My father’s desk had a drawer that never opened all the way.
He died in March. Last week I finally took a screwdriver to it.
Behind the false back, a folder with MY NAME on it.
I was three when my mother died. That’s the sentence I grew up inside – car accident on Route 9, closed casket, don’t ask your father about it.
Thirty-seven years of that. My brother Shane and I used to leave flowers at a headstone in Bellwood every May.
So I’m sitting on Dad’s bedroom carpet with his desk pulled apart, and there’s a folder, and my name is on the tab in his handwriting.
Inside were three pages and a rubber band ball, dried out and cracked.
The first page was a court document. Termination of parental rights, Ulster County.
Signed by Carol Ann Mercer.
Dated November 1993.
I was seven in November 1993.
I read the date maybe nine times before it went anywhere in my head. My mother’s name on a form, signed four years after she was supposedly in the ground.
The second page was a letter, addressed to our house, stamped RETURN TO SENDER in Dad’s block capitals.
The third page I couldn’t look at yet.
I called Shane. He drove over at eleven at night in his work boots and read the court document standing up in the hallway.
“Dad wouldn’t,” he said.
“He did.”
Then Shane said something that made me go cold. He said Aunt Patty stopped coming to Christmas in 1994 and nobody ever told us why.
I called her the next morning. I read her the name and the date off the form.
She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she said, “Oh, honey. He promised me he burned all of that.”
I sat down on the floor without deciding to.
“Patty. Where is she.”
“CAROL’S BEEN IN KINGSTON THE WHOLE TIME,” she said. “Forty minutes from you.”
I drove there Saturday. Gray house, plastic chair on the porch, a woman in a cardigan who looked exactly like the face I see in the mirror at forty.
She looked at me and her hand went over her mouth.
“You found it,” she said. “Then you need to hear what your father did in 1993, and you need to sit down first.”
What Was In the Letter She Sent Back
I sat down on her porch steps. There was a plastic pot with a dead geranium in it. I stared at that geranium for a while.
She sat in the plastic chair and pulled the cardigan tight and told me to ask what I needed to ask.
I asked about the letter first. The one stamped back in my father’s handwriting.
She’d written it in the fall of 1993. She told me she’d written maybe thirty letters total over the years, and that one was the first. She’d been sober eight months by then, living in a room above a hardware store in Kingston with a woman named Deb who’d gotten sober the same week at the same church basement. She said she wrote to the house because she didn’t have a lawyer and she didn’t know what else to do. She wanted to see us. She said she’d sign whatever she had to sign, do whatever supervised visits required, just please.
Every letter came back.
She stopped counting at twenty-two.
I asked her what she thought happened to us. Whether she thought we were okay.
She said she’d driven past our school once, in 2001. Just to see. She said she sat in her car in the parking lot until she saw me come out with a backpack on, and she watched me get on the bus, and she went home and cried for two days because I looked fine. She said that was the worst part. I looked fine.
She didn’t say it to be cruel. She said it the way you say something that cost you something.
The Court Document and What It Actually Meant
Here’s the thing about termination of parental rights that I didn’t know until I was sitting on a stranger’s porch steps at forty years old.
You can’t terminate rights that were never established in court. You can’t just file a form.
What my father had done, what the actual document said when I finally read it with fresh eyes and Carol sitting across from me, was that she had voluntarily relinquished. Signed away her rights. Ulster County, November 12, 1993.
I asked her why she signed it.
She looked at the dead geranium. Then she looked at me.
“He told me you didn’t want to see me,” she said. “He brought me a piece of paper that you’d written. Your handwriting. Said you were seven and you already knew what you wanted and what you wanted was for me to leave you alone.”
She said my father showed up at her apartment with two things: the paper in my handwriting and a man she didn’t recognize who stood by the door the whole time without speaking.
“I signed because I thought it was what you wanted,” she said. “I signed because I thought you hated me.”
I was seven. I don’t remember writing any paper. I don’t remember being asked.
Shane doesn’t either. I called him from the car before I drove home and he went so quiet I thought the call dropped.
“She was alive when we were putting flowers on that grave,” he said finally.
Yeah.
The Third Page
I went back the next day. I hadn’t been able to look at the third page yet, and I needed Carol there when I did.
She made coffee. Her kitchen had yellow curtains and a cat named something I didn’t catch. The coffee was strong and she put it in front of me without asking how I took it, and I drank it black, and she sat across from me and waited.
I unfolded the third page.
It was a photograph. Printed on regular paper, the ink a little faded. Two kids at a kitchen table, paper plates, a cake with candles. Shane and me. I’m wearing a striped shirt I remember. Shane has frosting on his chin. We’re both laughing at something outside the frame.
