There’s a woman at my mother’s grave in every photo my sister has ever sent me. She’s always in the background, wearing different clothes and standing there in different seasons. The photos span eleven years, but the woman looks exactly the same in every one. She’s never standing directly at our stone, always three rows over and facing us. I said it was a coincidence, and my sister said she’d thought so too for about the first five years. So this May, I drove out and walked to the row where she always stood.
I read all nine stones in that row, and the fourth one from the end had a name I recognized. It was my mother’s maiden name. The woman in all those photographs had been standing beside her sister’s grave, and the dates showed she had died in 2009. I checked the photograph from 2014 again and compared the woman standing there with an old family picture my mother had kept. The resemblance was unmistakable, but there was no record that my mother had ever mentioned having a sister. I called my sister and asked whether she knew the name on the stone, and she said our mother had told her never to ask about it.
I went back through my mother’s belongings that evening and found an old photo album I’d never opened. Most of it was ordinary family photographs, but several pages had been removed near the beginning. In the back pocket was a single photograph of my mother as a young woman standing beside another woman who looked exactly like the person in the cemetery photos. On the back, my mother had written a date from 1968 and one sentence: “She promised she’d never come looking for me again.” I stared at it for a long time before realizing the woman in the photograph was wearing the same necklace she wore in the cemetery.
The next morning, I called the cemetery office and asked whether anyone had visited that grave recently. The attendant checked the records and said the same visitor had signed the guest book every year for eleven years, always on the anniversary of my mother’s death. I asked for the name, and he gave me one that wasn’t on the gravestone. Then he said something that made my hands go cold. The visitor had been signing in under my mother’s name. He pulled up the most recent entry and showed it to me, and underneath the signature was a message written in the same handwriting as my mother’s: “I know you finally found her.”:::
