Nobody sleeps well the night after a revelation like that, but I slept better than I expected. In the morning I put on my good blue dress, packed the birth certificate in my purse, and drove the twelve miles to the house of Mama with my sister white knuckled in the passenger seat. Lorinda had not said a word since we left the river. The ladder to the attic stood unfolded in the upstairs hall, and a trail of small footprints led across the dust like the tracks of a very careful bird.
We stood at the bottom of the ladder for a long moment. Then we heard it, a faint scrape from above, followed by a soft cough. Lorinda grabbed my hand, the way she had when we were six and thought there was a bear in the cellar. “Somebody is up there,” she whispered. I called out in the firm voice I used on late clients for thirty eight years. “Whoever you are, come down, please, or we are going to come up.” A long silence. Then a small, steady voice said, “I would like very much to come down.”
She climbed down the ladder slowly, holding a flat cardboard box under one arm. A small woman, white haired, in a green cardigan, with a cane hooked over her wrist. She was about seventy years old. She had the chin of Daddy. She had the eyes of Mama, wide set and gray. She stood in the hallway with the dust on her shoulders and looked at the two of us standing there in our matching blue dresses, because we had both chosen blue, and she began to laugh and cry at the same time.
“I am Naomi,” she said. “Naomi Ruth. I think I am your sister.” The old lady in the church hat had been right. Our third sister had been born in the same hour as us, in a hospital in Kansas City in April of 1956, three small girls for a young couple who had a dairy farm and forty dollars in the bank. She was the smallest and the weakest, and the doctor said she might not make it through the winter. Mama and Daddy were scared, and they were poor, and a nurse named Odessa offered to take the baby.
Some choices are made out of love and some out of fear, and the hardest ones are made out of both at the same moment.
Odessa was the old lady in the church hat. She was ninety two now, and she waited in the car outside while Naomi did what she had come to do. She had been twenty two when she took that tiny baby home, a nurse who could not have children of her own, and she nursed the infant through the winter with a medicine dropper. Mama promised to take her back when the farm was on its feet. But the farm never was, and by the time it was, the baby was walking and calling Odessa Mama, and Mama could not bring herself to take a child from a mother.
Naomi grew up in Sedalia, thirty miles away. She knew she was adopted. She did not know about us. She found out five years ago, from a letter that Odessa finally wrote when she knew she was getting old. Naomi had come to see the house, the farm, the dairy, and to meet whoever was left. She found out about Mama too late. She stood at the grave on a gray morning and apologized to a stone. Then she went to the attic, because Odessa had told her where Mama kept the box.
The box was the thing under her arm. She set it down on the hallway floor and opened it, and the three of us knelt around it like children around a Christmas present. Inside were letters. Hundreds of them, bundled in kitchen string. Every one was in the handwriting of Mama, addressed to Naomi Ruth, the name that had been crossed out on the birth certificate. She had written one on every birthday for sixty four years. She had never mailed a single one. The first said, My baby, you are eight days old, and I have no right to hold you.
I read the first twenty out loud on the floor of the hallway while Lorinda wept against the wall. When I could not read any more, Naomi took over. Her voice was lovely, low and steady, a voice that taught Sunday school for forty years. And somewhere in the middle of a letter from 1971, about a hog that got loose and ate the garden, Lorinda began to laugh. Then I laughed. Then Naomi. We sat there in the afternoon light, three old women on a dusty floor, laughing at a hog.
Odessa came in on the arm of Kyle, my nephew, who had driven her all the way from Sedalia. She stopped in the doorway and looked at the three of us on the floor, and she took off her church hat and held it against her chest. She said she had been waiting seventy years for that picture. I helped her to the porch swing and brought her a glass of sweet tea. She held my hand. She told me she had loved us all along, and that she had prayed for us by name, and that she was sorry. I told her there was not a thing to be sorry for.
Lorinda gave up the idea of moving into the old house alone, and I gave up the idea of spending the rest of my life angry about it. We agreed, at the long kitchen table, with the dairy calendar from 1982 still on the wall, that the house would be for the three of us. Naomi would take the downstairs bedroom, because of her knees. Lorinda would have the sunroom. I would keep my yellow cottage on the river and come up on Sundays. The old wooden piece of Daddy hangs over the fireplace again, plugged and varnished, with a new birth certificate tucked inside.
We celebrated our birthday in April on the porch of my cottage, with a sheet cake that said Dorinda, Lorinda, and Naomi in pink, yellow, and green roses. Half the Sunday school class came, and the cousins from Sedalia, and one very elegant old lady in a church hat. We blew out the candles together. I am seventy years old, and for the first time in my life there were three of us to share the wish. I will not tell you what I wished for. I will only say that it came true before the smoke cleared.
