The Baby Sister I Prayed Forty Years For

“In April we cleaned out her closet to move her to a smaller room,” Fern said, “and on the top shelf was a round blue hatbox tied with kitchen string. I opened it on her bed. I thought it’d be a hat.”

She reached into her big purse and set it on the table, soft at the corners.

“Thirty-three postcards from you,” she said to me. “Every August, 1968 through 2000. She kept every one, in order, with a rubber band around each five years. And a letter from you, Janet. One. From 1983.”

Janet took a breath that shook.

“I was eighteen,” Janet said to me, hardly above a whisper. “Old enough to ask. The lady at the courthouse gave me the name of the worker who’d handled my papers, and I wrote to her care of the old address. I got back a card. A few lines.” She took the card from her own purse, and laid it on the table beside the others.

I knew it before I saw it. White card. Blue ink. A tall slanted hand.

You were loved before you were known. I may not say more. I am sorry. H.K.

I put my palm flat on the table next to my sister’s card. I did not need to fetch mine from the shoebox at home. Same ink, same hand.

“She answered you both,” Fern said quietly, “and never told either one the other was writing. She had promised the Pruitts in 1967 that the child would never be sought. And she promised a girl in a brown coat, the same month, that she would answer every card. She kept both promises. She just never found a way to keep them in the same house.”

“She could have told me she was alive,” I said. It came out harder than I meant, and I did not take it back. “She could have told me where, after the Pruitts died. She could have told me in 2015. I was fifty-seven. Janet was fifty. We lived under two hours apart.”

“Yes,” Fern said. She did not flinch. “She could have. Archie Pruitt died in 2006 and Pauline in 2015, and after that the promise was only to people in the ground. She knew it. I think she was ashamed, and by the time she might have been brave enough, her mind had started to go. I won’t make excuses for her. You’ve earned the plain truth of it.”

Nobody said anything. At the far end of the room Wanda’s dish towel stopped moving.

I was angry. I sat at that folding table with my sister six inches from me and I was angrier than I had been since I was eighteen. Forty years on my knees, and a woman in a navy coat had known the name of the town where my sister slept. All that time it had been in a hatbox on a shelf.

I looked at Janet. Janet looked at me. And she said what I had not.

“I know,” she said. “I’ve been angry since August.”

“What did you do with it?”

She thought. “I sat in the car. Then Hershel came out and said, ‘Janet, the woman’s ninety-six and can’t say her own daughter’s name, and the daughter drove seventy miles to put it in your hands.’ And I thought, well. That’s one way of finishing a promise.”

“I’m going to be angry a while,” I said, to Fern, to the hatbox. “I’d like that understood. I’m not made of glass. What your mother did cost us two lifetimes of Christmases.”