“…Pat, if you are reading this, then Brian kept his promise, and I am sorry for every day I made you not know,” I read aloud at my kitchen table, with the bracelet beside my teacup and the old woodstove cold in the next room. Brian sat across from me in his work coat with his head in his hands. Eddie handwriting slanted across the page, careful and a little shaky, the way it had been in his last months. Outside, a November wind rattled the storm windows. Biscuit the cat jumped onto my lap and kneaded my knees. I took a breath and kept reading, one word at a time.
“In March of 1983, I told you I was going to a training course in Ohio. That was a lie. I flew to Portland, Oregon, because my sister Marie had called me in the middle of the night. You remember Marie. She left Maine at nineteen and we did not hear from her for years. She was in trouble, Pat. She was pregnant, and she had run from a man who had hurt her badly. She had no money, no papers, no insurance. She was afraid he would find her at the hospital. I did the only thing I could think of. I told them her name was yours.”
I stopped reading. My hand had gone to my mouth. Eddie sister Marie, a small, quiet, fair haired girl who had once knitted me a scarf. I had last seen her at my wedding, at twenty, laughing too loud at the reception. I had been told she moved to California and lost touch. Brian said nothing. He only reached across the table and laid his hand on my arm. I turned the page. The writing grew smaller, and darker, as if Eddie had pressed harder on the pen at this part. I read on, and my voice cracked.
A rusted box from the flue, a hospital bracelet from the wrong side of the country, and a letter from a husband.
“Marie had a little girl on March the fourteenth. She named her Claire. She could not keep her, Pat. The man was looking for her, and she was frightened and sick, and she wanted the baby safe. I found a couple through the hospital chaplain, good people, a teacher and a nurse, who would raise her as their own. Marie signed the papers using your name, because she was afraid of her own. Then she vanished again, and I never saw her after that. I flew home. I did not tell you, because I had promised Marie, and because I was ashamed that I had lied to you at all.”
There was more. Marie had passed in 1991, in a hospital in Sacramento, of pneumonia, alone. Eddie had learned of it a year later, from a county clerk. He had mourned in silence. Over the years he put money away, a little at a time, from overtime on the power lines, cash only, saved in the tackle box in the chimney. He wanted it to go to Claire someday, if she ever came looking. He had hidden it where he knew I would never light a fire, because he could not bear for me to find it without an explanation. And he had left Brian a letter, in case.
“Brian,” I said. My voice was barely a whisper. “Did you know any of this?” He shook his head, and tears ran down his face. “Only that Dad had a secret in that chimney, Mom. I never knew what.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “I was so angry at him when he passed. I thought it was something terrible, another woman, another family. I was ashamed to even say it out loud. I should have trusted him. I should have trusted you.” I took his hand. “You were sixteen,” I said. “You were doing your best.”
I did not sleep that night. I sat by the cold woodstove with a quilt around my shoulders and the letter in my lap. In the small hours, an idea came to me, and I could not put it down. I got up, found my laptop, and typed Claire into a website for adoption searches. Date of birth, March the fourteenth, 1983. Saint Jude Medical Center. Portland. I pressed enter, and I sat back, my heart pounding. I did not expect anything. But three days later, a message arrived in my inbox, from a woman named Claire Whitaker, a middle school teacher in Eugene.
We spoke on the telephone the following Sunday. Her voice was low and warm, with a trace of hesitation. She said she had always known she was adopted, and that she had always wondered. She said her parents were gone now, and that she had two children and a husband who sold insurance. I told her about Eddie. I told her about Marie, the knitted scarf, the quiet laugh. I told her what was in the box. There was a long silence. Then she said, in a voice that trembled, “Mrs. Doyle, I think I have your sister in law eyes. Everyone always said so.”
She came to Bangor in December, with her husband and her two daughters. They stood on my porch in the snow, four people in bright coats, and I opened the door. Claire looked at me and then at the house, and then she looked past me at the photograph on the hall table of Eddie in his lineman helmet. She put her hand over her mouth. I opened my arms. We held each other in the cold hallway for a long, long time, and Brian, behind me, was crying openly. The cat walked in circles around our legs.
I gave her the box. I gave her the money, every old hundred dollar bill, and the bracelet. She cried again. But the next thing she did surprised me. She asked if she could help me light the woodstove. So the five of us, Brian, Claire, her husband and the girls, swept out the ashes and cleaned the flue together, and that evening we built a fire. The wood crackled, and the room filled with warmth. Claire sat on the floor beside me, with her head against my knee. I thought of Eddie, and I thought, you old fool, you hid the best thing in the chimney.