A text story
My sister moved away in 2012 and barely spoke about the house we grew up in.
Not dramatically. She just went to Tacoma for a job and then the visits got shorter and the phone calls got more logistical, and if you asked her about Ashland Street she’d say something pleasant and change the subject in a way you wouldn’t notice unless you’d watched her do it forty times.
Her name is Colette. She’s nine years older than me. When our mother died in March, she flew back to help clean the house out, and we spent four days doing what everyone does — sorting a life into keep, donate, and the pile you can’t classify.
On the third day, in the bottom of the cabinet under the stairs, I found an envelope with my name on it.
Just ROSALIE. My mother’s handwriting. Not sealed, soft at the corners, the kind of envelope that’s been opened and closed a great many times.
My sister took it out of my hand.
Physically took it. Crossed the room and took it, and said, “That’s not yours.”
I said my name was on it.
She wouldn’t answer. She put it in her back pocket and asked me whether we were keeping the good dishes, in a voice that was doing an enormous amount of work.
Later that night I noticed she’d put it inside her suitcase.
I want to be honest about the next twenty minutes because it’s the part of this I’d take back. She went out to the porch to call her husband. I went into the guest room, opened my sister’s suitcase, and went through her things.
Inside the envelope was a photograph of me as a child — four, maybe five — standing beside a woman I didn’t recognize. Outside somewhere, a chain-link fence behind us, the woman crouched down with an arm around my shoulders. Both of us squinting.
On the back, a date from 1998 and my mother’s handwriting.
And one sentence underneath the date:
“She deserves to know before she turns 30.”
I was already thirty-four.
I sat down on the floor of the guest room with the photograph in my hand and I did what I imagine anybody would do, which is build the obvious story in about four seconds.
The woman was my birth mother. I was adopted. Everyone knew but me. My sister had been sitting on it for years, that’s why she stopped coming home, that’s why the house made her strange.
I was so certain of it that when Colette came back inside and found me on the floor, I said, “Why didn’t anyone tell me I was adopted?”
And my sister stopped in the doorway and said, “What? You’re not adopted.”
Then she saw the photograph and sat down on the end of the bed and said, “Oh. Oh, God. You don’t know who that is.”
The woman in the photograph is Colette.
She was twenty-three in 1998. I did not recognize my own sister because I have no photographs of her from that decade — not one, in a house full of albums — and because the woman in that picture is about seventy pounds heavier than the woman I have known my entire adult life, with different hair and a face I had genuinely never seen.
Between 1996 and 2001 my sister was addicted to opioids. It started with a car accident and a prescription and it went where those go.
And from March of 1998 to August of 1999, when I was four and five years old, my sister lived in this house and looked after me full time, because our mother had taken a second job and there was no money for childcare and Colette — sick, using, twenty-three — was what there was.
Seventeen months. She got me up, fed me, walked me to preschool, put me to bed. The photograph was taken at the fence behind that preschool by a teacher who thought they were being nice.
I have no memory of any of it. None. I have a handful of images from that age — a red coat, the sound of the boiler — and not one of them has her in it.
Here’s what my mother meant by the sentence on the back.
It wasn’t a secret about my parentage. It was this: in June of 1999, when I was five, Colette left me alone in the house for most of a day.
She has never been fully able to say how long. She thinks nine hours. She went out to get well and she did not come back until after dark, and I was found by our neighbor Mrs. Iwu at some point in the evening, sitting on the front step, having eaten a box of dry cereal.
Nothing happened to me. That’s the phrase everybody in this story uses and it’s true and it’s also the flattest sentence in the English language. Nothing happened to me. I was five and alone for nine hours and nothing happened.
Two months later my mother put Colette into a program in Wenatchee, and paid for it by remortgaging this house, and it took two more attempts and until 2001 for it to hold.
My sister has been clean for twenty-four years.
And my mother spent the rest of her life not knowing what to do about the fact that I didn’t remember.
That’s what the envelope was. Colette explained it that night on the end of the bed and then we found the rest of it — because our mother, being who she was, had written it out.
Eleven drafts. In the same cabinet, in a folder underneath where the envelope had been. Eleven attempts, dated from 2003 to 2019, to write me a letter explaining what happened when I was five.
