The Baby Sister I Prayed Forty Years For
Mrs. Kasper carried her up the porch steps. The woman with the apron took her and said something low. The screen door closed behind them with a small, ordinary sound.
I sat in the front seat of the Plymouth with my hands in my lap. Mrs. Kasper came back down the walk and got in and did not start the car. She sat looking straight ahead through the windshield for what must have been a full minute. She was not supposed to. I know that now. There was a schedule, and the farm family was expecting me by four.
Then she turned the key and drove me thirty miles into the hills to the Abbotts.
The Abbotts were good people. Clarence and Inga ran hogs and a few head of cattle on eighty rocky acres and put up three hundred quarts of beans a summer, and they had room for exactly one extra mouth and not a spoonful more. Inga taught me piecrust and how to hang sheets so the wind would do the ironing. She never once raised her voice. She never once said she loved me, either, and I came to understand she had decided not to, so nobody would be hurt when the county moved me again.
The county did not move me again. I stayed with the Abbotts until I was eighteen. I am grateful for that.
But I will tell you what I did every night of those nine years in a narrow iron bed under the eaves. I said my prayers the way a child does, with a long list. God bless Mama in heaven. God bless Mr. and Mrs. Abbott. God bless Marcella. And at the end, last of all, because I did not know how to ask for it any other way: Please let me see her again.
The week she took me away, Mrs. Kasper wrote her home address on a slip of paper and pressed it into my hand without a word. I kept it inside my Bible. Every August ninth, my sister’s birthday, I sat at the Abbotts’ kitchen table with a penny postcard and wrote the same two lines. Is she well. Please tell her I have not forgotten.
Every year I got an answer. It was always the same kind of answer, on a plain white card, in blue ink, in a tall slanted hand.
She is well. She is loved. I may not say more. Keep praying. And then just the initial. H.
I had a shoebox of those cards by the time I was eighteen. I did not know about sealed files, or the promises an agency makes to a family that has waited years for a baby. I only knew that a grown woman in a hat answered me every August and told me nothing, and I did not know whether to bless her or hate her. I did both, mostly at once.
At eighteen, with a suitcase and a letter of reference from Inga Abbott, I took the bus to the county seat and walked to Mrs. Kasper’s house and sat at her kitchen table. I said, “I’m a grown woman now, and I would like to know where my sister is.” Mrs. Kasper set her cup down. She said, “Noreen, on my life, I cannot.” She said the family had asked the county for one thing, that the child never be told and never be sought, and that they had been promised. “I won’t break my word to a woman who has been good to a child you love,” she said. “Not even for you.”