Edna Vogel did not run, and she did not deny anything. She stood in the front pew in her navy dress with one hand pressed flat against her chest, staring at the rusted plate on the spray of roses. Then she said, in a voice I had never heard from her, “Karen, I have carried this for forty years. Please let me sit down and say it.” The pastor helped her to the fellowship hall. Dale and I followed. My husband closed the door behind us.
She told it with her hands folded, exactly the way my mother used to sit on that bench. Her son Gary had gone to California in 1981 and fallen in with a bad crowd in Fresno. In August of 1984 he had telephoned her from a truck stop in Ogallala, crying. He said he had a little girl with him and could not bring her back. She told him to turn around. He hung up. She never saw him again.
She said she had known for forty years where my sister might be. In 1998, a Christmas card had come from Oregon with no return address, and a photograph of a laughing girl of eighteen in a graduation gown. On the back, in the hand of her son: She is well. She is loved. Please do not come. Edna had kept it in her Bible. She had never shown it to my mother. She could not bear to choose between the two people she loved most, and so she had chosen silence, which was the worst choice of all.
A mother who watches the road for thirty one years has not wasted a single Sunday, because love that keeps looking is how the lost are finally found.
I screamed at her. I am not proud of it. I said every unforgivable thing a daughter says to the friend who stood at her wedding. Dale put one big hand on my shoulder and I stopped, because I saw that Edna was weeping with her mouth open and no sound, the way my mother did when I was small. Then I asked her for the card. She had it in her purse. She had brought it to the funeral, meaning to burn it at the grave, and had not been able to.
The photograph showed a young woman with white blond hair and the eyes of my mother. Sheriff Brandt reopened the file that Wednesday. It took the Oregon authorities nine days. Gary Vogel had died of a stroke in 2009 in Coos Bay, and his record listed one surviving child, a daughter named Annie Mercer, forty six, a registered nurse at the hospital there. She had been raised by a man and a woman who told her she was adopted from a church home in Nevada. She had never been told otherwise.
I wrote her a letter and rewrote it eleven times. In the end I wrote only what was true. I said that my name was Karen, that I was her sister, and that our mother had watched the westbound lanes of Interstate 80 every Sunday for thirty one years because she could not stop hoping. I enclosed the photograph of a little girl in a red jumper. I mailed it on a Friday. I did not sleep for six nights. On the seventh, my phone rang with a number from Oregon.
She did not say hello. She said, “I have had a red jumper in a box since I was a child. I never knew why I kept it.” We both began to cry. We talked for four hours. She had the voice of my mother, low and plain, with the same careful pauses, and twice I had to set the phone on the counter and breathe. She said she had always felt, in a crowd, that she was looking for somebody. I told her that somebody had been looking for her.
She flew to North Platte in October. I met her at the little airport in the wind, and I knew her before she came through the door, because she walked exactly as our mother walked. We drove directly to the cemetery. Dale was already there, standing beside the grave in his leather vest with his cap in his hands. He had taken the rusty license plate off the roses and cleaned it, and he handed it to Annie as if it were a medal.
Annie knelt in the grass and put her palm on the stone. She stayed there a long while. Then she said, “I am sorry I was one week late.” I knelt beside her and said that our mother would have told her she was right on time. Edna gave a full statement to the sheriff and was spared a trial because of her age. She lives now in a small room at the care home on Dewey Street, and Annie visits her, which is more grace than I could have managed.
On Sundays after church, my sister and I drive out to the rest area near Sutherland. We sit on the bench closest to the westbound lanes with a thermos of coffee and a plate of pot roast sandwiches, and we watch the cars go by. We are not looking for anything anymore. We simply sit together, two women with the eyes of our mother, and when the wind rises off the plains, one of us says her name.