Now I told him, silently, This is your box, and I am glad you’re here, and then I reached out and turned the key and lifted the lid.
Photographs. Of course, photographs. Photographs always. I almost laughed at how appropriate it was. One of Martin at three or four years old, sitting on his mother’s lap. She is tiny and fair haired and smiling directly into the camera lens, while my father’s dark-haired father stands behind the two of them, his hand on his wife’s shoulder, his face angled downward because he’s looking at his son. Another photo of my father in a high school track uniform, kissing a trophy, his parents standing behind him, caught in midclap. Another of my parents on their wedding day, my mother swanlike and radiant in a narrow cream-colored suit with a portrait neckline, her hair in a French twist, my father cutting a Cary-Grant-like figure, chin dimple and all, in his coat and tie.
I handed the photos to my mother, who glanced through and handed them to Cornelia, who held up the wedding photo and said, “How did you two look like this? Wasn’t it the late eighties? Where is the cotton candy hair? Where are the gargantuan square shoulders?” and my mother laughed.
“Keep going,” said Dev to me.
“I just really want it to be the same ring,” I said. “And as long as that ring box I see in the bottom of this box stays closed, it might be the same ring. But if I get it out and open it and it’s not the same ring, then it definitely won’t be.”
“Remember when we were fifteen and spent an entire day at the pool talking about Schrödinger’s cat?”
“We were such nerds. How did we turn out to be so cool?”
Dev laughed. “Good question.” Then, he nodded toward the box.
I took out the black suede ring box, stared at it for a few seconds, then handed it to Dev.
“You open it,” I said. “I’m way too nervous.”
He grinned and handed it back. “Not on your life. There might be a dead cat in there.”
“This is no time to talk quantum physics,” said Cornelia, shaking a finger at Dev.
“I was going to make a Pandora’s box joke,” said my mother. “But in the interest of time, I decided not to.”
“Clare,” said Gordon, gently. “Could you please open the damned box?”
I opened it.
It was the ring from the photograph. Same flat, square stone; in the photo it had looked brown or black, but in real life, it was a shade or two darker than apricot jam (“Carnelian,” whispered Cornelia). Same deeply carved gold sides: a shield on one side, a rampant lion on the other. Inside, still just barely legible, were the initials GLG.
I slid the ring onto my forefinger, then reached into my shoulder bag and pulled Edith’s photo from between the pages of the hardback book I’d brought to carry it in and keep it flat. I handed the photo to Dev, who held it up by its edge with his right thumb and forefinger. With his left hand, he reached out, scooped up my hand, and lifted it, balanced on his palm, to his face. For a moment, I thought he was going to kiss it, but he just narrowed his eyes, looking. The tiny twinge of disappointment I felt at his not kissing it took me by surprise, but I forgot all about it—or mostly—a second later when Dev said, “It’s the same ring. Definitely. And with those initials inside, it couldn’t be any other ring, could it?”
“No,” said Gordon, taking off his glasses and bending over to look. “It’s without a doubt the same ring.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “Dev, it’s the same ring!”
Dev smiled, an event as sudden and breathtaking as a white heron breaking from the marsh grass to wing over water, brighter than snow. His fingers closed over mine and squeezed, and for a split second, all I knew was his face and his hand holding mine, and there was no ring and no photograph and we were the only two people in the room.
“How cool is that?” he said, and he let my hand go.
I saw my mother and Cornelia exchange one of their two-second, thousand-word glances, and then Cornelia clasped her hands under her chin, eyes shining, and said, “Very.”
There was one more item in the box. Neither hope nor a dead cat. It was a manila folder held shut with a paper clip. Inside the folder was one slip of paper: an adoption certificate.
I didn’t read further than the header before I stopped, reached over, took Dev by his T-shirt sleeve, and pulled. “Get over here,” I said, and he walked around the corner of the table, and together, we read.
“Oh, my God,” I breathed.
“Holy shit,” breathed Dev.
