The oldest nephew was a heavy man in his forties named Wade, with sawdust in his hair and a tape measure on his belt. He wiped his hands on his jeans and looked at me for a long moment, as though he were comparing my face to something he remembered. Then he said, “Mrs. Vollmer, Aunt Lucille told us a hundred times that if a woman named Elaine ever came to this house, we were to give her the cedar chest. We thought she was old and confused. I guess she was not.”
They carried it out of the back bedroom between two of them, a long dark chest with brass corners, and set it down on the lawn in the afternoon light. It smelled of cedar and lavender and something older. The lid was held shut with a loop of string. On top lay an envelope with my name written on it in blue ink, in the handwriting of a woman I had last seen at the funeral of my mother in 1990, or so I had always believed.
I opened the envelope there on the grass, with the sun on my shoulders and the nephews standing back in respectful silence. It was four pages, in a hand that wavered but did not hesitate. Elaine, my dear girl, it began. If you are reading this, I am gone, and the BCA has found you at last. I have waited thirty eight years for this. Sit down somewhere quiet. What I have to tell you is a hard thing, but it ends well, and I want you to know that before you begin.
A woman who loses her memory of a whole childhood may find that someone else has been carrying it for her all along, carefully, in a cedar chest.
Lucille wrote that in August of 1966, I had been a happy eight year old in Blue Earth, with a best friend named Shelly Arndt, and that the two of us had spent every day of that summer on the hood of a station wagon. That autumn, my father lost his job, and a terrible fever came to our house. I had been sick for nine weeks. When the fever broke, the doctor said my memory had burned away. My mother, who could not bear the questions, took the whole family to Mankato and began again.
Lucille wrote that she had kept the photograph of the two girls because she could not bear to lose it. Twenty years later, in the summer of 1986, a woman of twenty nine had knocked on her door in Mankato, looking for a childhood friend named Elaine. She was thin and frightened, and there was a bruise on her cheek. She was Shelly Arndt. She was married to a man named Dale Grosz, a policeman, who had hurt her for six years, and she had come to the only person she thought might help.
“I could not bring you into it,” Lucille wrote. “You had two small children then, and a husband who was not well. So I did what I could. I drove Shelly to a place in Minneapolis, where women go who are afraid. I helped her get a new name. I took her to a rest stop on Highway 169 and left her car there, empty, so that her husband would believe she had been taken by a stranger. It was the only way, Elaine. He would have killed her. I swear on the Bible, she lived.”
I read the sentence three times. Then I looked up at the nephews, who were studying the sky, and I began to laugh, a wild breathless laugh that came out of me like a bird. Shelly Arndt was alive. The investigator, who had been standing by his car with a cup of coffee from the gas station, came across the lawn at a walk, and I held out the letter, and he read it standing up. When he finished, he sat down on the grass beside me.
Her name was Michelle Kerr now, and she lived in Duluth. She was sixty eight years old and a retired school librarian. The BCA found her in three days. When they told her that the case had been reopened, she broke down on the telephone and asked, in a voice they all remembered afterward, whether Elaine had been told. Her husband of the old life had died in a prison in 2009, after being convicted of a different crime. She had been free to come home for fifteen years and had not dared.
We met on the north shore of Lake Superior, at a gray stone park by the water, on a cold morning in September. I saw her before she saw me. A tall woman with silver hair and a long wool coat, standing at the railing, her hands in her pockets. I walked up beside her and could not speak. She turned her head. She looked at me for the longest time, and then she said, with the tiniest smile, “You still have the crooked bangs.”
I did not remember her. I want to be honest about that. But I remembered, when she took my hand, the exact warmth of it, and some small door opened in the back of my mind. We have not recovered the lost years, and perhaps we never will. But on Tuesdays now we speak on the telephone for an hour, and on summer weekends we sit on the dock at her little house in Duluth, side by side, with our feet hanging over the water, two old women holding hands.