Chapter 3 - The House on Larkspur Lane
Claire waited until the children were asleep before she opened the folder.
She sat at the kitchen table of the house on Larkspur Lane — the house she'd kept in the divorce, small and yellow-shuttered, with a porch swing Michael had installed the summer Emma was born and never taken down — with a mug of chamomile tea gone cold beside her elbow, and she read the letters twice through before she let herself cry.
The first letter, dated March 1987, was from her mother — younger, sharper-handed, the cursive not yet softened by the arthritis that would curl it in later decades — addressed to a Mrs. Eleanor Reyes of Baton Rouge.
I understand your son wishes to be part of the child's life, her mother had written, but I have made arrangements that I believe are best for everyone, including the baby. I am not in a position, financially or otherwise, to raise two children as a single mother, and I have decided that this child deserves a stable home more than she deserves a mother who resents the circumstances of her arrival. I ask that neither you nor your son attempt to contact me again. This is not cruelty. This is the only mercy I have to give.
The second letter was shorter, dated a year later, and colder. The third, from 1991 — the year of Claire's own birth — mentioned nothing of the first child at all, only a brief, businesslike note confirming that a small monthly sum would continue to be sent to the adoptive family "for the child's needs, as agreed," through an attorney's office in New Orleans.
Claire read that line four times. A small monthly sum. Her mother, who had told her a thousand times growing up that money had always been tight, that every extra dollar had gone to keeping food on the table and the lights on, had been quietly sending payments to a family in Louisiana for the daughter she'd given away.
There was a photograph tucked into the last envelope — small, square, the kind developed at a drugstore counter. A baby, dark-eyed even then, wrapped in a yellow blanket, held by a woman who was not Claire's mother.
On the back, in her mother's handwriting: Sophia. One year old. God keep her.
Claire pressed her hand over her mouth.
She thought of every Sunday of her childhood, sitting beside her mother in the third pew from the front of this same church, her mother's hand tight around hers during the hymns, the particular fierceness with which her mother had always said, during the Lord's Prayer, forgive us our trespasses. She had thought it was piety. She understood now it might have been something closer to penance.
She thought of her mother's face at Emma's christening, the tears that had seemed, at the time, like ordinary grandmotherly joy. She thought of the year her mother had disappeared for eleven days without explanation, the year Claire was fourteen, returning gaunt and quiet and refusing to discuss where she'd been — a trip, her mother had said, to see an old friend who was dying. Claire had never questioned it.
Now she wondered if her mother had gone to Baton Rouge. If she had stood outside a house on some unfamiliar street and watched, from a safe distance, a teenage girl who looked like her, laughing with friends on a porch, never once crossing the road to say hello.
The back door creaked. Claire startled, wiping her face, and found Emma standing in the kitchen doorway in her nightgown, hair a wild halo from sleep, clutching the stuffed rabbit she still slept with and pretended, in daylight hours, not to need.
"Mom? Why are you crying?"
Claire closed the folder quickly, though not quickly enough — she saw Emma's eyes catch on the photograph before it disappeared beneath the manila cover.
"I'm okay, sweetheart," Claire said, opening her arms. Emma climbed into her lap the way she hadn't in over a year, too big for it now, knees knocking the table, and Claire held her anyway, breathing in the smell of her daughter's shampoo, lavender and something chemical and sweet, and thought: I don't know how to explain this to you. I don't fully understand it myself.
"Is it about Dad and Sophia?" Emma asked into her shoulder.
"Sort of," Claire admitted. "It's complicated, baby. Grown-up complicated."
"Sophia looked sad at the pageant," Emma said. "Like she wanted to say something and didn't know how."
Claire pulled back to look at her daughter's face — too perceptive, always, this child, an old soul wearing an eleven-year-old's cardigan.
"What did you see?" Claire asked.
"I saw her looking at you the whole time," Emma said. "Like she was trying to figure something out. And I saw you looking back at her the same way." She frowned, chewing her lip, the exact expression Claire made when she was working through a puzzle. "Do you know her from somewhere?"
May you like
Claire thought of the photograph in the folder. A one-year-old in a yellow blanket. A woman who might be, against every odd Claire had ever imagined for her own quiet, unremarkable family, her sister.
"Maybe," Claire said softly. "Maybe I do."
