The moment I made out what had been sealed inside that well all those years, I backed away from the edge, because my mind leapt straight to the worst thing a man can imagine finding in a place like that — and then the flashlight steadied, and I saw it was nothing of the kind. It was a bundle. Oilcloth, wrapped and tied with twine, dry and careful, set there by living hands. I lowered myself down to the ledge and lifted it out, and what spilled into my lap was a young woman’s whole heart.
Letters. A tintype of a girl maybe seventeen standing close beside a young man in a borrowed-looking suit. A pressed flower gone to dust. And on top, a long letter in a careful, hopeful hand, addressed to Mama and Daddy.
“By the time you read this I’ll be far gone, and I need you to know the truth so you don’t grieve me dead. I am not lost and no harm has come to me. I am going to marry Samuel. You forbade it, and I understand why you think you must, but I love him more than my fear of leaving, and I could not bear to say it to your faces and watch you turn away. I’m hiding this in our old well because I know someday someone in this family will find it, and I needed to leave the truth somewhere the dark couldn’t swallow it. I’m alive. I’m happy. I’ll write the day it’s safe. Please — don’t let the story of me be a sad one. Your loving daughter, always.”
I sat on the lip of that well in the Oklahoma dark and wept for a girl I’d never met. For fifty years this family and this town had carried her as a tragedy — a girl who left one night and was surely taken, surely gone for good. And the truth had been waiting three feet down in the dry well the whole time: she hadn’t been taken by anyone. She’d been taken by love, and she’d been too young and too frightened to say goodbye out loud.
I couldn’t let it end there. It took months of letters and a kind clerk in a county two states over, but I found her. Samuel had passed a few years back, but she was alive — ninety years old, sharp as a tack, surrounded by children and grandchildren who had no idea their mother was once a ghost story in Oklahoma. I drove the bundle to her myself. She held that tintype of her young man and pressed it to her chest and cried like the girl who’d lowered it into the well, and she said, “I always wondered if anybody ever found it. I always hoped Daddy knew I was alright.”
She’s gone now, peacefully, this past winter. But she went knowing her goodbye was finally delivered. “She wasn’t lost. She was taken,” the old story said — and it was right, just not the way anyone feared. She was taken by a love so big a frightened girl climbed down a well to leave her family proof of it. I capped the well back up gentle, and I planted roses on top. Some things you find in the dark turn out to be the brightest stories of all.