My sister called yesterday and asked whether I’d heard from Mom. I said no, and she went quiet before telling me Mom had been asking the same question every morning for three months: “Has he found the building yet?” I asked what building she meant, and my sister said she didn’t know. Then she told me Mom had given her one instruction before going into the hospital: if a stranger ever contacted me about the photograph, I was supposed to go to the funeral home on the date written on it. I looked at the envelope again and realized the man on the train hadn’t chosen me randomly.
I drove there this morning. The funeral director recognized the photograph immediately, but he wouldn’t tell me whose funeral had been scheduled for that date. Instead, he asked whether my mother was still alive. When I said yes, he took a long breath and said, “Then she has four days to tell you herself, because after that we’re legally required to open the file.” I asked what was in the file, and he said it was something his predecessor had been instructed to keep sealed since 1974. The name on the original paperwork was my mother’s maiden name. The second name was my father’s.
Then he handed me a copy of a letter that had been attached to the file for fifty-two years. It was written by a woman I’d never heard of, and the final paragraph began, “If my daughter ever comes looking for this place, don’t tell her what happened to me until she knows why her mother left her here.” I couldn’t breathe. My mother had told me all my life that she had left me with my grandmother for six months because she needed to work. The photograph wasn’t of a random funeral home—it was where my grandmother had buried someone in 1974. And the man on the train had left me one final note on the back of the envelope: “Ask your mother who was in the room when they changed your name.”
