“Mr. Frankson came to me at the local library on my 13th birthday,” Noah said. “Yolanda left instructions. The attorney was supposed to give me a letter that day wherever I was.”
“And you’ve had it for five years.”
“Yes.”
“Five years, Noah.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You knew who I was to you,” I said. “You knew who she was. And you sat at this table every night without saying a word.”
“Yolanda left instructions.”
“I was terrified, Mom.”
“Of what?”
“Of you.”
I flinched. He saw it and shook his head quickly.
“Not like that,” Noah said. “I was scared you’d look at me and see her. See the sister you cut off. I was scared you’d feel like somebody tricked you into loving me. That I was some kind of, I don’t know, debt you didn’t sign up for.”
“I was terrified, Mom.”
Both my children knew about my estranged relationship with Yolanda.
“You are my son.”
“I didn’t know that would still be true if you knew.”
I sat back. I thought about the summer he turned 13.
The locked bedroom door. The fights he picked with Mia over cereal, the TV, and nothing at all.
How he stopped coming down for dinner, and I told myself it was hormones.
“You are my son.”
“You were miserable that summer,” I said quietly.
“Yes.”
“And I called it a phase.”
“I didn’t want you to look closer, Mom. I had already been lying to you every day. If you’d asked me straight out, I would’ve cracked.”
“I didn’t ask.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
“Wait here,” he said.
“I called it a phase.”
Noah got up and went to his room.
He came back with several pages and laid them in front of me.
“This is what Mr. Frankson gave me,” he said. “I’ve been carrying it in my pocket for weeks, except today. I kept trying to figure out how to hand it to you.”
I opened them.
Yolanda’s handwriting again.
This time she’d written to Noah.
“I kept trying to figure out how to hand it to you.”
My sister told him what she couldn’t tell me.
Yolanda had written plainly.
She told Noah who she was, who his father was, and why she had to give him up. My late sister shared how much she loved him and told him stories about the short life they had together before she became sick. She also told him about me, who I was, and how we’d become estranged.
I set the pages down.
My sister told him what she couldn’t tell me.
“Five years,” I said again, more softly.
“I’ve told you almost a hundred times.”
“Do you know what hurts, Noah? It isn’t what she did. It’s that you sat on the one thing that might’ve let me sleep at night all these years.”
“I’m so sorry, Mom.”
“I need some air.”
I folded the letter and slid it across to my son.
Then I stood up.
“Do you know what hurts?”
“Mom, please…”
“I’m not leaving you,” I said. “I just can’t hear another word tonight.”
I walked past him, went outside, and stood on the porch for a while.
***
Later, I came back in, found Noah gone, and went up to my room, but I didn’t sleep.
Sometime before dawn, I picked up my keys.
“I’m not leaving you.”
