I found forty-one letters in my aunt’s freezer, in the bottom of a box of green beans. Wrapped in foil, rubber-banded, dry as paper gets. All forty-one were addressed to my mother. All forty-one were unopened, and the earliest one was postmarked 1979. My mother died in 2016 without ever mentioning them, and my aunt hasn’t spoken a full sentence since her stroke. I opened the oldest one at the kitchen table, and the first line didn’t say hello or dear anybody.
It said, “Your sister knows what happened, but she promised she would never tell you.” I read it three times before turning the page. The rest of the letter was mostly details about a summer I barely remembered being discussed in our family. There was a boy’s name, a town two hours away, and a date that meant nothing to me at first. Then I realized the date was six months before my mother married my father. At the bottom, the writer had added one sentence: “If you still believe what they told you, ask your sister where the photograph went.”
I put the letter down and went through the others without opening all of them. Several had the same handwriting, but some were written by different people. One mentioned my mother by her maiden name, another referred to a hospital, and three simply said that someone was “asking questions again.” I found a photograph tucked inside the envelope from 1983, and on the back was a sentence written in my mother’s handwriting. It said, “I thought we agreed this would stay buried.” I had seen that handwriting hundreds of times, but I had never seen those words.
The next morning, I went back to my aunt’s house and searched the freezer again. Behind the old vegetables was a small metal tin I hadn’t noticed before, taped underneath the shelf. Inside was a single photograph, exactly like the letter had described. It showed my mother and my aunt standing beside a car, with a third person between them whose face had been scratched away. On the back was a date from 1978 and an address I recognized immediately. It was the address of the house where I grew up. I stood there holding the photograph, suddenly wondering why my mother had spent her entire life making sure I never knew what happened there.:::
