…because the beam of my light fell across a small, rusted tin box, about the size of a bread loaf, wedged sideways into the hollow. It was wrapped in oilcloth gone brittle with age, and tied with a faded blue ribbon. I have found plenty in walls over twenty years. Dead mice, newspapers from 1952, a baseball glove, a pint of whiskey sealed with wax. But I had never found anything tied with a ribbon. A person does not tie a ribbon around something she wants to be forgotten. I lifted it out with both hands, the way you lift a sleeping child, and carried it to the shade of the front porch.
The homeowners were a young couple named Marisol and Evan Duarte, in their early thirties, who had bought the house two months before. They came out onto the porch, wiping their hands on dish towels, and I told them what I had found and where. Evan whistled softly. Marisol set a hand on her heart. “Should we open it?” she asked. I said the law does not say much about what a person finds in his own wall, but my conscience said that something with a ribbon on it wanted to be read by the right person. We decided to open it together, and to stop if it looked private. It looked private. We opened it anyway.
Inside, on a bed of faded tissue, lay a bundle of letters in the handwriting of a woman, a tiny knitted baby cap, a hospital bracelet, and a photograph of a young woman with dark curled hair holding a bundle in a blanket. On the back of the photograph was written, in ink gone brown: Eleanor Marsh and baby girl, March 3, 1946. Marisol turned the bracelet over in her palm. It was a baby band, the old kind, made of glass beads on a thin wire. The letters were addressed in the same hand to My darling girl, and the first one began, I am hiding this where only the house will know.
A clean rectangle of stucco on an old wall had been hiding the letters of a mother to a daughter she never got to raise.
We read them on the porch steps, passing the pages back and forth, and I forgot all about my hammer. Eleanor Marsh had been nineteen years old and unmarried in the spring of 1946. Her father, a stern deacon who ran a lumber yard in Bellaire, discovered she was expecting, and arranged for the baby to be placed with a family in another city. She was not allowed to say goodbye. She was allowed to hold the child for four hours. In the weeks after, she wrote letters to a daughter she would never raise, one for every birthday she could stand to write, and slipped them into the tin along with the cap.
Over the years, she married, and moved into this house, and became Mrs. Eleanor Whitlow. She never had any other children. She kept the box in a closet until 1971, when her husband died and a nephew began to poke through her belongings. She was afraid of the questions.
So she hired a young plasterer to cut a hollow into the wall of the sunroom and seal it with a clean rectangle of stucco. The last letter was dated 1989. It said, I am an old woman now, and I have made my peace. If the house is ever sold, I hope it falls into the hands of someone who is curious. The wall will keep you safe until then.
I put the last page down. My hand, I noticed, was shaking. “Mrs. Whitlow passed in 1994,” Evan said, reading from his phone. “The estate sold the house. Nobody came forward.” Marisol looked at me, her eyes full. “Do you think she is still alive? The baby?” I told her she would be seventy eight. And then I said something I had not planned. “I have a brother in law who works in county records. I know a man who does adoption searches. If you want me to try, I will.” Marisol took my rough hand in both of hers. “Please,” she said. “Please try.”
It took five weeks. The search turned up a woman named Catherine Reyes, seventy eight, living in a small apartment in Pasadena, Texas, a retired schoolteacher who had been adopted at four days old and had spent half her life looking for her mother. She had written to agencies and churches. She had paid a private investigator in 1998. When the Duartes called her, she did not say anything for a long time. Then she said, in a thin careful voice, “Is she alive?” Marisol had to tell her the truth. There was a long, shaking silence on the phone. And then Catherine said, “May I see the house?”
She came on a Saturday in October, in a blue cardigan, with her daughter driving. She walked slowly through the front door and stood in the sunroom for a long time with her hand on the wall. I had patched it back as an open niche, with a glass door, so that the place where the box had been would stay visible. Marisol gave her the tin. She did not open it right away. She held it to her chest and rocked. Then she sat down on the sunroom bench, untied the ribbon with trembling fingers, and read the first letter aloud. Her voice broke at the first line. My darling girl.
I stood in the yard, out of respect, and let them have the room. After an hour, Catherine came to the screen door. “Mr. Dawson,” she said, “thank you. You are the first person in seventy eight years who has ever been willing to knock on a wall to find out what was behind it.” I could not speak. I said, “It was only a patch, Catherine.” She smiled. “No. It was a door.” She put her small warm palm on my face for just a second, like a blessing, and went back inside to the letters.