The activities director told me the woman’s name was Margaret, and that she really was my mother’s younger sister. I told her that was impossible because my mother had always said she was an only child. My father heard me and finally looked up from the puzzle. He said, “That’s what we told you because it was easier than explaining why Margaret disappeared.” The woman beside him reached across the table and said my childhood nickname, a name nobody in that building could possibly have known.
My father explained that Margaret had left our family in 1976 after an argument with my mother that neither of them ever repaired. She moved across the country, changed her surname when she married, and eventually stopped answering letters. My mother told everyone her sister was dead, and my father went along with it because by the time I was old enough to ask questions, the lie had already become part of our family history. Then in January, Margaret was admitted to the same home by coincidence, and my father recognized her immediately even though they hadn’t seen each other in almost fifty years. She recognized him too.
I asked why that meant I had to disappear for five months. My father started crying before he answered. Margaret had asked about my mother during their first conversation, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her she had died twenty-eight years earlier. Instead, he spent weeks sitting with her, slowly telling her about the life her sister had lived after they stopped speaking. He said he asked me not to visit because Margaret wanted to meet me, and he was terrified that I would hate him when I learned he’d helped keep an entire person out of my life.
Then Margaret opened the drawer beside her chair and pulled out a bundle of envelopes held together with an old rubber band. Every one had my mother’s handwriting on it. None had been opened. My mother had written to her sister for twenty-two years. Margaret said she’d been too stubborn to read them while my mother was alive and too ashamed afterward. She handed the bundle to me and said, “Your father has been reading them to me one at a time since January.” Then my father picked up the final unopened envelope and said, “This one has your name on the back. Your mother wrote that if Margaret ever came home, it was supposed to go to you.”
