The bank called to tell me my safe deposit box had been drilled. I don’t have a safe deposit box. The branch had closed, the boxes had been cleared, and the contents were inventoried and mailed to the listed owners. They sent me a photograph of the inventory, eleven items, and one of them was my father’s watch. It was the watch that had been on his wrist when we buried him, and I had the funeral home’s paperwork and a photograph of him in the casket wearing it.
The bank’s records showed the box had been rented in 1997 and accessed nine times, with the last access in 2018. I asked for the signature from that visit, and the manager emailed me a scanned copy. It wasn’t my father’s signature, but I recognized the handwriting immediately. It belonged to my mother, who had died in 2014. I asked how she could have accessed a box that was supposedly in my name, and the manager said the original rental documents listed two authorized people. My father’s name was the primary name, but mine was listed as the second person.
I told the manager that was impossible because I would have been a teenager in 1997. He checked the original paperwork again and then asked me whether I had ever had a different middle name. I said no, and he went silent. The name on the box wasn’t exactly mine—it was my full name with a middle name I’d never used. I searched the name online and found it in an old newspaper article from 1997. It was the name of a child who had supposedly disappeared from a nearby town that same year. I stared at the article for several minutes before realizing the photograph beside it was of me.
I called my sister and asked whether she remembered anything unusual about 1997. She told me our parents had always forbidden her from talking about that year, even after they died. Then she admitted she had found an old key in my father’s desk years ago and had thrown it away because she thought it belonged to the bank. I asked what else she remembered, and she said our mother once told her that the watch should never be separated from the person who wore it. The bank manager called me again while we were talking and said they had found one final item in the box that wasn’t on the inventory photograph. It was a birth certificate with my name on it—and a different date of birth.:::
