I stared at the name on the screen for a long time because I knew it immediately. It was my cousin, my aunt’s only son, the man who had spent the last fifteen years telling everyone that his mother and he barely spoke after a family argument. I called him and asked if he knew the boy in the photograph. He went completely silent, and then he asked me where I had seen it. I told him about the obituary and the message, and he said he couldn’t talk about it over the phone. I asked him what my aunt had been doing with a child in 1974, and he finally said, “She wasn’t supposed to keep him that long.” I asked what that meant, and he told me my aunt had taken the boy because his mother had been in trouble and needed someone to watch him for a few weeks. A few weeks became five years.
I asked why nobody in the family knew about him, and my cousin said because my aunt had made everyone promise not to ask questions. He said the boy wasn’t related to us, but my aunt had treated him like her own and had sent him to school under a different last name. Then he told me something I had never heard before: every Friday, someone really had driven the boy to my aunt’s house, but it wasn’t my cousin. It was my father. I told him that couldn’t be true because my father had been working out of state during most of those years, and my cousin said, “That’s what you were told.” Then he sent me an old photograph from his mother’s things. It showed my aunt at the same picnic table, the same little boy beside her, and my father standing behind them. On the back, my father had written a date and one sentence: “He needs to stay here until she comes back.”
I asked who “she” was, and my cousin said he’d spent thirty years trying to find out himself. He said the boy had eventually left in 1979 and that my aunt had never spoken about him again, but she’d kept one envelope hidden behind the kitchen cabinet until the day she died. My cousin had found it after the funeral and hadn’t opened it because his mother had written DO NOT GIVE THIS TO HER UNTIL I’M GONE across the front. I asked who “her” was, and he said he assumed it meant me because I was the only person in the family his mother had always protected from the story. Then he sent me a photograph of the envelope. The handwriting was my aunt’s. The name written underneath mine was my mother’s. And the date on the envelope was three months before I was born.
