I sat on the edge of Hopes bed with the crayon-covered paper shaking in my hands and read it again. If you are reading this, you are Aunt Carol.
“Hope,” I said as gently as I could. “This song. Little Bird Over the Hill. Where did your mommy learn it?”
“From her mommy,” Hope said, half asleep. “And her mommy learned it from hers. Mommy said only two people in the whole world know it. And one of them would find me.”
Two people. My grandmother made that song up on a farm in Kentucky in 1951 and sang it to exactly two little girls. Me. And my little sister, Nina, who ran away from home at sixteen and never came back, twenty-nine years ago.
I called the caseworker that night, and then I did not sleep at all.
It took two weeks to find Nina. She was in a hospital three hours away, very ill, at the end of a hard road she had walked a long time. She had come back to our county on purpose. She had heard, through an old neighbor, that her big sister Carol fostered children now. And when she knew she could no longer keep Hope safe herself, she had done the bravest and most broken thing she could think of. She placed her own daughter into the county, in our town, and taught the child the one song that only I would know, trusting it to carry Hope the rest of the way home.
My sister ran away from me at sixteen, and twenty-nine years later she found the way back with a lullaby and a little girl.
I drove to that hospital with Hope in the back seat. Nina was thin and gray, but when she saw me in the doorway her whole face crumpled, and she said my name the way she used to when we were small and sharing a bed and our grandmother was singing us down to sleep.
We had time. Not as much as I wanted, but enough. Enough for Nina to hold her daughter and know she was safe. Enough for twenty-nine years of silence to become, at the end, a kind of peace.
Hope lives with Tom and me now, for good. The lavender room is hers. Some nights she still sings Little Bird Over the Hill, and now I sing it with her, the way my grandmother did, so that the two people in the world who know it will always be more than two.