The heat in the parish that week didn’t lift even after the sun went down behind the live oaks. I was standing in the middle of my mother’s kitchen with a black garbage bag in one hand and a roll of heavy-duty tape in the other when the silence started feeling too loud. Mama had been gone three days. We buried her out at St Ray had already taken her Buick keys and driven off to see about the gas station in town.
He always did that when things got heavy, just climbed into a truck or a car and pointed the hood toward the highway until someone called him back. I stayed behind to clear out the drawers because that was my job. It had always been my job since I was twelve years old and had to the kind of floor wax they stopped making back during the Carter administration. I went through the pantry first, tossing out cans of cream stuff. That old green tin sewing basket sat on the nightstand right where it had been for thirty years, stuffed with spools of thread the color of dried tobacco and little square patches of cotton she used to mend Ray’s work shirts. I lifted the lid to take brown envelope tucked underneath a bundle of yellowed receipts from the hardware store down on Main Street.
It wasn’t a modern envelope with a clear window. It was thick, coarse paper with a purple ink stamp from the Lafayette Parish Courthouse that had faded until it looked like a bruise.
The postmark was smudged, but I could still make out the year: 1975. The same year Mama always told people she lost her firstborn baby girl to the croup before they could even get her down to the clinic in Abbeville. I didn’t think twice. I just pulled it out, sat down right there on the edge of the twin bed with the floral quilt, and slid my thumb under the flap. The glue gave way with a dry rasp, like a cricket dying in the dark.
Inside was a single sheet of cheap lined paper folded twice. My name wasn’t on it. Nobody’s name was on it except for a docket number written in pencil at the top: 489-B. I didn’t read the whole thing right then because my chest got tight the way it does when I have one of my spells. I just folded it back up, shoved it down into my apron pocket right next to my house keys, and finished putting the canned goods into the black bags.
Ray came back around nine with a six-pack of warm beer and sat on the porch steps drinking one while I locked up the back door. He didn’t ask what I found in the bedroom. Ray never asked about anything unless it had an engine or a price tag attached to it.
The next morning I didn’t go to the laundry or answer the phone when the deacon from the church called about the Wednesday night supper. I drove straight down to the parish seat. The courthouse downtown still had those heavy oak doors that weighed about five hundred pounds each and smelled like floor polish and old tobacco smoke. The girl behind the records counter looked like she was nineteen years old and had too much eyeliner on, and she was chewing gum so hard I thought her jaw might snap. Her name tag said Brenda, though I doubt that was her real name.
“I need to pull a file,” I told her, laying the faded brown envelope right on the formica counter between us. “1975. Vital records.”
She didn’t look up from her screen for a solid ten seconds. “You got an ID? You got a relationship to the party listed?”
“She’s my mother,” I said. “And she passed away on Saturday.”
Brenda tapped her nails against the keyboard. Clack, clack, clack. Like a woodpecker on a dead gum tree. “That’s going to cost you thirty-eight dollars for the certified search fee. Cash or card. We don’t take personal checks from out of the parish.”
I didn’t argue with her. I pulled out my old leather purse, dug around past three different tubes of peppermint chapstick and a handful of crumpled receipts from the Piggly Wiggly, and laid two twenty-dollar bills on the counter. She didn’t give me change right away. She walked over to a metal cabinet in the corner that looked like it had been through three different hurricanes and dragged out a heavy gray binder with tape holding the spine together. She flipped through the onionskin pages until her finger stopped on a line near the bottom.
“Wells,” she muttered, licking the side of her thumb before turning another page. “File 489-B. You want copies of the court seal too?”
“All of it,” I said. My mouth felt like I’d been chewing on sand. “Give me whatever is in that folder.”
She went into the back room where the copying machine made that high-pitched whining sound like a dying alternator. When she came back out, she didn’t hand the papers to me. She slid them across the counter the way a dealer slides cards in a game down at the Legion hall. Three sheets of paper, still warm from the drum.
I didn’t look at them until I got back out to the parking lot. The sun was right overhead now, beating down on the hood of my old pickup truck until the paint was too hot to touch. I sat behind the steering wheel with the engine off, letting the air inside the cab turn into a baking oven because I couldn’t bring myself to turn the key. I smoothed the first page out against my knee.
The baby had not died of the croup in the winter of 1975. That was the first lie. The second lie was that Mama had spent three weeks crying into her apron because the Lord took her little girl home before she even had a name. According to the adoption decree stamped by a judge who had been dead for thirty years, the infant had been handed over to a licensed placement agency in Baton Rouge three days after she was born at the county hospital. The people who took her were named Arthur and Clara Wells from a farm up outside of Terre Haute, Indiana. They didn’t call her Mary like Mama sometimes whispered when she had too much cough syrup in her tea. They named her Margaret. Margaret Wells.
