Chapter 7 - The Unopened Envelope
I don’t know why.
Maybe I wanted answers.
Maybe I wanted to sit inside a piece of my past long enough to understand why it had found me again.
Sarah showed me the photographs.
They were kept in a shoebox beneath the bed.
The first few were ordinary.
Neighborhood picnics.
Children on bicycles.
Women standing beside cars that looked ancient now.
Then Sarah handed me one that took the air from my lungs.
My mother stood on the front steps of our old apartment building.
She was younger than I remembered her.
Beside her stood another woman holding a baby.
Evelyn, presumably.
And sitting on the steps between them was me.
Eleven years old.
Skinny.
Serious.
Trying hard not to smile.
“You were terrible at photographs,” Sarah said.
“I hated them.”
“You look angry.”
“I probably was.”
Sarah handed me another.
In this one, I was holding the baby.
Her.
“You dropped my sock,” she said.
I looked closer.
The infant in my arms had one bare foot.
“You remember that?”
“My mother wrote it on the back.”
I turned the photograph over.
In faded blue ink were the words:
Nathan holding Sarah. Lost one sock. Blamed the baby.
I laughed.
A real laugh this time.
Lily immediately came over.
“What?”
“Apparently I blamed your mother for losing her sock.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No.”
“Babies can’t be blamed.”
“I’m learning that now.”
Sarah smiled.
But then she reached deeper into the box.
“There’s something else.”
She removed an envelope.
Unlike the others, it wasn’t old.
The paper had yellowed slightly, but it had been sealed carefully.
My name was written across the front.
Nathan Hale.
I stared at it.
“That’s my mother’s handwriting.”
“I know.”
My chest tightened.
“When did she give this to your mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“You never opened it?”
“It wasn’t addressed to us.”
My mother had been dead for nineteen years.
Nineteen years.
Yet here, in a cramped apartment I had nearly emptied with a legal notice, was an envelope she had written to me.
My hands suddenly felt clumsy.
“Why do you have this?”
“My mother kept it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You never asked?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“She always said, ‘One day he’ll need it more than he wants it.’”
I almost smiled.
That sounded irritatingly like something my mother would approve of.
“Your mother knew where I was?”
“Of course.”
“I became easy to find.”
“I don’t mean after you became successful.”
Sarah’s voice softened.
“She knew where you were before that.”
Something in me stilled.
“What does that mean?”
Sarah looked uncertain.
“I think you should read the letter.”
I held the envelope.
Then stopped.
Not because I didn’t want to open it.
Because suddenly I wanted to too much.
I placed it on the table.
“Not yet.”
Sarah didn’t question me.
Lily did.
“Why not?”
“Because sometimes adults need time before reading letters.”
“Why?”
“Because adults are strange.”
She nodded.
“That’s true.”
Sarah gave her a look.
May you like
“What?”
“Nothing.”