“Gareth Grace,” I murmured.
“G.G.,” murmured Dev.
“Tell us!” barked my mother.
We told them.
On December 29, 1956, in a Canadian town called Canterbury Mills, Gareth Lambert Grace and Louisa Cole Grace of Rye, New York, adopted a healthy baby boy, Caucasian, eyes brown, hair brown. In the spaces for the boy’s place of birth, for his mother’s name, and for his birth date, the same two words were typed: UNKNOWN, FOUNDLING.
As I read and for at least twenty seconds after I finished, no one moved or said a word. We all just stood around the table, swaddled in an awestruck hush. But after that one rapt moment, I got busy putting all the puzzle pieces together inside my head, and I could tell from the expression on Dev’s face that he was doing the same thing. After about ten seconds of this, our eyes met.
“We should fill in the blanks,” I said.
“Birthplace,” said Dev.
“Antioch Beach, Delaware,” I said.
“Birth date.”
“December third, 1956.”
“Birth mother.”
My eyes filled with tears. “Sarah Giles.”
Dev smiled and bumped me with his shoulder. “Go on. Sarah Giles, who?”
I lifted my head and told my family, “Sarah Giles, my grandmother.”
We all moved into the family room, Cornelia having suggested that comfy chairs and sofas lent themselves to the task of processing revelation far more readily than did standing around a dining room table. As usual, she was right.
“Food would help, too,” said Gordon, and a few minutes later, he was carrying in wooden carving boards covered with cheeses, smelly and not-smelly, soft and hard, and prosciutto sliced so thinly you could see through it; baskets of cut-up baguettes; bowls of blueberries and strawberries and olives; and a big plate of molasses cookies he’d baked the day before.
“I love you, Gordon,” I said, popping a blueberry into my mouth. “With all my heart.”
“I love you, too,” he answered, dropping a kiss on the top of my head. “Now, partake, people.”
We didn’t just partake. We gorged. We relished. We destroyed.
Finally, my mother said, “Clare, I don’t know why I never gave you that box of your father’s things before. I’ve been trying to decide whether or not I kept it from you on semipurpose because of some kind of deeply buried resentment I harbored toward your father, and the answer I’ve come up with is that I honestly don’t think so.”
“No,” I said, “that doesn’t seem like something you’d do. Your resentment is never deeply buried. If it isn’t buried in a very shallow grave, it’s alive and well and walking among us.”
“My thought exactly,” said my mother. “We just moved so soon after your father died, and there were so few personal items. Most everything was sold, the furniture, the apartment, the artwork. All the proceeds went into a trust with the rest of what he left you, the money you’ll get when you’re twenty-five. Anyway, I forgot all about that box and that ring until I saw Edith’s photo. I even forgot that Martin was adopted. His parents were dead when I met him, and he wasn’t big on discussing personal information. He told most people that he was born and raised in Rye, New York, but, now that I think back, he did mention the adoption to me once or twice, right after we got married. Anyway, I’m sorry about the box.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“It’s lucky that I left the key sitting in the lock. Not particularly securi
ty-minded, but lucky. I’m sure I would never have been able to track it down.”
“I’m pretty sure that if you couldn’t find the key, Clare would’ve yanked that box to pieces with her bare hands,” said Dev.
“And teeth,” I said.
“So Gareth Grace, who you think called himself George Graham, was Mr. Big City?” said Cornelia. “Is that what we’re thinking?”
“It all fits,” I said. “He and Louisa are from New York, too, not far from the city.”
“And Gareth worked in Manhattan,” said my mother. “Finance, banking, some money thing. I remember that now. Not sure about a Richmond connection, but we have a name, so it should be easy enough to track down.”
“Oof. Trying to put everything together in the right order is making my brain hurt,” said Cornelia. “Can someone tell me, in a slow, step-by-step manner, how Sarah and her baby ended up in Canada?”
“Dev, you start,” I said. “My brain’s a little sore itself.”