My ears started ringing that high, sharp whistle that usually means my blood pressure is acting up again. I looked down at the second page. It was a letter written on cheap stationery with blue ink that had started to feather around the edges where sweat had dropped onto the page. It was in Mama’s handwriting. I knew every slant of those letters because I’d spent ten years practicing my Palmer method at the kitchen table while she watched me with a ruler in her hand.
“I was nineteen,” the letter said. “Your father said we couldn’t afford another mouth, and he put his foot down the minute we came home from the clinic. He said if I didn’t sign the papers he’d pack his things and leave me in that rental house with the tin roof by the bayou. I didn’t have nobody to help me. I signed them on a Tuesday morning while he waited out in the truck with the motor running. I am sorry. I hope you got a good home where they don’t yell when the stove smokes.”
I read that one sentence over three times until the ink looked like it was swimming across the paper. My father had been dead twelve years, and suddenly I wanted to dig him up just so I could spit in the dirt over his box. Ray always said our old man was a hard worker who kept bread on the table, but he never mentioned that the bread was bought with the price of a baby sister I wasn’t supposed to know about. I sat there in that hot truck until my shirt was stuck to the vinyl seat back, staring out at the courthouse lawn where the St. Augustine grass was turning brown from the drought.
Then I saw the third page. It wasn’t old like the others. The paper was bright white, the kind you buy in a ream at the dollar store, and the printing was neat and small, done on a computer printer with black ink that hadn’t faded an inch. It was a note clipped to the bottom of the court record with a little silver paperclip that had left a tiny rust mark on the corner.
“I have searched for my family since I learned the truth when I turned forty,” the note said. It was dated last spring, right around the time Mama’s breathing started getting short and she had to keep the oxygen tank rolling beside her armchair. “My adoptive parents were good people, but they’re both gone now. I know my birth mother’s name was Clara Mae Thibodeaux. If anyone in Lafayette Parish knows anything, please contact me through the registry. I just want to know why.”
At the bottom was an email address and a phone number with a 317 area code. Indiana. About a thousand miles north of where I was sitting with my hands shaking against the steering wheel.
I didn’t start the truck right away. I pulled my apron pocket open, took out the house keys, and then dropped the papers back into the brown envelope. My chest felt heavy, like someone had piled two sacks of feed on top of my ribs. Mama had lived seventy-eight years in that house with the blue shutters, and she never once mentioned Indiana. She never mentioned Margaret. She just sat in her rocking chair every November, staring out at the rain coming down through the pecan trees, and told us we were all she had left in this world.
I drove back home by way of the river road because the main highway was backed up with trucks hauling timber from the parish line. The bayou looked low and sluggish, the water the color of strong tea with scum gathering around the cypress knees where the turtles liked to sun themselves. When I got back to Mama’s house, Ray’s truck was gone, but he’d left the front screen door unlatched so it kept banging against the frame every time the wind shifted off the marshes.
I went inside, dropped my purse on the kitchen table, and picked up the landline phone that sat on the little shelf by the refrigerator. The cord was twisted up the way Mama liked it so it wouldn’t drag on the floor. I didn’t use my cell phone because the signal in the kitchen was always spotty and I didn’t want the call to drop halfway through the middle of whatever was coming. I punched in the 317 number from the bottom of the white paper, reading the digits off one by one like I was dialing a combination to a safe.
It rang four times. I was just about to hang up and tell myself it was a dead end, that fifty years was too long to go looking for someone who probably didn’t even care about an old woman’s lies down in the swamp, when a woman’s voice answered on the other end. She didn’t say hello like people do down here. She just said her last name, crisp and flat, the way they talk up north where the winters make people hard.
“Wells,” she said.
My tongue felt thick in my mouth. I had to swallow twice before any sound came out, and even then it sounded like a stranger’s voice talking in an empty room.
“Margaret?” I said.
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I could hear something in the background up there in Indiana, maybe a television or a dishwasher running, some kind of mechanical noise that didn’t belong in a house where everything was heated by gas and quieted by habit.
“Yes,” she said, and her voice didn’t sound hard anymore. It sounded thin, like she was holding her breath against a door that was just about to swing open. “Who is this?”
“This is Clara’s girl,” I told her, and for the first time since I found that brown envelope in the sewing basket, my hands stopped shaking. “I’m your sister. And we’ve got a whole lot of talking to do before the sun goes down.”
