She laughed about it.
She was furious.
I sat down on the rug.
Aunt Hattie sat in the chair.
“Margaret was not a quiet woman,” Aunt Hattie said. “Not with her sister, anyway. She was quiet with you because she did not want you in the middle. She wanted you to be a girl. She let your mother think she’d won the surface because the surface was all your mother could see, and Margaret was working underneath.”
I opened the box.
The first thing inside was a small white envelope with my name on it in my grandmother’s handwriting.
Underneath the envelope was a stack of photographs wrapped in acid-free tissue paper.
My grandmother had wrapped them properly.
She had wrapped them the way a conservator would.
I would later learn she had asked Aunt Hattie to drive to a craft store in Hilton Head and buy archival sleeves so that the photographs would last.
14 photographs.
A baby, eight weeks old, on a white cotton blanket on a wicker porch swing.
A toddler holding a sand dollar very seriously up to the camera.
A four-year-old in a green sundress at the lighthouse.
A 5-year-old with both hands flat on a screen door, looking out at a thunderstorm.
A 5-year-old in my grandmother’s kitchen, standing on a step stool with flour on her face, smiling because her grandmother had just called her my love.
I knew this child.
I knew her without any help.
I had not seen this child since I was 12 years old.
I did not cry.
I had not cried in front of any of them since 2008.
But my hands were not steady, and Aunt Hattie watched them and did not say anything.
Underneath the photographs was a second envelope.
This one was thick.
It was sealed in three places with brittle red wax.
Across the front, in my grandmother’s handwriting: Petra Witcomb. To be read in your own home, my love. Never under your mother’s roof.
“I won’t open that here,” I said.
“Good girl,” Aunt Hattie said.
I sat with the photographs for a long time.
Finally, I said, “Aunt Hattie, why did Grandma do this?”
Aunt Hattie folded her hands in her lap.
“Because she figured it out,” Aunt Hattie said.
“About your sister.”
I did not understand at first.
“Your mother,” Aunt Hattie said, “did not have your sister with your father. Your grandmother knew. She would not say. She did not want to break the house apart while your daddy was still in it. But she did not want to leave you in it without resources either. So she did what she could. She kept what your mother would take.”
I looked at her.
She looked at me.
“You will have questions,” she said. “And then you will have plans. I am too old to make plans. I am not too old to confirm what is true.”
I nodded.
We sat there on the rug, and Aunt Hattie poured a second cup of tea from a thermos at her elbow.
After a while, she said, “Bring the box home, Petra. Open the letter. Then come back to me when you know what you want. And know this: whatever you do, Margaret is on your side. Margaret has been on your side since you were small enough to hold a sand dollar.”
I drove back to Savannah with the wooden box on the passenger seat beside Theo’s empty tea mug and Theo’s hand on my knee.
I did not say a word for the first 30 miles.
At a red light on the bridge over the Wilmington River, I felt my hands begin to shake.
I rolled down the window.
I did not say anything.
The light turned green.
I drove on.
That night, I did not open the letter in my apartment.
Chapter 6: Evidence of the truth
I drove the wooden box to the lab.
A conservation lab at night is a careful place.
The exhibits are dark.
The HVAC hums.
The motion-sensor lights catch you a beat after you walk past them, so it looks like the building is remembering you in pieces.
I let myself in with my badge.
I went to the back, to the long oak table under the daylight lamp.
I unwrapped the 14 photographs first.
I laid them out in order.
I documented the back of each one in my pencil log.
I noted the chemical signature of the paper.
I noted the silver salts.
The Polaroids were original instant film manufactured between 1996 and 1999.
The lab prints were Kodak Royal, processed through a 1-hour drugstore in Bowfort that closed in 2003.
Both were consistent with the dates penciled on the back in my grandmother’s careful handwriting.
These photographs were authentic.
These photographs were of me.
These photographs had never been altered.
Then I opened the sealed envelope.
There was a will.
There was a letter.
There was a small key on a string.
I read the letter first.
My grandmother’s handwriting on yellow legal paper, dated September 14, 2007.
6 months before she died.
“My Petra,
“If you are reading this in your own home, then I am gone and your mother has taken what I left behind.
“The will I am leaving with this letter is the will I made with witnesses. The will your mother will show you is not the will your mother will tell you got lost.
“Got lost the way every photograph of you got lost. She is consistent, arbitrus, in her way.
“Inside this box, you will find the property deed to the cottage at 14 Coral Lane on Taibbe, paid in full in your name as of October 2007.
“You will also find a savings instrument in the amount of $145,000, held in trust in your name only at a small Charleston bank under the guardianship of my old friend Pace.
“I asked to hold it for you until you are 30 or until you marry, whichever comes first. He has a grandson named Owen who will know how to find you when the time comes.
“I knew about Caroline. I knew when you were 8 and she was three. Your father knew, my love. He chose silence. I did not have the heart to make him stop choosing it.
“But I did not have the heart to leave you in their house with nothing.
“You are mine. You have always been mine. You are not the empty page in their book.
“You are mine, and you are kept, and you are loved.