I lifted it out, and my hands started to shake, because it was a manila envelope with my name on it in Roy’s carpenter pencil, and inside was a letter on state letterhead from the Ohio Adoption Registry.
Match notification. Two parties registered. Consent required from the birth parent to release identifying information.
I was seventeen in 1979 and I had a baby girl at a home in Columbus and I signed a paper in a room with no window and I came back to this county and I did not tell one living soul except the man I married four years later.
Roy carried that for forty-five years and never once brought it up unless I brought it up first, which was maybe five times in our whole marriage, always in the dark, always in November.
Behind the state letter was a photocopy of a registration card dated 2011.
She registered fourteen years ago. She has been waiting fourteen years, and the state cannot tell her anything unless I sign, and I never knew there was a registry to sign with, because I have spent my whole life not looking.
Roy found it. There’s a printout in that envelope from the library computer, which tells you what it cost him, because that man typed with one finger and hated a machine. He got the form. He filled in everything he could and left the signature line blank.
And there’s a photograph, four by six, of a woman about my age standing in front of a brick school with a lanyard around her neck. On the back, in a hand I don’t know: If she ever wants to know, tell her I’m a school nurse in Marysville, I have two boys, my husband’s name is Tom, and I’ve never once been angry. Tell her I registered the week my youngest turned eighteen because I wanted to be sure I had something good to report.
Roy had written to the registry himself, as a third party, asking whether a letter could be held on file for me if I ever came looking. That is not a thing that is allowed. Somebody there did it anyway and mailed him back a copy of what she’d written.
His own note was underneath, three lines, on the back of a feed store receipt.
Ruthie — you never once asked me to find her and I never once quit looking. All that’s left is your name on line six. Give it till spring. You’ll be glad you kept it. — Roy
Give it till spring. He said that on the porch handing me a six-dollar box from the feed store and I sighed at him, out loud, and set it out and never planted a thing in it.
Three weeks later he was gone in the yard before the squad reached our road, and that envelope sat under a false floor through the whole winter.
I signed line six on the eighteenth of March. It took the state eleven weeks.
Her name is Kathleen. We talked on the phone for two hours and forty minutes the first time and I could not tell you one thing either of us said except that she has my mother’s laugh, which is not possible and which is true.
She came in July with the boys. I planted the box with marigolds and set it on the front step so she’d see something living when she pulled in.