The letter at the very top of the shoebox was in the round, hopeful handwriting of my daughter Shawna, and it began with the words that I had waited fifteen years to hear. Dear Mom and Dad, if anything ever happens to me, please let Logan stay with Gloria. I read it in the living room of my little house, with the shoebox in my lap and my grandson Logan sitting on the carpet in front of me, picking at a loose thread in his sock. He was eleven now, and he had not spoken more than ten words to me in all that year.
I had thought the box was only another of the many I had kept in the attic. It was the one the court had sent me after the case was closed, with the last of the belongings of Shawna from her apartment in Tulsa. I had never been able to open it. But that morning, a social worker named Ms. Alvarez had called to say that Logan needed to know the truth, and I had gone to the attic, in my slippers, and carried it down the stairs.
Under the first letter lay a second, and a third, and a fourth. They were all addressed to Logan. I counted two hundred of them by supper time, each one dated, each one in an envelope sealed with a small round sticker in the shape of a star. Shawna had written one a month, from the month he was born, even when he was too small to read. She had stopped at the age of nine, in the spring that the accident happened.
A mother who writes to her baby every month is telling him, in advance and in her own hand, that he was loved from the very first day.
I did not know what to say to Logan. For years, I had felt that I was keeping a bruise that could not heal. When my daughter died, his father had signed away his rights and moved to Texas. The state had placed my grandson in a foster home across the county, because they said I was too old and too poor. I had spent three years in court, on a folding chair, with a lawyer who had barely looked up from her notes. In the end, I won him back. But the boy who came home was not the boy who left.
I handed him the first letter. He took it as if it might break. He read it silently, his lips moving, and when he reached the part about Gloria, he looked up at me with eyes so wide that I almost could not bear it. “She wanted me to live with you?” he asked, in a small voice. “My mom wanted that?” I told him yes. I told him she had written it in black and white, years before, on the very day she turned twenty six.
He read the second letter, and the third. He read them one after another, cross legged on the carpet, while the clock on the wall ticked toward midnight. I made cocoa and set a mug beside him, and he did not touch it. At some point, he began to cry, the quiet, almost embarrassed crying of a boy who has been holding something in for far too long. I got down on my knees on the carpet, and I wrapped my arms around him, and he let me. He had not allowed it in a year.
“I thought you did not want me,” he said into my sweater. “I thought you only took me because you had to.” My heart broke in two. I told him that I had spent every dollar I owned and every day of three years to get him back. I told him that my daughter had been asking me, from the other side, to take care of him, and that I had never in my life been so glad to do anything. He held on tighter.
In the weeks that followed, we read a letter every evening, one at a time, at the kitchen table. Shawna wrote about the first time she felt him kick. She wrote about the lullaby she sang, about the color of his eyes, about the day he said the word truck. Logan laughed at some of them and cried at others, and sometimes he asked me to read the same one twice. It took more than six months to reach the last. When we did, he held it for a long time before opening it.
The last letter said only a few lines. Logan, the world is large and strange, but it is also kind. Find the people who love you and stay close to them. Be brave. Be gentle. I will see you when it is time. Love, Mom. He folded the page along its old crease and put it in his shirt pocket, and he left it there for the whole day. That night, he climbed into the old rocker beside me, though he was far too big, and put his head on my shoulder.
Logan is sixteen now, and tall as a door. He keeps all two hundred letters in a locked wooden box on his desk, and he writes one of his own on the first of each month, to a daughter he hopes to have one day. I have read none of them. But I know they will begin the same way, with the five words that Shawna taught him. Dear child, you are loved.