My mother-in-law left me a key in her will. One key, no explanation, while everything else went to her sons. They laughed about it at the reading, and I laughed too, because she was ninety-one and had kept a sense of humor to the end. It turned out to be a safe deposit key, and the bank had a box in her name and mine, opened in 1994. The strange part was that I was nineteen that year and had never met the woman.
I brought my husband with me to the bank, and the manager took us downstairs. She put the key into the lock, waited for me to confirm my identity, and then stepped outside. My husband opened the box and stood there looking at what was inside for a long time. He didn’t touch anything at first, which was unusual because he had been joking about the whole thing all morning. Then he slowly picked up a small envelope with my name written across it. There was also an old photograph underneath it, face down.
The photograph showed a young woman standing outside a hospital, holding a baby. I recognized the woman immediately, but I couldn’t understand why I knew her. She looked almost exactly like my mother when she was young, except I had never seen the photograph before. On the back was a date from 1994 and a sentence written in my mother-in-law’s handwriting. My husband read it first, and the color drained from his face. He handed it to me without saying a word.
The envelope contained a birth certificate, several hospital records, and a letter that had never been mailed. None of the documents made sense together at first, but they all carried the same date. I asked my husband why his mother would have opened a safe deposit box in my name before we had even met. He said he didn’t know, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye when he said it. Then I noticed there was one final document tucked beneath everything else. It was a handwritten note from my mother-in-law that began, “I promised your mother I would wait until you were old enough to decide for yourself.”:::
