We got our first house cheap, my wife and me, twenty-nine and thirty, been renting our whole marriage, and the reason it was cheap is the fella before us left in a hurry. You could tell. Food still in the cupboards. A kid drawings on the fridge. The realtor got cagey and just said the bank had it now and the previous owner was no longer in the picture, and at that price I decided some questions are not worth asking. It is Hannibal, it is a solid little house, and it was ours.
First week I am fixing the small stuff. There is a closet in the back bedroom with an old water stain and a soft spot in the ceiling. I figure I will cut the bad piece out and check the roof. Standing on a stepladder with my utility knife, I cut a square out of that soft ceiling, and there is the dark space up in the rafters.
Now I should have got my flashlight. But you do not, when you are up a ladder and impatient. I reached my hand up in there to feel around for wet wood. My fingers hit something. Not a joist. Something with give to it, wrapped, shoved back up over the closet where a man would have to stand on a ladder and reach blind to ever put it, or find it. I worked it down through the hole. And I froze right there on that ladder, because I knew, holding it, that somebody had hidden this on purpose, and hidden it careful.
It was a bundle wrapped in a pillowcase. Inside, a childs baby book, filled out in a mothers hand. A birth certificate. A little stack of photographs, a baby growing into a toddler, a young woman holding him, an older woman I took for a grandma. And an envelope with a few hundred dollars, soft with handling.
It took me a while, and a kind woman at the county, to understand. The mother who lived here had gotten herself and her little boy out of somewhere bad, fast, in the night, the way you have to sometimes. She hid the things she could never replace, her son whole babyhood, up where no one would find them, meaning to come back when it was safe. It never got safe enough. The bank took the house before she could.
She was not gone from this world. She was just gone from here. And through that same kind woman at the county, I got word to her that a young couple had her boy baby book and his pictures, safe, waiting.
She drove four hours to my door. And when I put that pillowcase in her hands, she sat down on my new front step and wept over her son first photographs, the ones she thought she had lost forever in the worst night of her life.
I had to choose between grabbing him and grabbing these. I grabbed him. I always told myself I made the right choice and I always hated that I had to. You gave me back the part I had to leave behind.
Her boy is seven now, and safe, and he has his baby book. We never did meet the man she ran from, and I am glad. Our house was somebody hiding place before it was our home. I like to think it did its last good deed the day it kept those pictures safe for her.