“Before he comes looking for her!” Donna Kessler shouted again, her voice cracking in the dusk. She stood in my front yard in her slippers, among three hundred sunflowers, holding a garden trowel like a weapon. I opened the window. I was sixty five years old and had never been shouted at by a neighbor in my life. “Donna,” I called, “who is coming looking for who?” She looked up, and in the porch light I saw that her face was wet. “My husband,” she said. “Walter. If he finds out that box is out of the earth, he will find her. Please. Please give it back.”
I did not give it back. I went out onto the porch in my robe and sat on the top step, and after a minute Donna sat down on the bottom one, her trowel in her lap. The box was beside me, its plastic wrap peeled back. I had read the letter three times. It was written in a firm slanting hand by Mrs. Alvarez, the retired teacher who lived in my house for thirty years. “If anyone finds this, please do not tell the woman next door. She knows what happened to Emily.” Under the line was a longer page I had not yet shown anyone. I held it out to Donna. “I think you should read the rest.”
She read it by the porch light with her lips moving. The letter said that in the spring of 2003, Emily Kessler, seventeen, expecting a baby, had come to Mrs. Alvarez door in the middle of the night with a duffel bag. Her father Walter had thrown her out. He had told everyone she moved to California to live with an aunt. Mrs. Alvarez wrote that she drove Emily to a cousin in Oregon herself, and she had hidden a box in the yard so the girl would have something to come back to if she ever dared. The final line read, “Donna knows. She stood at the window and let it happen.”
A neighbor with a trowel, a box beneath three hundred sunflowers, and a daughter who had never really moved to California.
Donna put the paper on her knee and pressed her hand to her mouth. For a long time she said nothing. A mockingbird was singing in the maple. “I did stand at the window,” she said at last. “Walter was so angry, and I was so afraid of him. I told myself it was only for a few months. I told myself she would call. Twenty years, Ruth. I have written to her every birthday. Every letter came back. I did not even know where to send them.” She laughed, a terrible small laugh. “I complained about your wind chimes because I could not stand to hear anyone happy in that house.”
I looked at the photographs in the box. A baby girl in a yellow cap. A teenager with Donna eyes, standing in front of a Pacific Northwest evergreen. A child bracelet, little silver beads, the kind you string on a thread. The last photograph was recent, a young woman about twenty, in a college graduation gown, with a ring of sunflowers painted along the bottom edge of the frame. On the back, in Mrs. Alvarez hand, it said, Her name is Lily. She knows she has a grandmother. She wants to meet her someday. I held the picture out. Donna took it like a woman accepting a baby.
“The letter says to give the box to you only if you ask for forgiveness with your own mouth,” I said gently. “It does not say I have to be the one who forgives you. But I think you should say it out loud, Donna. Not to me. To Emily. And to that girl.” She wept openly then, on my porch, in front of my sunflowers, and I put my arm around a woman who had spent six years reporting my mailbox color to the homeowners association. It is a strange thing to be holding your enemy while she cries. It felt exactly like holding anyone else.
In the end, it was Mrs. Alvarez who made the first call. Her niece still lived two streets over, and she had Emily number in an old address book. Donna sat at my kitchen table with the phone while I made coffee. She dialed. I will never forget the sound of her voice when someone picked up. She said, “Emily. It is Mom,” and then nothing, for a very long time, while a woman four states away began to sob. I washed the same cup three times so she could have her privacy. Then Donna handed me the phone. Emily wanted to thank me.
Emily and Lily came in July, when the sunflowers were taller than my fence. They stood at the curb with their bags and looked at the yellow rows, and Lily laughed and said she had never seen so many. Donna met them on her front walk, in a blue dress, her hair freshly curled. I stayed in my kitchen with the curtain open an inch. There was an awkward, shaking, impossible moment, and then it broke. Three women, a generation apart, held on to each other in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, while the bees went about their business in the flowers.
Walter, it turned out, had been in a care home for two years with a failing heart and a failing memory. Donna had been visiting him daily and lying to herself that she was staying faithful. When Emily came, she went to see him with her mother. I do not know what was said. But Donna told me later that he reached for his daughter hand and called her by her childhood name, and that was all either of them needed. He passed quietly in the fall. Emily held his hand. Nobody wore black. The sunflowers were still blooming when we gathered at the church.
The homeowners association sent me a letter that summer, congratulating me on the best front yard in the neighborhood. It was signed by a committee chair who did not know that the complaint had come from the house next door. I framed it and hung it in the hall. This past spring, Donna knocked on my door at seven in the morning with a flat of seedlings under her arm. “I thought we might plant them on both sides of the fence,” she said. “So nobody can tell where one yard ends and the other begins.” I went inside for my gardening gloves.