“Okay,” said Dev. “So the night Sarah killed her husband, we’ll assume things unfolded the way John described them at the trial. Sarah and Steven weren’t meant to be part of Gareth’s escape system, but when John found Sarah distraught after shooting her husband, he took her to Edith’s for medical treatment and so that she and the baby could be relocated. Then, he drove her to the next safe house on the route, which must have been in this Canadian town Canterbury Mills. Gareth probably didn’t drive with him, but he must have met them there, either because that’s how it always worked or because he already had the idea of adopting Steven. We don’t know what happened between him and Sarah, but I’m guessing that either she died of her injuries or she decided that her kid would be better off with Gareth and Louisa.”
“I can see how that could’ve happened,” I said. “Sarah was a fugitive. If she’d gotten caught eventually, who knows what would have happened to Steven?”
“But how hard,” said my mother. “What a devastating choice that would have been for Sarah.”
“All right, but I’m confused about something,” said Gordon, scratching his head. It was a thing I loved about Gordon: he actually scratched his head when he got confused. “John Blanchard says he took Sarah away and was back at work the next morning. But there’s no way he could’ve driven to Canada and back that fast.”
“Maybe he put the two of them on a train or something,” said Dev. “Although Sarah was apparently really injured, probably in ways that would have attracted attention. And he knew the police would be looking for her, so public transportation wouldn’t have been a great idea.”
“Or maybe,” said Cornelia, slowly, “he didn’t take her at all. He just told the police he did. Wouldn’t Gareth have sent a car with an anonymous driver the way he usually did? And if that were the case, John wouldn’t have mentioned it at the trial because he wasn’t about to give away Gareth’s relocation system.”
“Yeah, I didn’t even think of that,” said Dev. “Bet you’re right.”
“Good,” said Gordon. “My second point of confusion is fuzzier.”
“Go for it,” said Clare. “We’re on a roll.”
“Well, none of this is a coincidence, right? Edith was at the wedding—”
“Nonwedding,” I said, automatically and then grimaced. “That’s, uh, what I call it, although usually just inside my own head.”
Gordon smiled. “Edith was at Clare’s nonwedding on purpose. She probably read about it somewhere.”
“Oh, God,” I said, covering my eyes. “The stupid newspaper announcements. In more than one paper, too, with a photo and everything. I was mortified. Who announces an engagement? But Zach said it was a tradition in his family. Like the Barfields are the Kennedys. Like anyone would care.”
“Well, someone did,” observed Dev.
“Oh. Right,” I said. “Well, if those ridiculous announcements brought Edith into my life, I guess they were a good idea after all.”
“So here’s my confusion. While I personally would give Clare a house or anything else under the sun that she wanted,” said Gordon, “why would Edith? Sarah was just a woman who seems to have spent a few hours at her house and then disappeared forever. Why would Edith give her granddaughter a house? Why would she even make a point of showing up at her wedding almost sixty years after she’d met Sarah?”
I sliced off a piece of Bucheron, popped it into my mouth, and contemplated Edith. Finally, slowly, I said, “I think they belonged to her, all of the women and children she helped, at least a little. Not in an ownership way, but I think she felt responsible for them. That’s why she kept the shadow ledger, to keep track, to help her remember them, even after they disappeared. I think it’s how she was.”
Dev said, “But she couldn’t literally keep track of them because they did disappear. She never knew where they went or who they became.”
“All except for Steven. She knew that Gareth adopted him and took him back to New York. She knew that he became Martin Grace. She kept track of him because she could. And then she kept track of me.”
After a pause, Dev said, “You know, we promised we’d tell the Richmond people—Abby and Selby—if we ever found out more of the story. We should call them.”
I met his eyes. “We will. But why don’t we wait?”
“For what?” asked Dev.
