had thought immediately of her friends the Jaegers, an Oregon couple who very much wanted a child but couldn’t seem to have one of their own. Mama told me this startling fact herself before she died, insisting that although Mrs. Chambers had made the connection and even arranged for her lawyer to facilitate the private adoption, it was God Himself who had engineered the whole event and worked out every detail.
Sophie’s mother died more than ten years ago, and I realized now that it was a shame that when I was a teenager yearning for answers I hadn’t been resourceful enough—well, brave enough, actually—to speak to Mrs. Chambers myself and ask for details about my birth family. Because I hadn’t, she’d carried that information with her to the grave. With my father now gone too, I could feel all chances of ever learning the truth slip through my fingers and begin to float away, like a lifeline from a frozen shore.
The breeze picked up suddenly, and so did the whir of the windmill. During my high school years, when I’d obsessed about finding my birth family, I found a Pennsylvania adoption search website and perused it for any information that might be about me. I found nothing. I also read that Pennsylvania is a hard state for a search. But maybe it was easier now than it had been ten years before.
Storm clouds gathered toward the west, and the metal blades of the windmill began to spin. Mama loved the windmill. She and I used to sit on the bench in the late afternoons when the wind picked up and watch it spin, me leaning against her side and her arm holding me tightly. Ever since I could remember, I’d prayed for a baby sister, but when Mama became ill I prayed multiple times a day for her to get well—and then for a baby sister. The day before she died, we sat on the bench. I was eight. Now I knew what an effort it must have been for her to struggle down the steps and sit with me one last time.
That night I had prayed, for what seemed the millionth time, that Mama would get well, and then I told God it was okay if I didn’t get a baby sister after all, but that I really, really needed Mama to be okay. Early the next morning she died.
I turned my face toward the house. It had been half an empty shell these years since Mama’s death. Now, with Dad gone, it was completely hollow.
Staying and packing up the house felt overwhelming. So did returning to my job. Suddenly, more than anything I wanted to get away—from here, from work, from everyone and everything that was familiar.
I asked myself what was stopping me from doing just that. My father no longer needed me. The clinic would probably give me a few more weeks of family leave. Why couldn’t I simply take off for a while?
If I told James how I felt, he would say I was depressed. Maybe I was.
Or maybe I just knew that making a fast escape might be the one thing that would keep me from drowning in the icy waters of my own overwhelming loss.
As quickly as the breeze had picked up it disappeared and the windmill stopped. I stood slowly and headed for the house. My grief for Dad had stirred my grief for Mama. The combination was nearly unbearable.
That evening James returned to Portland, where he would pick up my black dress and heels at my apartment and then spend the night at his studio on the east side of town. He would be back here the next morning in time for the funeral. As I rocked in Mama’s chair, I heard a car in the driveway. I stood and headed for the back door, reaching the kitchen just as Sophie was letting herself in. She told me she had a new mother in labor.
“Hopefully the baby will come before morning,” she added. “Lord willing, I’ll be there for you tomorrow.” Sophie stepped closer and focused her eyes on mine. “You looked so sad in the yard this afternoon.”
I felt my face grow warm.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’ve been thinking that maybe I should get away. That maybe a change of scenery would do me good.”
“A vacation?”
I shrugged.
“A trip, yes, but…” I looked away. “More like a search.”
She leaned back against the counter.
“This has to do with finding that box,” she said.
“Sort