…the Lindqvist family in Portland. We named her Claire Margaret. God forgive us.”
Claire Margaret. That’s my name. Claire Margaret Dunn.
But I was born in 1976, in Boston. My mother, Ruth, had always told me she grew up in Maine but left at eighteen and never went back. She never said why. She died when I was thirty.
I read the whole letter at the kitchen table, surrounded by drywall dust. It was written by a woman who signed it “Your grandmother, Agnes.” In 1974, my mother had been sixteen and pregnant. Agnes and her husband had arranged for the baby to be adopted by a family in Portland. My mother never forgave them. She left home and never spoke to them again.
“If you’re reading this,” Agnes wrote, “then you finally found your way home.” She had written it for the baby. For the first Claire Margaret.
Which meant that when my mother had a second daughter two years later, she gave me the exact same name.
I’d bought this house because it felt right. I’d never once asked who had lived in it before me. I called the county records office. The house had belonged to Agnes and Henry Dunn until 1998.
I hired a genealogist. It took her a month. Claire Margaret Lindqvist was alive, fifty-two years old, a music teacher in New Hampshire. She had been told she was adopted. She’d been searching for her birth mother for twenty years and never found a trace, because my mother had changed her last name when she married.
I wrote to her and enclosed a copy of Agnes’s letter and the photo of our mother holding her as a newborn.
She called me the day the letter arrived. We talked for four hours. She cried when I told her our mother had named me after her. “So she didn’t forget me,” she said.
“She never forgot you,” I said. “She just couldn’t say your name out loud. So she gave it to me.”
Two Claires met for the first time on the front porch of our grandparents’ house in Maine. We have the same laugh. We both hate cilantro. She plays piano; I can’t carry a tune.
We finished renovating the kitchen together. We left a new box behind the new wall: our photos, a copy of Agnes’s letter and a note in both our handwriting.
“To whoever finds this: Two sisters found each other in this house. We were apart for fifty years. We’re not anymore.”
