A look of understanding passed over Evan’s face, and he came down the steps to join me. He put one long, strong arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “I’ll get them down.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, shifting my weight from one foot to the other as I watched him take a six-foot ladder and set it up next to the appropriate shelf, retrieving what I needed. A moment later, Evan carried the box through the house and put it on the kitchen table. I followed him inside, then stood next to the table and removed the snapped-on lid.
“I can stay and help,” he offered. “If you want.”
“Thank you,” I said, giving him a grateful smile. “For doing this”—here, I motioned toward the box—“and everything you said to me in the bedroom. You’re so good to me. But I think this is something I need to do on my own. You should get back to work anyway.”
He looked at me a moment longer, then nodded. “The card Natalie left with her contact information is on the fridge, under the blue magnet. In case you end up going to the post office. There are some smaller boxes in the hall closet that might work.”
“Okay.” I took a couple of steps over so I could hug him. “I love you so much.”
“Love you more,” he said, and then he left through the back door. The dogs made a ruckus when he joined them outside, and he called them to follow him, which I appreciated. They’d distract me if he’d let them stay home.
After he was gone, I stood in the silence, unmoving, contemplating what I was about to do. I stared at the stack of notebooks inside the box, the earlier pages filled with one or two sentences, couplets of my thoughts about the girls when they were young; the later containing the letters I’d written to each of them on her birthday each year. I wondered if they would sit down and read everything together. Or if each of them would take a turn, poring over every one of my words on their own before coming back together and talking about the things they’d learned about me—the things they’d learned about their past.
It was daunting to imagine them peeling open these pages and seeing into the depths of me, into the record of the things I’d wished for them, their dreams I hoped had come true. I hoped that in my passing all of this on, both of my girls would better understand what I’d been through, why I made the decisions that affected them both so much. I hoped they would laugh a little when they came across the stories of the funny things they did when they were babies; I hoped their hearts would be warmed by my words. I hoped these notebooks would help them to forgive the woman who’d brought them into the world—the woman who ended up leaving them to the find their way through it without her.
Just like my mom did to me, I thought, and I felt an ache in the pit of my stomach, recalling the day I stood on her front porch and she turned me away. Am I like her? At the time, and over the many years since, I couldn’t fathom how she could just cut off a relationship with her only child. How she could see me needing her, asking for help, and still she closed the door. Yet here I was, under different circumstances, basically having done the same thing to Natalie and Brooke.
I sat down at the table and, with shaking hands, began removing the notebooks from the box. A voice in my head warned me that I’d probably be better off forgetting the whole idea—that I should just put the box back up high on the shelf. What if getting this package from me only made things worse? What if now, after I’d rejected them, my daughters couldn’t care less about my thoughts, or what memories I had of the time together we’d shared? What if the package came back, marked RETURN TO SENDER?
But then another thought struck me. This decision wasn’t about me, or how I felt. It was about Natalie and Brooke, about giving them something they needed. I wanted to give them answers, which was more than my mother had given to me. I’d never know why my mom made the decisions she did, but if I went through with mailing the package, Natalie and Brooke wouldn’t suffer the same fate. Sending them my notes and letters was about giving them an explanation—giving them the truth, as imperfect and ugly and unfair as it could sometimes be. It was giving them everything I could.
Half an hour later, I had filled a brown cardboard shipping box with the stack of notebooks. Then came the hardest part—writing one final note to my girls. I grabbed a blank sheet of paper from the printer in the den, then returned to the kitchen, where I sat back down at the table and began to write.
Dear Brooke and Natalie,