Fletcher read it first and then went out and stood in Ruth’s back yard for about twenty minutes.
We found Nesta Orlow in eleven days. It was not hard; she has never left Hobart County.
She is fifty-three. She works in the county recorder’s office. She has been married for nineteen years to a man named Hal and she has a daughter of twenty-two.
I wrote to her first, on paper, at her home, and I made it two paragraphs and I did not put anything in it that would corner her.
She called the number at the bottom of it forty minutes after the mail came.
The first thing she said, and she was not crying yet, was: “Are you the one with the freckles or the other one?”
She had two photographs. Somebody at the agency, against every rule that exists, had sent her two photographs in 1996 and that was the entire content of twenty-eight years.
We met her nine days later, at a diner on the highway outside Cordwell, because Fletcher said he did not want it to be at anybody’s house where somebody would have to be a host.
She got there first. She had a booth in the back and a cup of coffee she had not touched.
I had spent nine days building an expectation and none of it was correct. I had pictured somebody wrecked. She is not wrecked. She is a small, brisk, dryly funny woman who works in a county office and who has clearly been getting up and going to work for thirty years, and the first four minutes were the most ordinary conversation imaginable — the drive, the weather, whether the coffee there is any good.
Then Fletcher said, “Did you ever try to find us?”
He asked it flatly and I could have killed him and it turned out to be exactly the right question.
She said, “Twice.”
In 2011, when we turned eighteen and the relinquishment restrictions came off, she wrote to the agency and asked whether we had ever registered on the reunion side of the state registry. Neither of us had, because neither of us knew such a thing existed, because the people who would have told us had a reason not to.
And in 2015 she drove to Sparrow Lane.
She sat in her car outside that house for about forty minutes. She said she got as far as the mailbox and then went back.
I asked her what stopped her.
And she said, “I’d signed a paper saying I wouldn’t. I know what that paper’s worth now. I didn’t know it then. I was twenty-two when I signed it and I was thirty-eight standing at that mailbox and I still thought that woman could take something else off me.”
Nobody said anything for a while after that.
Then she took out the two photographs, which she keeps in a hard plastic sleeve in her purse and has for twenty-eight years, and put them on the table between the sugar and the napkins, and pushed them across.
PART 5 — SIXTY
I have not spoken to Wanda Kessick since I put a bunch of lilies down on her hall table.
My adoptive mother spent twenty-eight years telling my brother and me how grateful we should be that she took us in. On her sixtieth birthday I let myself into her house with flowers — and heard her laughing in the kitchen about how we had believed every word she ever told us.