Written on the back in my father’s handwriting: They’re doing fine. Don’t write again.
He’d sent it to her. Sometime in the mid-nineties, best I can figure from how old we look. He’d sent her a photograph of us laughing at a birthday party with a note that said don’t write again, and then he’d kept it. Kept a copy, or got it back somehow, or she’d sent it back. I don’t know.
Carol held the photograph for a long time. Her hands didn’t shake. She’d had thirty years to get to a place where her hands didn’t shake, I think.
“I never got this,” she said.
So he kept it too. For thirty years, in a folder with my name on it, behind a false back in a drawer that never opened all the way.
I don’t know what that means. I’ve turned it over a hundred times and I can’t get it to mean just one thing.
What Patty Knew and When
I drove to Patty’s the following Thursday. She’s seventy-one, lives in the same house in Rhinebeck she’s lived in since 1987, has a dog named something with too many syllables that she shortens to Biscuit. She had coffee ready when I got there too. Maybe that’s a family thing.
She told me she’d found out in December 1993. She’d come to our house for Christmas and found a card on the counter, one of Carol’s letters, opened, and she’d read it before she understood what she was reading.
She confronted my father that night after Shane and I were in bed.
She said he told her Carol was unstable. That she’d had problems. That bringing her back into our lives would hurt us more than the absence did. He said the grave in Bellwood was a kindness, something concrete for us to grieve so we could move on. He said Carol had agreed to it.
Patty said she didn’t believe him, not entirely. But she also said she loved her brother and she loved us and she didn’t know what the right thing was. So she stopped coming to Christmas because she couldn’t sit at his table and pretend, and she never told us because she didn’t know how.
“I should have told you,” she said. “I know that. I’ve known that for thirty years.”
Biscuit put his head in my lap. I let him.
There’s no good version of what Patty did. But she’s seventy-one and she’s been carrying it since 1993 and she cried when I showed her the photograph, the one printed on regular paper with the frosting and the striped shirt, and I don’t have the energy to be another thing she has to carry.
The Grave in Bellwood
Shane wanted to go back to the grave. I didn’t, at first.
He convinced me on a Tuesday, two weeks after I met Carol. We drove out in the morning, before it got hot. The headstone is gray granite, her name on it, the wrong dates.
Carol Ann Mercer. 1959-1989.
She was born in 1959. That part’s right. She was thirty years old in the photograph I’m holding, in the kitchen with the yellow curtains, drinking coffee she made without asking how I take it.
Shane brought flowers out of habit and then stood there holding them.
“I don’t know what to do with these,” he said.
He put them down anyway. We stood there for a while. The grass was wet.
I don’t know whose grave it is. I’ve thought about that. Someone is in the ground there. My father bought a stone with her name on it and two wrong dates and put it somewhere we could grieve, and we did, we really did, every May for years.
I don’t know if I’m angry at him. I know I was, the first week. I know I drove home from Carol’s that first day and sat in my driveway for forty minutes because I didn’t trust myself to go inside and be normal around my kids.
But he’s gone. He died in March with that drawer still locked, and I don’t know if he meant for me to find it or if he just couldn’t throw it away. I don’t know if there’s a difference.
The Conversation We’re Still Having
Carol and I have talked four times since that first Saturday. Phone calls, mostly. She’s careful. I’m careful. We’re both forty years into being the people our particular histories made us, and we’re trying to figure out what, if anything, we’re supposed to be to each other now.
She asked me once if I wanted to know more about the years before. Before the accident that wasn’t, before Route 9, before the closed casket.
I said not yet.
She said okay.
Shane has talked to her once. He was on the phone for two hours and when he called me after he didn’t say much, just that she sounded like someone who’d done a lot of work to get to where she was. That’s Shane’s way of saying he’s not ready to be angry and he’s not ready to forgive and he’s somewhere in the middle trying to figure out which direction to walk.
Me too.
The desk is in my garage now. I couldn’t throw it out and I couldn’t keep it in the house. The drawer sits open because there’s no false back anymore to catch it. The rubber band ball is on my workbench. I don’t know why I kept it. It’s dried out, cracked, useless. It doesn’t mean anything.
Or it means my father was the kind of man who kept a rubber band ball in a secret drawer next to the thing he couldn’t throw away and couldn’t explain.
Maybe that’s enough to know about a person.
Maybe it isn’t.
—
If this one’s sitting with you, pass it along to someone who’d understand why.
For more tales of family secrets and unexpected discoveries, check out My Maid of Honor Stood Up at My Wedding and Held a Printed Email or perhaps My Neighbor Hadn’t Signed Her Own Checks in Six Months and I Watched a Six-Year-Old Climb onto a Stranger’s Harley. I Should Have Stopped It..
