your half sister, Peggy Ann,” Aunt Lottie whispered through her tears. “She was seven years old, and a school photograph of her at five looked exactly like you. Your mother was married before your father, to a man named Roy Doyle. When that marriage ended, Roy took Peggy Ann from the school yard one afternoon and drove away, and nobody knew where. The police sent her picture to every town in New England, and half the people in Pickerel Notch kept stopping your mother in the grocery store, certain that you were the missing girl.” I held the phone with both hands.
Lottie said that my mother was only thirty two then, with a five year old at home and a heart that was breaking. Every week strangers told her they had seen her daughter, and every week she packed me into the car to go and look. “She was afraid for you,” Lottie said. “People pointed at you in the street. A man once followed the two of you to the car, sure that you were the girl. So she sent you to me for a year, so she could chase every lead without dragging you along.” I had always believed I was sent away for being a burden.
I thanked my aunt, hung up, and sat in my kitchen in Pickerel Notch for a very long time. I was not angry, which surprised me. I mostly felt sad for my mother, carrying such a weight through every birthday and every Christmas for forty eight years. The next morning I drove to her small yellow house on Alder Lane. I did not plan to scold her, and I did not rehearse a single speech. I only wanted to sit at her table and tell her that I knew, and that I loved her no matter what she had kept from me.
A mother kept forty eight unsent birthday letters for the daughter she lost to a custody dispute and a registry brings them together again.
Mother was in the garden in her old straw hat. When I told her about the video, the trowel slipped from her fingers. “Cousin Faye sent it to me by mistake,” I said. “Mom, I called Aunt Lottie. I know about Peggy Ann.” For a moment she did not breathe. Then she sat down on the porch step, and eighty years of strength seemed to leave her at once. “I wanted to tell you so many times,” she whispered. “But you had already lost a whole year of your childhood to all of it. I did not want you to lose anything more.”
She took me inside and brought down a shoebox from the top shelf of the hall closet. It was full of envelopes, forty eight of them, one for every birthday of Peggy Ann since the day she vanished. Each one was sealed and addressed in careful handwriting to Miss Peggy Ann Doyle, wherever she may be. “Roy told the court I had no money and no home,” Mother said. “Then he disappeared with her. I looked for ten years, and after that I just wrote letters.” My brother Walter arrived while we were reading them, and he sat down beside us without a word.
Walter confessed that he was the one who had pushed Mother at the restaurant, because he thought it was time. He was ten when it happened, and he remembered his little sister crying in the back seat of the car of Roy. “I have wanted to find her my whole life,” he said. “I just did not know how to say it to you, Nancy.” I told him that nobody needed to be sorry any more. Then I opened my laptop and asked, “Mom, did you ever sign up for one of those registries that help families find each other?”
She had, in 1994, using the name Dolores Doyle, because that was the name on all the old paperwork. But after she married my father, she had been Dolores Whitcomb for decades. I explained that a registry could not match two names that did not know each other. We spent that afternoon filling out forms with every name and date we could remember, including the exact town where Roy was last seen. It felt like hanging a lantern in a window. Mother signed the last line with such a steady hand that I wanted to cry. Then she folded her hands and said she was ready to wait as long as it took.
Nine days later, my phone rang while I was putting groceries away. A kind woman from the state registry said, “Mrs. Whitcomb, we have a match with a woman named Margaret Ann Pelletier, fifty five, living in Lebanon, New Hampshire. She registered in 2009 and has been looking for her mother ever since.” I sat down hard on the kitchen floor. Peggy Ann had been looking too. Roy had told her their mother gave her up, and she believed him until she found an old court paper among his things after he passed away.
We met the next Saturday at the lake landing in Pickerel Notch. Peggy Ann stepped out of her car with gray curls and a gap between her front teeth, and I felt as if I were looking into a mirror from a different year. Mother stood very still, holding the shoebox against her chest. Peggy Ann walked straight up and said, “Mama?” in a voice so small and brave that Walter had to turn away. Mother could only nod. They held each other for so long that the geese stopped honking.
That evening we all sat around the table on Alder Lane, three children of Dolores at last, passing the box of letters from hand to hand. Peggy Ann read every one, even the ones that made her cry, and she kept a pile on her lap as if she could not bear to put them down. My mother watched her with shining eyes, and Walter quietly refilled the coffee cups so that no one would have to leave the table, not even for a minute. “Eighty years old,” she said softly, “and my table is finally full.” I reached out and took the hand of my sister, and for the first time in my life, nothing was missing.
