The voice on the telephone at six in the morning was warm and low and a little shaky, the voice of a woman who has practiced a sentence a hundred times in a car. “Mr. Engstrom? My name is Annika Hale. I am sorry to call so early. I am sitting in a gas station in Two Harbors with a cup of coffee I cannot drink. I have been parked outside your road for an hour, and I cannot make myself turn in.” I told her I would put the kettle on. I did not ask a single question. I did not trust my own voice.
I stood on the porch in my barn coat while the sun came up red over Lake Superior, and a small gray car came up the long gravel lane at the speed of a funeral. A woman got out. She was forty one, I knew, but she looked like a girl in the cold light, tall, dark haired, with the exact gray eyes of my wife. In her hand she held a battered shoebox. Behind her, Lise from Missoula climbed out of the passenger side and waved shyly. They had driven all night, the two of them, through Montana and North Dakota.
At the kitchen table, over coffee and toast, Annika told me what she knew. She had been born in Duluth in January of 1983, to a girl of seventeen who gave her up the same week. The adoption was arranged in secret by a Lutheran pastor. For her first three months she lived at a children home in Missoula, in a wooden crib by a window, wrapped in a red wool blanket that the staff said came in the mail every December. Then a couple adopted her and took her to Idaho. She never knew about the blanket until last month.
I sat there with my hands around the cup and the whole of my married life rearranged itself in my mind like pieces on a board. Ingrid had been eighteen when I met her at a church supper in the summer of 1983. She had seemed older than her years, and quiet, with a sadness that I took for shyness. I had married her in September. I had been so happy that I never noticed what was missing from the story. A girl who knitted like other people breathe. A woman who always kept one chair at the table empty at Christmas.
A mother who gives her child away does not stop mothering. She only learns to do it in the dark, one stitch at a time.
Annika opened the shoebox. Inside were the letters. Lise had found them in the files of the children home, tucked behind a card catalog, a bundle of forty one envelopes, one for each year, each addressed in the careful hand of my wife to Annika, care of Missoula. The home had never opened them because the instructions said to deliver only if the girl herself came asking. Annika had been the first to come. She laid them on the table in a row, and I recognized every stamp, every swirl of the handwriting of Ingrid.
We read them together, taking turns, until the coffee went cold and the morning light moved across the linoleum. They were not long. Dear Annika, one began. Today you are three, and I imagine you in a yellow dress. Dear Annika, you are nine now, and I hope someone taught you to ride a bike. Dear Annika, I married a good man this year, and I cannot tell him, because I am afraid I will lose him. Dear Annika, I knit a scarf every winter and I send it to the coldest child. I pretend each one is you.
My voice broke on the one from 1997, the year the bank nearly took the farm. Annika, the farm may be gone by spring. I do not know how to tell Walt that I have been writing to a daughter he does not know about, and I am so afraid that if I do, I will lose the only family I have ever really had. I laid my head on my arms on the table and wept. Annika came around the table and put her arms around my shoulders, and I smelled the shampoo of my wife on her, or I imagined it.
“Mr. Engstrom,” she said. “Walt. I did not come to take anything. I came because I needed to know who she was.” I took her face in my hands, and I told her what I would have said to Ingrid if I had been given one more chance. I told her that nothing in the world could have made me love her mother less, that I would have raised that baby as my own, and that Ingrid had carried a burden alone for forty years that she never needed to carry. Then I told her to call me Walt, or anything she liked.
My sons arrived by noon. Erik drove from Minneapolis and Soren from Fargo, and when they came through the door, stiff and startled, they stopped in their tracks. Annika stood by the stove. Soren, the younger, looked at her, then at the photograph of his mother on the wall, and said in a whisper, “Oh.” That was all. Then he crossed the kitchen in three strides and hugged his sister so hard she squeaked. Erik stood in the doorway with his hand over his mouth and said, “I always wanted a sister.”
We stayed up past midnight, the five of us, with Lise on the couch. Annika told us about her husband, a high school science teacher, and her two daughters, who were sixteen and thirteen and had never once been told that their grandmother was a famous knitter. In the morning I went to the chair by the stove and picked up the red skein with the needles still stuck in it, the six rows my wife had knit before she died. I held it out to my daughter.
Annika had never knit anything in her life. I showed her how to cast on, awkwardly, with my big farmer fingers. She finished the scarf by Christmas, crooked and lumpy and a little too long. We mailed it, as Ingrid always had, to the post office box in Missoula. Lise wrote back that it went to the smallest boy in the home, a five year old named Gabriel, who wore it to bed. On the tag inside the cowl, Annika stitched a name in red thread. Ingrid.