Those six weeks. In the spring of 1994, who was she with for those six weeks?
I knew exactly which six weeks she meant. I was in the hospital after my spine surgery. My husband was working doubles to pay for it. My sister Linda said she would keep my daughter.
I told the therapist that. She nodded. Then she said Linda had told my daughter the truth in March. Linda did not keep her.
Linda was twenty two then, working nights, and she panicked. She had a boyfriend whose grandmother lived out in the country. So Linda left my five year old with an old woman named Mrs. Opal Tate, a woman I had never met, in a house with blue tile and a stairway and a diamond window. For six weeks.
And in April of 1994 a tornado came through that county.
My daughter remembered it. She remembered the roaring, and being pulled under the stairs, and the old woman lying on top of her, and then the old woman not moving. For thirty one years my little girl believed she watched a stranger die protecting her, and she thought she had dreamed it.
She never told me because she was five and thought she had done something wrong. And by the time she was grown, it felt like a nightmare she could not trust.
I drove home and called my sister. Linda cried for an hour. She said she was ashamed every day of her life. She was afraid I would never forgive her. For a while, I did not.
But the therapist had asked me one more thing. Did I want to help my daughter find out the rest?
So I did. I went to the library in that county and pulled the newspaper from April 1994. Page three had the story. An elderly woman was injured when a tornado hit her farmhouse. She shielded a young child who was staying with her. Both were treated at the county hospital. Both survived.
Survived.
I brought that article to my daughter. She read it three times. She put her hand flat on it like she was trying to feel it.
Opal Tate lived until 2009. Her granddaughter still lives in that county, and when I called her, she knew exactly who we were. She said her grandmother talked about the little girl under the stairs for the rest of her life. She always wondered if that baby turned out all right.
The granddaughter invited us out. The house was rebuilt after the storm, but the stairway is original. My daughter stood at the bottom of it for a long time. The granddaughter handed her a photo of Opal, a tiny woman in an apron, grinning.
My daughter says the nightmares have stopped.
Linda and I are working on it. She came to Thanksgiving. My daughter hugged her at the door and told her it was all right, that she turned out fine, and that Opal made sure of it.