A long silence follows Angela’s words. She bites her lip again, waiting.
“Nancy…？”
“Thank you, but I don’t think so.” She sniffles. “I really appreciate you tracking me down for the letter. I’ll be glad to have the note back, but I don’t think I can meet with this woman. I’m just—I’ve been trying to move on from it and I’ve done pretty well, to be honest. I don’t want to pick at that scab again, if you know what I mean.”
Angela nods to the empty store around her. “Yeah. Yeah, I get it. Totally.”
“So, I’ll send you my address. If you can mail everything over, that would be great. Thanks again for your help.”
And before Angela can respond, the line goes dead.
CHAPTER 27 Nancy
SPRING 2017
The package has collected a fine layer of dust.
Nancy’s been avoiding opening it since Angela Creighton sent it over a few weeks ago. It’s been moved from the sideboard in the front hall to the kitchen counter, to the desk in her office, to the top of the dresser in her bedroom. Every time she moves it during a weekly tidy-up blitz, she half-heartedly considers opening it and just getting the whole damn thing over with. She figured she knew what was in Frances’s letter, but had no desire to willfully rip open a wound that she had carefully stitched together over the past thirty-seven years. That scar is fine and faded now; sometimes she can hardly even tell it’s there. Unless she inspects it too closely, which is exactly what this package is calling her to do.
On a warm Saturday afternoon, Nancy finally gets up the courage to open it. She fetches a pair of scissors from the overflowing junk drawer in the kitchen and climbs the stairs back up to her room. She sits down on the bed and with a sigh, snips open the white bubble mailer, emptying the contents onto her lap.
Nancy picks up Margaret’s note. She notices that the edges are singed on one side of the note, burn marks that weren’t there when she first discovered it all those years ago. She pictures her mother, striking a match over the sink and holding the flame to the note before having a change of heart. Nancy knows that the prevailing wisdom at the time was to not tell children they were adopted, but her mother obviously had some reservations about that, even though she never acted on them. She wonders if Frances had kept the note and booties as some kind of shrine to Margaret, the girl who had given her the child she and her husband so desperately wanted.
She unfolds the photocopy of the obituary Angela Creighton found, sees Margaret Roberts’s name in black and white. She reaches over to her bedside table and opens the drawer, digs in the back, and withdraws the small drawstring pouch she’s kept Margaret’s booties in since her mother gifted them to her at her baby shower.
She lifts the booties and Margaret’s note up to her heart and holds them there for a long time, as though trying to absorb some of their long-forgotten energy. At least now she knows why no Margaret Roberts ever contacted her, tried to find her. She’s carried that resentment around for decades, but she can release it now.
Next, Nancy reads the news article about the closure of the maternity home, considers the horrors Margaret and the other girls might have experienced there. Her heart fills with a new kind of compassion for the poor girl. She remembers the confessions of that nun she sat with at St. Sebastian’s, that the girls at that home were lied to, their babies sold. A new wave of horrendous realization hits her at the thought that she may have been purchased by her parents. Was the home she was born at anything like the one that existed in the St. Sebastian’s building? She bookmarks that for now. It deserves a deeper dive if she can handle the research. And she should try to learn more about Margaret, if there is any more to learn.
Wiping away a tear, she picks up the final item in the package: her mother’s letter. She deliberately left it for last. It’s written on the same heavyweight paper Frances always used, purchased from an expensive British stationer in Rosedale. As soon as she sees her mother’s handwriting, the tears start to fall in earnest. When she’s finished reading, she curls up on the bed, bringing her head to her hands as she sobs into them.
Please forgive me, my dear.
She would give everything she owns for the opportunity to tell her mother that she does forgive her. That as a mother now herself, she understands the overwhelming power of a parent’s desire to protect their child from harm and heartache.
She thinks back to 2010, trying to recall everything about that year and pinpoint how the letter went astray.
She was living in the apartment above Thompson’s then. After the affair, she’d been the one to move out of their family home. Katherine was angry with them both but didn’t want her dad to leave, and a big part of Nancy was happy for the solitude. She wanted to go back to the city, to walk the streets she’d walked as a young woman, before she met Len, or Michael, or had the responsibilities of a career and children. When she was a purer version of herself and hadn’t made so many concessions yet. Hadn’t told so many lies. She needed to find herself again.
The apartment was meant to be a stopgap until her divorce from Michael was finalized and their assets were split, but she’d ended up staying longer than expected when Frances’s health rapidly declined. She didn’t have the energy to look for a new place until after the funeral. That’s when she bought this house in Oakville, with an extra room for Katherine, who divided her time between Nancy and Michael.
Frances died in February 2010, so it’s likely the letter was posted by her lawyer sometime that month. Nancy thinks back on all the times she reached into that mailbox and pulled out the flyers and bills that were addressed to the antiques store. She would pop into the shop right away, if it was open, and hand the rogue mail over to the bleached, tucked, and highly polished woman who owned the store. Nancy wonders which day it was that she reached her hand into her own mailbox, never knowing that the most important letter of her life was waiting for her just inches away, inside the box for Thompson’s.
Nancy sits up, crosses her legs underneath her on the cream-coloured duvet, and reads her mother’s letter through again. She wanted Nancy to go find Margaret, but Nancy failed. Margaret Roberts is dead, and Nancy can never fulfil her mother’s final wish. She adds it to the long list of things she should have done in her life and didn’t.
The tears are still pouring down Nancy’s face when Katherine appears at her open bedroom door.
“Mom? What’s wrong?”
“Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry, Katherine,” Nancy mutters, swiping ineffectively at her eyes. She should have locked her door. Damnit. “I—”
“What is it? What happened?” Her daughter steps into the room and sits down beside Nancy. Katherine is thirty now, but still living at home while she finishes a seemingly never-ending Ph.D. program. “Mom? You’re scaring me.”
“Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry,” Nancy says, pulling her into a tight hug. “Everything’s fine, it’s fine. No one’s sick or anything. It’s just…”
She releases Katherine, tucks a strand of sandy hair behind her daughter’s ear, casting around for some excuse to give, a white lie to tell.