She had kept it locked because everything in it was waiting for a day when she would no longer be there to be asked about it.
"Don't open it here," Priya said softly. "Not standing up in a dusty room. Sit down. Have water. Open it like a person, when you're ready."
"I'm not ready," Sadie said. "I don't think ready is a thing that happens." She held the envelope the way she held newborn babies at the hospital when they were first put into her arms — carefully, and with both hands, and with the strangest sense that it was far heavier than it could possibly be. "But she wrote when I am gone. And she is gone."
She carried it downstairs into the kitchen, into the light.
Chapter 7: Vera's Letter
Sadie made tea she did not drink, in the kitchen where she had eaten ten thousand meals, and opened the envelope with the butter knife because her hands would not do it any other way.
Priya sat across from her and did not speak. The dress lay on the chair beside them, still sealed in its plastic, yellow as a held breath. The ticket stub lay next to it. Through the window, the garden Vera had tended for twenty-five years went on being green without her, which seemed to Sadie like the most unreasonable thing in the world.
Inside the envelope there were four pages, closely written, both sides, in the upright hand she knew better than her own. At the top, no date. Only:
*My Sadie —*
*If you are reading this, then I am gone, and I have taken the coward's way out of the hardest conversation in the world, which is what this is. I ask you to read it all before you judge any of it. I know that is a great deal to ask. Everything about this letter is a great deal to ask.*
Sadie read on, and the kitchen ticked and settled around her, and the tea went cold in its cups.
*You know that before you there was another baby. I told you when you were small that I had a daughter who was born sleeping, and that God took her because heaven needed her more, and you used to leave flowers on the little stone at St. Jude's and call her your sister in heaven. Her name was Faith. She was born in February of 2001, perfect and still, and they let me hold her for one hour, and then they took her away and I went home to a house with a painted nursery and a husband who did not know how to say anything that helped.*
*I was not well after that, my darling. I want you to know that, not as an excuse — there is no excuse in this letter, I have checked — but because it is the truth, and the truth is all I have left to give you. I did not sleep. I walked the floors. I stood in the door of that painted room. Carl wanted to take the crib down and I would not let him touch it.*
*In May the church ladies made me go to the spring fair. They said the air would do me good. I went the way a person goes to the dentist. And there — by the carousel, in the crowd, with the music playing — there was a little girl in a yellow dress, crying because she had lost hold of her brother's hand. She had dark curls and a smudge of ice cream on her chin and she was nobody's, for just that one moment she was nobody's, standing there in the middle of all those people with her face screwed up to wail.*
*I picked her up to comfort her. That is the God's truth, Sadie. I picked her up to comfort her, and she put her arms around my neck and her head down on my shoulder, and she was warm, and she was breathing, and she weighed exactly what a child weighs, and something in me that had been broken since February closed over her like water over a stone.*
*I told myself I would take her just for the day. I have written that sentence four times and crossed it out four times in the drafts of this letter, because it sounds like a lie, but it is the truest thing I know. Just for the day, I said. Just until she stops crying. Just until I find the lost-and-found, just until we are out of the noise. I carried her through the fair gate with her face against my neck so the music would not frighten her. I told the man at the gate she had tired herself out. He did not even look up. Nobody looked up, Sadie. That is the thing I have never been able to forgive the world for — how easy it was. Nobody looked up.*
Sadie lowered the pages. Her eyes were streaming so steadily that she had stopped noticing.
"Do you want me to stop existing for a while?" Priya said. "I can go and be extremely interested in the porch."
"No," Sadie said. "Stay in the world. Just — stay in it over there." She picked the letter up again.
*By the time we got to the car, the day had become a plan, and by the time we got home the plan had become a life, and I have no defense for it except that grief is a kind of madness and I was mad with it, and every day after that first day, giving her back got harder instead of easier, because every day she was more mine. Carl knew. Carl knew from the first night — I believe he knew before I said a word, standing in the doorway looking at a child asleep in the spare room in a yellow dress. He worked at the county offices. The papers that made her Sadie Lindell came through his hands. I will not pretend he argued. He was grieving too, in his quiet way, and he chose me over the truth, and I let him, and that is on both of us.*
*Her name was not Sadie. You must look for her other name yourself, when you are ready — I find I cannot write it, even now, even in a letter no one will read until I am past being asked about it. I am still a coward at the end of all these years, you see. But I will tell you the rest of what is yours. The dress in the drawer is the dress she wore that day. I could not throw it away and I could not look at it, so I sealed it up, which is what I did with everything I could not bear. The ticket stub is hers too — it was pinned to the dress. I have kept them together all this time like evidence, because that is what they are.*
*And the mark behind your ear — the little crescent, God's thumbprint, I called it, and made you wear your hair down over it like a curtain. I told you it was to keep you modest. It was to keep you hidden. It is mentioned, I always feared, in some doctor's record somewhere in this city, from before. A mother who lost a child does not forget a mark like that. I knew that. I have known it every day for twenty-five years, every time I brushed your hair. Forgive the hair, if you can. Forgive any of it, if you can. I do not ask it. I have no right to ask it.*
*You were loved, Sadie. Whatever else this letter does, do not let it take that from you, because it is also the truth, and it is the biggest truth I own. You were loved every day, on purpose, by a woman who had no right to you at all. If there is a hell for what I did, it will not be fire. It will be reading this letter over your shoulder and watching you find out.*
*Your mother — for that is what I was, and was not —*
*Vera*
Sadie read the last page twice. Then she folded the letter along its old creases — it had been folded and refolded; Vera had plainly taken it out over the years and put it back, the way you touch a bruise — and she sat with her hands flat on either side of it, on the kitchen table where she had done her homework and eaten her birthday cakes, all of it real, all of it hers, all of it built on a May afternoon and a woman who did not look up being needed.
Across the room, in its plastic sleeve, the yellow dress caught the light.
"I don't know what I am now," Sadie said at last, to Priya, to the room, to the woman who was not there to hear it. "She's written me a letter that makes me a person who was taken. I don't feel like a person who was taken. I feel like her daughter, sitting in her kitchen, reading her mail. Both of those can't be—" She stopped. "Both of those are true, aren't they. That's the awful thing. Both of those are true."