I opened the top one at the table. When I read the first line of what my grandmother had hidden in that vanity all those years, I had to put it down, because it started: “Dear Carol Ann, you are one year old today and I have counted every one of the days.”
There were fifty-nine of them.
One a year, every year, on the eleventh of April. Sealed. Stamped, some of them, with stamps that cost four cents. Not one of them ever addressed to a street, because she never had a street to send them to.
My grandmother had a baby in 1951, when she was seventeen years old, in a home for unwed mothers outside of Cleveland that has been a parking lot since 1988. They took the baby out of the room before she was allowed to hold her. She signed what they put in front of her because a girl in 1951 signed what they put in front of her, and then she went home and was told by her own mother that the subject was closed, and it stayed closed for the rest of that woman’s life.
She married my grandfather in 1955. He knew. He is the one who built that false back into the cupboard, and he built it in 1961, and he never told a living soul either.
Fifty-nine letters. Report cards she imagined. Birthdays she guessed at. One from 1968 that runs four pages and is mostly an apology. One from 1994 that is a single line about being tired of guessing.
I did the spit test in November. I did it half expecting nothing.
Carol Ann is not Carol Ann. Her name is Diane, she is seventy-three years old, she lives in Grand Island, Nebraska, she taught third grade for thirty-one years, and she has four grandchildren, and she matched me at the level of a first cousin once removed, which is exactly what the arithmetic said she should be.
She had been looking since 1998. She had a file box of dead ends. She had written to that home in Cleveland twice and been told the records were destroyed, which was a lie somebody told her because it was easier than the truth.
I drove the letters out myself in March. I would not put them in the mail after they’d already waited fifty-nine years for a mailbox.
She read them at her own kitchen table over two days, in order, one a year, the way they were written. Her husband and I sat on the porch most of it and did not talk much.
The thing she keeps saying, the thing she said again on the phone last week, is that she had spent her whole life with a story about being unwanted, and that story turned out to be about a scared girl in 1951 who was never once asked what she wanted.
My grandmother died in 2019 believing she had failed at the only thing she ever really tried to do.
Diane has the vanity now. I hauled it out there in a rented trailer in June. She sits at it every morning, and the little cupboard stays unlocked, and there’s nothing in it but hairpins.