“Until we get back from Canada.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Clare
About two hours into our road trip from the airport in Bangor, Maine, to Canterbury Mills, as we were driving our tiny rental car through a tiny town full of tiny lakes, a dozen of them, like twelve dropped silver dollars, I realized that I was completely happy. And if the town seemed like something caught in the past, with its simple black-roofed houses and its single downtown street lined with storefronts (bakery, coin laundry, drugstore, shoe store, movie theater, coffee shop), a white church at one end, I was fully—mind, body, and soul—rooted in the now, as present in the present as I had ever been.
Dev was driving, one tan hand on the wheel. We had the windows open. Dev’s hair shifted around in the breeze. We had talked straight through the flight and through the rainy first hour and a half of the car ride but the rain had stopped, and now we were sitting in a loose, amiable silence surrounded by the crayon-bright, washed-clean world. Right then, what lay behind—all those mistakes I’d made—didn’t matter, and what lay ahead—all those blanks we hoped to fill in—didn’t matter either. The moment was complete—a brimming glass, a terrarium—and every question I’d ever had felt answered.
“I wish I could keep it,” I said.
“What?”
“This.”
Dev’s profile didn’t move a muscle, but a pink flush appeared in the center of his right cheek.
“So keep it,” he said.
When we got to Canterbury Mills, we parked the car on a side street and walked around, sticking to the neighborhoods and the little offshoot country roads because we figured that those were more likely places for a safe house than the downtown. I think I half expected a brass plaque nailed next to a front door or a historical marker stuck in the middle of a front lawn saying something like: This house harbored Sarah Giles and her baby, Steven, and a lot of other people. It was a good place. Of course, we came across exactly nothing like that, but somehow just walking down those streets and seeing houses that could have been that house gave me something I hadn’t known I was missing.
“Maybe that’s what I’m really searching for,” I told Dev. “I mean, answers about whether she survived her injuries or where she went when she left here would be wonderful, but now that we’re here, I realize that mostly what I want is for Sarah to feel real to me. Like those Civil War battlefield field trips we’d take as kids. Pretty much all you got was grass, rickrack fences, maybe a statue or two, but being there in that field, you could picture the battle: the smoke and shouting, the gunfire and the boys dying on the ground. You could feel history prickling the skin up a
nd down your arms.”
Dev stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned to face me. It had happened before over the years I’d known him: I’d say something and Dev would regard me with a pure, almost clinical interest, as if I were a math problem or a scientific theory or a microscope slide or a zoo animal. Which sounds off-putting and possibly creepy, I know, but somehow wasn’t at all. In fact, I’d always liked it: being from time to time a thing that piqued his intellectual curiosity, sparked his neurons, got his wheels turning.
“Literal prickling?” he asked.
“Yes. Like sleet hitting my skin and bouncing off. Little stings.”
“So do you feel Sarah here? Is she prickling up and down your arms?” he asked. He looked down at my bare arms, and I lifted them, pale side up, elbow side down, for his inspection.
“Yes. And Steven and Gareth. And Edith, too, even though she was never here,” I said.
“That’s interesting,” he said.
“It’s not like ghosts,” I said, quickly. “More like an interplay between place and imagination and nerve endings. Or something.”
“Which could be like ghosts, I guess. What people think of as ghosts. I wish I could see what parts of your brain are lighting up when this happens.”
“Whatever is happening, it helps me, the prickling, the unseen things becoming real. It solves something. Fills in a space. I don’t mean it fills a hollow place inside me. It’s more like those ovals on a standardized test: it shades in an answer to a question I hadn’t known I’d needed an answer to,” I said, and then laughed. “Yeah, that sounds weird.”
Dev shrugged. “Good weird, though.”
We kept walking, side by side, the noon sun resting on our shoulders and on the tops of our heads.
“But hey,” I said, suddenly. “What if she was here?”
“Edith? You’re thinking this because of the prickling?”
“More like the prickling got me thinking about how Edith might have been here. Remember how Gordon asked why Edith would leave me her house when she’d only been with Sarah and Steven for a few hours, and I said that I thought she felt responsible for those two the way she did all the other shadow ledger people?”