Finally I worked the rusted lid up. Inside was one thing, wrapped in a scrap of cloth. I unwrapped it, and I had to go sit down in the hallway, because my brother Roy, who went to Vietnam at nineteen and came home somebody else and lived and died alone and never once told a soul why, had been carrying a photograph of a Vietnamese woman and a baby for fifty years.
On the lid of that Prince Albert tin, in his shaky hand, he had written one word, and it was a name I did not know. A girl name. And when I turned the photograph over, there was that same name written on the back, along with a date, and one more word that broke me clean in half. Daughter.
My brother had a daughter. Over there. A little girl, and the woman who was her mother, and then something happened, the way it happened to so many of them, the pullout, the chaos, the promises that could not be kept. Roy came home without them and never got them out and never once got over it. That was what came back from that war wearing my brother face. Not a coward, and not just a drunk, and not a man who liked being left alone. A father who left his baby girl on the other side of the world and could not live with it and could not talk about it and drank to drown it and then quit drinking and just went quiet, for fifty years, with her picture in a tobacco tin.
There was a letter in the tin too, folded small, addressed to that name, never sent, the ink gone brown with the years. I have looked for you every year of my life. I never stopped. If you ever read this, know that I did not leave because I wanted to. They made me go, and I have been trying to get back to you ever since. You were never for one single day forgotten. You were the best thing I ever did and the worst thing I ever lost.
I sat in that hallway of the veterans home and grieved for my brother in a way I never had before, because I finally knew him, two years too late, an hour up the road too far. All that time I told myself Roy just liked being alone. Roy was the loneliest man alive, carrying a daughter he lost across an ocean, and I let work and the drive and the holidays keep me away, and now he is gone and I cannot ever tell him I am sorry.
But I can find her. That is the thing I can still do. I have started already, with the veterans groups that do this work, that reunite the children left behind over there with their American families. She would be in her fifties now. She might not even know his name. But she is going to know it. She is going to know her daddy looked for her every day of his life and carried her in a tin over his heart until the day he died. I could not bring my brother back to himself in time. But I can bring his girl the father who never for one day stopped loving her. I owe him that much. I owe them both that much.