I lifted the lid, and I had to sit down on the floor, because my sister Faye, who I thought I knew my whole life, had a whole other life folded up inside that suitcase.
On top was a baby blanket, yellow, hand-knit, never used, still with the tissue in the folds. Under it, a paper hospital bracelet with a date from the spring of nineteen fifty-six, when Faye would have been seventeen. And a photograph, just the one, of a young Faye in a hospital gown holding a newborn, and my sister in that picture wore a look I had never once seen on her in sixty years, a look wide open with love and about to break clean in half.
There were papers, and I made myself read them. Adoption papers. In the spring of nineteen fifty-six our people had sent Faye off to stay with an aunt in Knoxville, and we were all told it was to help the aunt, who was poorly. She came back in the fall, quieter, and she stayed quiet the next sixty years, and not one soul in this family ever knew that the aunt in Knoxville had been a story, and that Faye went away a girl and came home a mother with empty arms.
They took the baby from her. That is how it was done back then to a girl who was not married, especially up on a hard ridge like ours. She was given no choice in it. And she never told a living soul, and she never married, and she never let anybody far enough into her house or her heart to risk them finding the one thing under her bed she could not bear to lose a second time.
At the bottom of the suitcase were cards. One for every year. Not letters, just birthday cards, sixty of them, bought and dated and never sent, to a daughter she was not allowed to keep and never stopped counting the years of.
Happy 40th birthday to my girl, wherever you are. Your mother thinks of you every single day, and always has. That was the one on top.
The papers had a name on them. It took me and a young cousin who is good with a computer a couple of months, but we found her. Faye daughter is sixty-nine now, lives outside Bristol, raised happy by good people, always knew she was adopted, always wondered. She had tried to find her birth mother once, years back, hit a wall, and made her peace with never knowing.
I got to be the one to tell her that her mother had loved her every day of her life. I gave her the blanket, the bracelet, the picture, and the sixty cards. She read every card at my kitchen table, and when she finished she said the thing I will carry to my own grave: that she had spent her whole life half believing she was given away because she was not wanted, and now she knew it was the exact and total opposite. Faye did not get to raise her girl. But in the end she got to reach her. I only wish she had lived to do it with her own hands.