer remember.
Anna went quiet.
When I asked what was wrong, she told me nothing.
At twenty-two, I had accepted nothing as an answer.
That habit was beginning to look expensive.
The next morning, I called the alumni office.
The woman who answered was cheerful until I explained I was searching for someone from the class of 1985.
“We can’t release private contact information.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“What are you asking?”
“Could you forward a message?”
“If we have a current email, perhaps.”
I gave Anna’s full name.
Keys clicked.
“No current address.”
“Do you have anything?”
“Her record hasn’t been updated in years.”
“What about classmates listed as emergency contacts?”
“We don’t maintain that.”
I thanked her and nearly hung up.
Then she said, “You might try the reunion committee from the thirty-year gathering. Several class members volunteered to locate former students.”
She gave me two names.
One was unfamiliar.
The other was Diane Keller.
I sat back.
I remembered Diane.
She had been Anna’s roommate for one semester and one of her closest friends afterward.
More importantly, Diane had been the person I called after Anna vanished.
In 1985, she refused to help me.
I searched for her.
Ten minutes later I had a number.
It took another twenty minutes to press call.
A woman answered on the fourth ring.
“Hello?”
“Is this Diane Keller?”
“Who’s asking?”
“My name is Walter Hayes.”
Silence.
Not ordinary silence.
Recognition.
“Diane?”
“I know who you are.”
My skin prickled.
“It’s been a long time.”
“Forty-one years.”
“You remember exactly.”
“I remember that year.”
I gripped the phone.
“I’m trying to find Anna.”
The line became so quiet I checked the screen to make sure the call had not dropped.
Finally Diane said, “Why?”
“My wife died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Before she died, she asked me to find Anna.”
Diane inhaled sharply.
“You’re married to Carol?”
“Was.”
Another silence.
I stood.
“You knew Carol?”
“I have to go.”
“Wait.”
“I can’t help you.”
“You haven’t even heard why—”
“I said I can’t help.”
“Diane, please.”
Her voice hardened. “Some things should have been dealt with forty years ago.”
My chest tightened.
“I tried.”
“No.”
“What?”
“You tried to find Anna after everything was already over.”
“Everything was over because she left me.”
Diane said nothing.
“Didn’t she?”
A faint sound came through the phone, almost like a sigh.
“Diane.”
“I shouldn’t have answered.”
“You knew why she left.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Did my mother have something to do with it?”
The question stopped her.
I heard breathing.
Then Diane said, very quietly, “Walter, if you find Anna, don’t go to her expecting the story you’ve been telling yourself.”
The call ended.
I remained standing beside the kitchen table with the phone against my ear.
Diane had not given me an address.
She had given me something worse.
A reason to believe the past I remembered was not the past that had actually happened.
Click here to continue reading: PART 4: The Friend Who Refused to Help Me Finally Called Back, and One Question About My Mother Changed Everything I Remembered
On the Last Night Carol Could Speak Clearly, She Asked Me to Find the Woman I Had Spent Forty Years Forgetting
Part 3 of 35
