The paper felt thin in my fingers.
That was the first thing I noticed.
Not the writing.
Not the age.
Just how easily it seemed it might tear if I held it too tightly.
I had spent the whole conversation holding on to the end of the pew.
Now I had something else in my hands.
A letter.
According to Rebecca, it had come from the woman who raised her.
I looked at the folded edges.
I wondered how many times Rebecca had opened it.
How often she had read the words inside.
How long she had been trying to make sense of the story her adoptive mother left behind.
I hadn't opened it yet.
I needed another moment.
Rebecca didn't hurry me.
For that, I was grateful.
I had been hurried through too much in my life.
Or perhaps I had simply accepted things too quickly.
That was how it felt standing there.
In 1971, Mama told me my daughter had died.
I believed her.
I didn't have any reason, at least none I understood then, to think she would deceive me.
She was my mother.
That had been enough.
Now I was looking at a letter from a different mother.
A woman I had never known.
And her daughter was standing in front of me, waiting.
I looked up.
“Your mother gave you this?”
Rebecca nodded.
“Yes.”
“Before she passed?”
“Yes.”
I lowered my eyes.
“And she explained what it was?”
“She told me what she had been keeping from me.”
I held the paper against my palm.
I didn't want to assume anything that wasn't written there.
Rebecca had given me an account of what she knew.
I wanted to believe she was sincere.
But sincerity wasn't the same as certainty.
I had learned that already.
Or was beginning to.
“Did she tell you why?” I asked.
Rebecca's face tightened.
“Why she hadn't told me earlier?”
I nodded.
She looked down.
“I had questions after she told me.”
I understood that answer better than I wanted to.
Questions.
I had dozens already.
And I hadn't even read the letter.
I looked toward Mama's casket again.
The church was still the same church.
The people were still the same people.
Nothing had happened that anyone standing farther away would have understood.
A grieving daughter had been approached by a woman.
They had spoken.
A piece of paper had changed hands.
That was all anyone could see.
But I was no longer thinking about the funeral in the same way.
I had come to bury my mother.
Now I was wondering whether she had buried the truth about my child.
I didn't want to use that word.
Truth.
It felt too final.
I wanted to say misunderstanding.
Or confusion.
I wanted there to be something simple that could explain how Rebecca knew about my baby and my mother's words.
But each time I tried to find a simple answer, I looked at Rebecca's face.
And there was the chin.
I had noticed it early in our conversation.
I hadn't been able to stop noticing it.
She wasn't a young girl.
She was a grown woman.
There were years in her face.
Experiences I knew nothing about.
I couldn't imagine the child she might have been.
Yet something about her expression, when she waited for me to speak, made me feel a tenderness I hadn't expected.
I tried to push it away.
Not because it was unpleasant.
Because it frightened me.
I had protected myself from hope for most of my life.
Hope had seemed cruel when my daughter was dead.
There was no reason to picture her growing older.
No reason to wonder where she might be.
No reason to imagine meeting her.
I had kept that part of my heart closed because there was nobody left to come home.
Now Rebecca was asking me to consider that the door had been closed on a living person.
I felt tears rise.
I blinked them back.
Rebecca saw.
“You don't have to do this all at once,” she said.
I looked at her.
I wanted to tell her that I had already waited too long.
If she was my child, every minute suddenly seemed important.
But I couldn't rush into calling her my daughter.
Not without knowing.
That would have been unfair to both of us.
“I don't know what to say to you,” I admitted.
She nodded.
“I wasn't sure what to say either.”
I looked at the letter.
It was still folded.
I could open it.
I knew that.
My hands simply wouldn't move.
“I thought I knew everything that mattered about that night,” I said.
Rebecca listened.
“Mama told me what happened.”
I paused.
“She told me you were gone.”
The word you surprised me.
I hadn't intended to say it.
I looked up quickly.
Rebecca had heard.
Her face changed.
She pressed her lips together and lowered her eyes.
I felt something inside me give way.
Not belief.
Not yet.
Something smaller.
I had stopped speaking about my daughter as a memory and begun speaking to the woman who might be her.
I couldn't take that back.
I didn't want to.
But I was frightened of what it meant.
“I'm sorry,” I said.
Rebecca shook her head.
“Please don't apologize.”
I looked at her.
“I'm not trying to hurt you.”
“I know.”
“I just can't understand how this could be true.”
She wiped her eyes.
“I had trouble understanding it too.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
I thought about the woman who had raised Rebecca.
She had died three months earlier.
That meant Rebecca had already lost the mother she knew before coming to find the one she had been separated from.
If her account was right, she had spent years being loved by another woman while I believed she was in the ground.
That was a difficult thought.
It brought relief and grief together in a way I couldn't untangle.
I wanted my daughter to have lived.
Of course I did.
I would have given anything for that.
But I hadn't expected the possibility of her life to hurt.
I hadn't expected to feel the weight of all the ordinary things I might have missed.
A first word.
A birthday.
A child reaching for her mother's hand.
I caught myself imagining those things and stopped.
I didn't know Rebecca's childhood.
I had no right to fill it in with what I wished had happened.
That was another hard truth.
She was a stranger.
Even if she was my daughter, I didn't know her.
I didn't know the sound of her laugh.
I didn't know what had frightened her when she was little.
I didn't know how her adoptive mother had comforted her.
All I knew was her name.
Rebecca.
I said it silently to myself.
Then I looked at her again.
“Did you know my mother would be here today?”
Rebecca glanced toward the casket.
She nodded.
“I knew I had to speak to you before she was laid to rest.”
I followed her eyes.
That was the reason she had come.
Not to interrupt a funeral for the sake of making a scene.
Not to embarrass me.
She had found herself facing a moment that could not be repeated.
The woman who had told me my daughter died was about to be buried.
And Rebecca had decided I needed to know what she had discovered.
I couldn't say whether I would have had the courage to do the same.
I hope I would have.
But I had spent most of my life avoiding the questions that were now rising inside me.
I looked back down at the letter.
My thumb rested on the fold.
I could feel the slight ridge in the paper.
For years, the only account I had was Mama's.
Now there was another.
I had to decide whether to hear it.
I thought about my mother lying a few steps away.
I loved her.
That hadn't changed.
But loving someone didn't mean every word they had spoken was true.
I had never needed to separate those things before.
Now I did.
Rebecca stood quietly in front of me.
She had stopped trying to convince me.
She had put the paper in my hands.
What happened next was mine to choose.
I lifted my eyes.
“Rebecca, I can't tell you I believe everything yet.”
She nodded.
“I understand.”
“But I don't want you to leave thinking I refused to listen.”
Her mouth trembled.
I looked at the letter again.
I had spent fifty-five years living with an answer I never questioned.
I was no longer sure that answer was right.
That was all I could admit.
It was enough to make me open the folded paper.
Click here to continue reading: PART 5: The Letter Was Open in My Hands, and I Was Afraid of What It Might Tell Me About My Mother
I Was Standing Beside My Mother’s Casket When a Stranger Asked for the Name I Had Used All My Life
Part 4 of 10
