I had spent fifty-five years believing one woman.
Now I was standing beside her casket, holding a letter from another woman, and I didn't know which of them had told the truth.
The paper was open in my hands.
I looked down at it.
Rebecca stood across from me, watching without saying anything.
I had asked her to let me see it.
Now that she had, I almost wished I had waited.
There was something frightening about having a question answered when you had spent most of your life avoiding the question itself.
I looked at the old folds.
The paper had been opened many times.
I could tell by the places where it had started to weaken.
Rebecca had carried it for years.
That was what she had told me.
I wondered how many times she had held it the same way I was holding it now.
How many times she had looked for an explanation that might make the past easier to understand.
I couldn't ask her everything at once.
I could barely manage the question that had been troubling me since she walked into the church.
“Your mother really told you where you came from?”
Rebecca nodded.
“She did.”
I looked at her.
“And you believed her?”
She pressed her lips together.
“I had to think about it.”
That answer surprised me.
I had expected her to say yes without hesitation.
After all, she had come to this funeral and approached a woman she had never met.
She had called me her mother.
She had seemed certain enough to risk saying something that could hurt us both.
But now I saw that certainty had not come easily.
She had needed time.
Just as I did.
I looked at the letter again.
“Was this the only thing she gave you?”
“No. There was a box of papers.”
I remembered that.
She had mentioned the box almost as soon as she began explaining herself.
I hadn't paid enough attention then.
I had been too busy trying to convince her that she was mistaken.
Now every small detail seemed important.
A box.
A letter.
An adoptive mother who had died three months earlier.
A daughter who had been searching for me.
I had never imagined those things belonged in the story of my life.
And yet Rebecca had brought them into the church as though they had always been there.
I looked toward Mama's casket.
For the first time since the funeral began, I didn't know what I wanted to say to her.
There had been years when I wished I could speak to her about my baby without crying.
Years when I wanted to ask whether she remembered how small my daughter had been.
Whether she remembered my face when she told me the baby was gone.
But I never asked those questions.
I accepted what Mama told me.
That was the beginning and end of it.
Now I wondered whether she had depended on my acceptance.
I hated myself for thinking that.
She was dead.
I was supposed to be remembering the good things about her.
Instead, I stood there wondering what she had known about a living child.
Rebecca moved slightly.
I looked up.
“I'm sorry,” she said.
I frowned.
“For what?”
“For bringing this to you here.”
I shook my head.
“You didn't choose when your mother died.”
“No.”
“And you didn't choose when mine died.”
Her eyes filled.
“No.”
I looked down at the letter.
“Then neither one of us chose this.”
It was the first thing I had said to her that felt fair.
I hadn't meant to be cruel before.
But I had been frightened.
And frightened people sometimes say things they would never say if they had a moment to think.
I remembered pulling my hands away from her.
I remembered telling her my daughter was dead.
I remembered how she looked when I said it.
She hadn't become angry.
She had simply tried again.
That patience hurt to remember.
I looked at her face.
The dimple in her chin was there.
The same little mark I had noticed when she first approached me.
I didn't want to make too much of it.
A resemblance could be a coincidence.
But I couldn't stop looking.
“Has anyone ever told you that you have a dimple right there?”
I touched my chin.
Rebecca watched me.
Then she touched hers.
Her mouth trembled.
I wished I hadn't mentioned it.
Not because I regretted the observation.
Because I saw how much it meant to her.
I had been looking for proof.
She had been looking for recognition.
Those were not the same thing.
I held the letter more carefully.
“Rebecca, I'm trying.”
She nodded quickly.
“I know.”
“I don't want you to think I'm turning you away.”
She wiped her eyes.
“I don't.”
But I wasn't certain she believed that.
I had already told her she couldn't be my daughter.
I had already treated her explanation as an accusation against my mother.
I couldn't undo those first few minutes.
I could only try not to hurt her again.
I looked down at the paper.
Something about holding it made the years feel different.
For fifty-five years, I had counted the time since my daughter's death.
Now I was being asked to consider that those same years might have been the years of her life.
I couldn't make my mind accept both ideas.
One had to be wrong.
And if the first was wrong, then everything I thought I understood about 1971 had been built on somebody else's words.
I swallowed.
“Tell me something.”
Rebecca looked at me.
“Anything I can.”
“When your mother gave you those papers, did she know you would look for me?”
Rebecca lowered her eyes.
“She wanted me to know the truth.”
It wasn't quite an answer.
But I understood that she wasn't going to pretend to know more than she did.
I respected her for that.
I had begun to see how dangerous certainty could be.
Mama had sounded certain.
I had believed her.
I had repeated her explanation for more than half a century.
And never once had I thought to distinguish between what I knew and what I had been told.
I looked at Rebecca.
“Did you know my name before you came here?”
She nodded.
I remembered how she had approached me.
She hadn't asked whether I was the woman who had lost a baby in 1971.
She had asked whether I was Doll.
That was the name people used for me.
A familiar name.
One that belonged to my everyday life.
Hearing it from Rebecca had made her seem less like a complete stranger.
Now it troubled me.
She had known what to call me.
She had come looking for someone specific.
I lowered my eyes.
“I'm trying to understand how much you already knew.”
“I understand.”
I wanted to ask a hundred more questions.
But each one seemed to lead back to the same place.
My mother.
Rebecca's adoptive mother.
The letter.
And the child who was supposed to have died.
I glanced toward the church doors.
People were still there.
The funeral had not stopped because my life had become unrecognizable.
That almost offended me.
I wanted the whole room to be quiet.
I wanted someone to tell me what to do.
But nobody else understood what was happening.
Rebecca and I were having a conversation that belonged to us.
I looked at the letter again.
“I never expected to see anything connected to her.”
Rebecca understood who I meant.
The baby.
My baby.
The child I had never known as anything other than a loss.
I could hardly make myself use the word daughter while looking at the woman in front of me.
It felt too soon.
And at the same time, fifty-five years too late.
“I used to think about what she might have looked like,” I admitted.
Rebecca said nothing.
“I don't mean all the time. But sometimes.”
I looked at her.
“I never imagined this.”
Her face changed.
I saw her trying not to cry again.
I looked away before I started crying too.
There were things I wanted to say that I didn't yet have the right words for.
I wanted to tell her that I hadn't forgotten my daughter.
I wanted to tell her that believing my child was dead had never meant I stopped loving her.
I wanted to tell her that if Rebecca was that child, I had not abandoned her by choice.
But I didn't know enough to say any of those things with certainty.
I had a letter.
I had a woman named Rebecca.
I had the memory of Mama telling me something terrible in 1971.
And I had a growing fear that my memory might be the only true part of what I had believed.
I looked toward Mama again.
For the first time, I allowed myself to think something I had been fighting since Rebecca approached me.
My mother might have known my daughter was alive.
I didn't say it aloud.
I wasn't ready.
But I didn't push it away either.
I lowered my eyes to the paper and made myself keep reading.
Click here to continue reading: PART 6: Every Question I Asked Rebecca Brought Me Back to the Same Terrible Possibility About the Night My Daughter Was Born
I Was Standing Beside My Mother’s Casket When a Stranger Asked for the Name I Had Used All My Life
Part 5 of 10
