I did not go home. I drove to my mother’s.
Two hours up the 99 with a filing cabinet drawer’s worth of letters in a bag on the passenger seat, and I want to tell you that I spent those two hours composing something devastating, because that is what I was doing for the first forty minutes.
I had a version where I put the 1995 letter on her kitchen table and said nothing at all. I had a version that started four words, Mom, you gave me four words. I had one that was just the number two hundred and sixteen, said once, and then me leaving.
Somewhere around Tulare I stopped doing that and started doing arithmetic instead.
She was twenty-nine in 1995. I am thirty-eight now. I tried to picture myself nine years ago — thirty-something, my husband gone in March with no warning, a seven-year-old who had stopped sleeping — and I tried to picture what I would have done to make my kid stop hurting, and the honest answer is that I do not know, and that I am not confident it would have been better.
That is not the same as saying she was right. I want to be very clear that I have never got to a place where I think she was right.
But there’s a difference between a woman who did a wrong thing out of malice and a woman who did a wrong thing at twenty-nine in a kitchen at two in the morning because it was the only lever she could reach. And by the time I came off the highway I could not make her be the first one, however much I wanted to, because I’d read her letters and the woman in them is frightened, not cruel.
The unforgivable part isn’t 1995.
The unforgivable part is 2005, and 2012, and every single time after I was grown that she said he didn’t want us to a woman who was thirty and paying for therapy about it.
She knew before I said anything.
I’ve thought about that a lot too. I came up the path and she opened the door before I knocked, and she looked at my face and at the bag in my hand and something went out of her, all at once, the way air goes out of a thing.
She said: “Oh.”
Not what’s wrong. Not this is a surprise. Just “oh,” in the doorway, at seventy-four.
She’d been waiting nine years for me to find out. Since 2014, when she wrote that letter telling him it would land now. She had known for nine years that this conversation existed somewhere ahead of her and she had not once come and got it.
We sat in the front room and I put the letters on the coffee table and neither of us touched them for a while.
I asked one question. I’d got rid of all the speeches on the highway and what was left was one question and it came out much smaller than I meant it to.
I said: “Why did you keep saying it? After. When I was grown.”
She was quiet for a long time. My mother is not a woman who fills silences.
Then she said: “Because I’d said it. Because I’d said it when you were eight and then I said it when you were fifteen and by the time you were twenty-five it wasn’t a thing I was saying any more, it was a thing that was true. In this house. It was just true here.”
I said that wasn’t an answer.
And she said — and this is the sentence, this is the one I carried out of that house and still have — she said:
“Nora, if I told you at twenty-five, then I hadn’t protected you at seven. I’d just lied to you for eighteen years. There was no day where telling you cost me less than not telling you. So there was never a day.”
We talked for five hours.
I’m not going to lay it all out. Some of it was her side of 1995 and it is worse than the letters make it sound, and some of it is hers to tell and she is seventy-four and I am not going to publish my mother.
But two things came out of it that belong in this.
The first is that she never opened them. Not one. She wants that known and I believe her — she took them off the mat and she wrote REFUSED and she put them back in the box on the corner, for nineteen years, and she never read a single word of what he wrote to me. She said if she’d read them she would have had to stop.
The second is that she did not know about the presents.
I watched her face when I told her and there is no possibility that she knew. She made a sound and put her hand over her mouth and she said, “Every year?” and I said every year, thirty-one of them, and she said “Every year?” again like the number would change.
She asked what was in 2003. I said a green dress.
She said, “She wouldn’t have worn it,” and then she started to cry, and so did I, because it was true. I wouldn’t have worn it. I was fifteen and I wouldn’t have worn a dress my mother picked, let alone one from him.
He bought it anyway. That’s the whole man, really. He bought a dress for a girl who wouldn’t have worn it and wrapped it and wrote 2003 in the corner and put it on a shelf.