I set my brush down real slow because the sealed box behind the fake vent was a small thing, no bigger than a breadbox, painted the same dull gray as the wall, with a lid held on by two screws. I had expected something terrible. In twenty years you learn to expect it. What I got, when I unscrewed the lid in the basement of that house outside Ravenswood, was a smell of old paper and lavender, and a stack of envelopes tied with a rubber band gone brittle with age. Hundreds of them. And every one was addressed to the same name in the same neat hand.
The couple who hired me, Terry and Janelle Ostrow, stood behind me on the basement stairs. They had bought the house six weeks earlier, and they were still sleeping on a mattress on the floor. When I held up the first envelope, Janelle said, “Daniel Lowe. Who is Daniel Lowe?” There was no stamp on it. No postmark. Each envelope was sealed and addressed, and not one of them had ever gone anywhere. I turned the top one over. On the back, in the same hand, was a date. March 3, 1968.
We carried the box upstairs to the kitchen table. Terry opened the first letter with a butter knife, since none of us wanted to tear anything. Dear Danny, it began. I hope you are warm. It is snowing here. Your father does not know I am writing. I think about you every day. Come home when you can. It was signed Mama. Janelle read a second one, and a third. They were all the same kind of letter, short, plain, full of weather and small news. The cat had kittens. The church roof was fixed. The pie came out right.
There were three hundred and eleven letters. Janelle counted them. One every week, nearly, from 1968 until 1991. All of them hidden in a sealed box behind a fake vent, in a house where a woman named Rose Lowe had lived until her death. Terry looked up the name on the deed. Rose Lowe, widowed in 1989, died in 1993. She had a son, Daniel, the records said, who had left the state at twenty one and never returned. On the last letter was a note in a different hand. Please forward to Daniel.
A mother can love her child across any number of years and miles, even when she cannot send a single word, even when she must hide the proof in a wall.
I knew the story before they told me. A boy of twenty one, in 1968, with a draft notice, and a father who had fought in Korea and believed a man should go. A boy who packed his bags and crossed the border into Canada in the night. A father who said his name was never again to be spoken in the house. I had a cousin who did the same. And a mother who was forbidden to write, and wrote anyway, every week, in secret, and could not mail a single page.
Terry and Janelle talked all that evening. At the end they asked if I would help them find him. I said I had a friend at the VFW, a clerk named Jim, who was good at that sort of thing. He found a Daniel Lowe in Winnipeg, Manitoba, seventy six years old, a retired high school music teacher. Janelle wrote him a letter, a real one, with a stamp, and she enclosed the first of the letters from his mother. She did not know if he would answer. We all waited. Three weeks went by.
On a Saturday morning in November a car with Canadian plates pulled up in front of the house. A tall old man in a gray wool coat got out slowly, holding a cane. He stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the windows for a long time. Janelle opened the door. Daniel stepped inside and stopped in the hall, and she saw that he was shaking. He said, in a quiet voice, “I used to hide behind that door and watch her bake.” He had come, he said, to see the kitchen.
They sat him at the table. They gave him the box. He did not open it right away. He put both hands on the lid and sat with his eyes closed. Then he took out a letter at random, from 1974, and began to read aloud in a steady voice. When he reached the end, he laid it down, and he put his face in his hands. He said that he had written to her, too, a hundred times, but his father had returned every letter unopened. He had assumed that she wanted nothing to do with him.
He stayed three days. He read every one of the three hundred and eleven letters, in the dining room, with a pot of tea at his elbow. Terry and Janelle left him alone, and brought him sandwiches on a tray. On the last evening he carried the stack out to the back yard and sat on the bench under the maple that his mother had planted the year he was born. Janelle watched from the window. He was talking, softly, to nobody, the way you talk to someone who is standing right next to you.
Before he left, he gave the Ostrows a gift. It was a small music box, the kind with a handle, that he had carried with him from Winnipeg. It played an old lullaby. He said his mother had given it to him on his fifth birthday. He wanted it to stay in the house, in the kitchen, where the music had begun. They put it on the windowsill above the sink, where it plays on rainy afternoons, and where Janelle, who was six months pregnant, now winds it every night for the child she is carrying.
I did my job and cleaned the vent, a real one this time, running clear to the outside, with fresh aluminum duct. I would not charge them. Terry insisted on paying, so I let him. But I kept the brush I had been holding when I opened that box, and it sits on a hook in my truck. A man learns a few things in a lifetime of the walls of other people. Mostly that a house is a keeper of secrets, and that a secret sealed in love will wait as long as it must.