The letter said her name was Rebecca and that she had been born six years before me. My mother wrote that she’d spent her entire adult life telling people I was her only child because Rebecca had been adopted privately when my mother was nineteen. She said the ring originally belonged to Rebecca’s grandmother — the mother of the man who fathered her — and that was why she couldn’t let it be buried with her. Three weeks before she died, she’d arranged for someone to remove it after the viewing and send it to an address in Arizona.
That someone was the man who mailed it to me. I called the number I found for the return address, and he told me his wife had died two months earlier. His wife was Rebecca. The ring had arrived at their house in 2009 with my mother’s letter, but Rebecca refused to wear it. She kept it in the padded envelope for thirteen years and told her husband that if she died before finding the courage to contact me, he was supposed to send it to me without an explanation. She didn’t want her first introduction into my life to be a story I was forced to believe.
Then he told me Rebecca had known about me since I was born. She had found my mother when she was twenty-four but had honored her request not to contact our family. Still, she quietly followed my life from a distance. She had photographs of my graduation, my wedding announcement, and every Christmas card my mother had mailed her for nearly thirty years. I asked why my mother could write to the daughter she’d given away while never once telling the daughter she raised that she existed. He said Rebecca had asked exactly the same question.
Before we hung up, he told me there was something inside the ring box that I hadn’t noticed. Beneath the little velvet insert was a folded photograph of two young women standing together in 2008. One was my mother. The other looked enough like me that I had to sit down. On the back Rebecca had written, “Mom finally let me call her Mom last year. She still isn’t ready to tell my sister about me. If you’re reading this because I never managed to tell you myself, please know I wasn’t the daughter she chose instead of you. I was the daughter she spent fifty years trying to find her way back to.”