DRAFT 1 – 2003 (I’m 9) DRAFT 2 – 2005 DRAFT 3 – 2008 (my 14th bday) DRAFT 4 – 2010 DRAFT 5 – 2012 (Colette leaves) DRAFT 6 – 2014 DRAFT 7 – 2016 DRAFT 8 – 2018 DRAFT 9 – 2019 DRAFT 10 – 2019 DRAFT 11 – 2019, unfinished, stops mid-sentence
She never gave me any of them.
The “before she turns 30” line was written on the photograph in 2011, when I was seventeen, as a note to herself — a deadline she set and then blew past by four years and then by six and then by however many, because every time she got close she ran into the same wall, which is spelled out in draft seven:
“I can’t work out who this is for. If I tell her, she gets a bad thing she doesn’t currently have. Colette gets punished twice. And I get to feel honest. I keep counting and it comes out that the only person who gains is me.”
So why did my sister take the envelope out of my hand?
Not to hide it. Colette had decided, on the flight in, that she was going to tell me herself before we finished the house. She’d been rehearsing it for four days.
She grabbed it because she didn’t want me to find out standing in a hallway with a dust mask around my neck, from a photograph, with no one holding my hand. She wanted forty minutes and a kitchen table.
She said, “I’ve had one chance at this for twenty-four years and I wasn’t going to let you find it in a cabinet.”
And I went through her suitcase and took it from her anyway.
That’s mine to carry. I’ve apologized for it twice and she’s waved it off twice, and I’ve decided a third apology would be for my benefit rather than hers, which is a lesson I got from my mother’s draft seven.
What I actually feel — and it took about five months to arrive at, so I’m going to state it plainly — is not anger about the day I was left.
I can’t be angry about it. I have no access to it. It’s a thing that happened to a five-year-old I can’t remember being, described to me by people who love me.
What I’ve been angry about is the seventeen months before it.
Because nobody ever told me those happened either. I grew up understanding my sister as a distant person who lived far away and was pleasant at Christmas. I did not know she got me up every morning for a year and a half. I did not know she walked me to preschool. I did not know she was the person who taught me to tie my shoes, which she mentioned in passing that night and which stopped me cold.
They edited her out of my childhood to protect me from nine hours of it. And they did it so thoroughly that there is not a single photograph of my sister in this house from 1996 to 2001, which I now understand was not an accident of the film era.
I lost seventeen months of having been loved by somebody. That’s the actual theft. Not the letter, not the day, not the envelope.
We finished the house in April.
I have the photograph. It’s the only one that exists of the two of us from that time, and it’s on my refrigerator, held up by a magnet shaped like a strawberry, where guests occasionally ask who the woman is.
I say, “That’s my sister.” I’ve stopped adding anything else, because the pause after it is where people put their own version and I don’t have to supply one.
Colette and I talk on Sundays now. Actually talk, forty minutes, not logistics. She has told me eleven or twelve things about that year that I did not know — that I was afraid of the vacuum, that I had a specific way of eating toast, that I called her “Lettie” and then stopped, at some point, and started calling her Colette like everybody else.
She said that last one landed harder than anything else in twenty-four years. She never corrected me. She thought she’d forfeited it.
I’ve started calling her Lettie again. Not performatively — I did it once by accident on a Sunday in July and there was a silence on the line and then she said, “Okay,” in a very small voice, and we kept going.
The eleven drafts are in a folder in my desk. I’ve read all of them, in order, which took an evening and most of a bottle of wine, and which I recommend to nobody.
My mother was wrong to sit on it for twenty-two years. I want to say that clearly, because I’ve noticed people want me to absolve her and I’m not going to.
But draft eleven stops mid-sentence in October 2019, and the sentence it stops in the middle of is:
“Rosie, the thing I most want you to understand about your sister is that she was the only one of us who never once”
And then nothing. Six years of nothing, and then a hospital, and then a house full of boxes.
I’ve asked Colette what she thinks the end of that sentence was. She says she has no idea and doesn’t want to guess.
I think about it most days. I’ve written maybe thirty endings for it in my head and thrown all of them out, because every one of them says more about me than about either of them.
It’s the only part of this I don’t get to have. Everything else came out of a cabinet eventually.
