The voice on the phone at six in the morning belonged to a young woman who spoke so fast and so softly that I had to ask her twice to repeat her name. She said it was Hannah. Hannah Bauknecht. She said she was sorry to call at dawn, but she had been sitting in her car in the parking lot of McCulloch Park since midnight, and she had watched my car go by yesterday, and she thought I might be the lady who had found the wallet. “It was mine,” she said. “I dropped it. And I have to explain, because I do not want Grandma to think the worst.”
I told her to wait where she was. I woke Mrs. Bauknecht, who was sleeping on my couch with her oxygen line coiled beside her, because she had refused to go home until she knew. We drove to the park in my car, the old woman hunched in the front seat with her hands in her lap and her eyes fixed on the road. The morning mist lay on the water of the pond. At the edge of the lot, beside a battered green hatchback, a young woman of about twenty three stood with her arms wrapped around herself. She had a long dark braid and the gray eyes of Danny.
Mrs. Bauknecht got out of the car without a word. She stood on the gravel, and the girl looked at her, and then the old woman made a sound I had never heard a human being make, a soft cry like a hurt animal. “Danny,” she said. “You have his eyes.” The girl ran to her. They held each other in the pale light with their faces buried in each other shoulders, while I stood by the car with my hand on the door and tears streaming down my own face, not wanting to intrude.
It took a long time for Hannah to tell the story, sitting on a bench by the water with her grandmother wrapped in a blanket on one side and me on the other. Danny had not drowned in 2003, she said. After the fight with his wife, he had walked to the pond at midnight, in despair, and sat in the dark intending to do something terrible. But a night fisherman, an old man in a plaid cap, had talked to him. He had listened for hours. At dawn Danny took the first bus out of town, leaving his truck, with the keys in the ignition, because he could not face anyone.
Sometimes a man must disappear before he can be found, and sometimes a family must wait twenty two years for him to find his way back.
He went to Oregon, Hannah said. He worked on a fishing boat, then a lumber mill, and he got sober in a church basement. He met a woman. He remarried, built a small house, coached a girls soccer team. He never found the courage to contact the mother he had left behind, because every year the shame grew heavier. His first wife, the mother of Hannah, had moved to Arizona after 2003 and told their daughter her father was dead. Hannah believed it until she was twenty one, when a genetic test led her, trembling, to a stranger in Oregon.
“We met a year ago last September,” she said. “He was waiting at the airport with a bunch of daisies. I knew him at once. He cried for an hour. He told me everything.” She took the wallet from her pocket. I had returned it to the porch rail of Mrs. Bauknecht on Thursday, and the old woman had carried it home. “This was his,” Hannah said. “He kept it all those years, the license, the photograph. On the back he wrote the date we first met. He was proud of that day. He said it was the best day of his life.”
I glanced at Mrs. Bauknecht. She sat very still. Then she asked, in a voice thin as paper, “Where is he now?” Hannah looked down. Her braid fell across her shoulder. “He died five weeks ago, Grandma,” she said. “A heart attack, in his sleep. He was forty six. He left a letter for you.” She reached into her jacket and pulled out an envelope, the paper crinkled from being carried. “And he asked me to bring his ashes to the pond. He said it was the one place on earth where he had been happy as a boy.”
We sat there in silence for a long while. The mist was burning off the water now, and the first sunlight lay across the cattails like gold leaf. Mrs. Bauknecht opened the letter with fingers that shook. She read it slowly, with her lips moving. When she finished, she folded it in half, and then in half again, and held it to her cheek. “He says he is sorry,” she said. “He says there is no one he loved more. He says he waited too long.” Her mouth trembled. “He says he forgives me for not looking harder.”
I did not know what to say. I pressed her hand. The old woman turned her face to the sun and closed her eyes. Then she asked Hannah where her father wanted to be scattered. Hannah pointed to the edge of the water, to the place where the cattails parted and a patch of clear water showed. “Here,” she said. “Where the wallet fell. I think I dropped it on purpose, Grandma. I think part of me wanted someone to find it.” Mrs. Bauknecht smiled, and her whole face lit up. “Well, someone did,” she said.
They scattered the ashes together at noon. I stayed back by the willow, but I could hear them. Hannah read a poem her father had liked. Mrs. Bauknecht, supported on the arm of her granddaughter, spoke to him in Polish, in the soft old words of her own mother. I think she was saying a lullaby. When the wind lifted the gray dust off the water and carried it toward the trees, a pair of herons rose from the reeds and flapped across the pond in slow, silent arcs.
Mrs. Bauknecht lives with Hannah now, in a bright little house in Tucson, where the oxygen is easier to manage. She writes me every month, in a clear round hand. She says her granddaughter reads to her at night. She says she has hung a photograph of Danny above her bed, and that every morning she says good day to it. In September, on the anniversary of the day I found the wallet, I fished at the pond again. I caught a big old fish, and I stood in the cattails a long time, and I let it go.