My Sister Handed Me a Folder at Our Mother’s Funeral, And Told Me Not to Open It Until Everyone Left

Part 4: Toledo

Emily drove me to the airport on Wednesday. She had a bag in the trunk.

“You’re not coming to Denver.”

“No. I’m going to Toledo.”

I looked at her.

“Now?”

“I told Rebecca I would come after the funeral. She knows about Mom. She’s been sending me texts. She wants to meet me. In person, I mean. Not just on the phone.”

“Does she know about me.”

Emily didn’t answer right away. She flipped the turn signal. It clicked in that empty-highway way.

“She knows there are two of us. She doesn’t know your names.”

“I want to come.”

“Kate.”

“Em, I want to come. Don’t fight me on this.”

She didn’t fight me on it. She rerouted. She called United and moved my flight to Friday out of Detroit and she called the woman in Toledo and said she was bringing her sister and there was a long pause on the other end that I could hear from the passenger seat.

Then the woman said okay.

Rebecca lived in a duplex on a street with a lot of chain-link fences. There was a plastic Halloween pumpkin on the porch even though it was almost November. When she opened the door I forgot for a second what I was doing there. She had our father’s eyes. Exactly. The same shape, the same color, the little downturn at the corners that made him look sad even when he wasn’t.

She was tall like him too.

Her son was in the living room on the floor with an iPad. He didn’t look up. He was rocking a little, humming, watching some kind of counting video. Rebecca introduced him. “This is Marcus.” She said it the way you’d introduce anyone. Like it was just his name. Not a diagnosis. Not a story.

We sat at her kitchen table. It was small and clean. She’d made coffee. She apologized for the coffee, said she wasn’t much of a coffee person, she was a tea person, but she thought her sisters might want coffee.

Her sisters.

Emily said her name was Emily and shook her hand. I said my name was Kate. Rebecca held onto my hand for a beat longer than a handshake. She had our father’s hands too.

“I don’t want anything from you,” she said. It was the first real thing she said after the small talk. “I want you to know that. Your mother, she already, she did so much. I don’t want anything else.”

“We know.”

“I wasn’t sure if I should even, after she got sick. I told her not to send more. I told her I was okay. She wouldn’t listen.”

“That was Mom.”

Rebecca laughed a little at that. It wasn’t a big laugh. Just a small one. But it was ours. It was the same laugh. It came out of her face the way it came out of Dad’s.

I looked at my sister across the table. Emily was watching Rebecca with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Not warm exactly. Not cold. Something like the look she used to give patients at the hospital where she’d worked before she quit to take care of Mom. Careful. Measured. Willing.

We stayed for about an hour. Marcus never looked up from the iPad. He hummed a little louder when Rebecca laughed, though. I watched him do it. He knew where his mother was in the room even when he wasn’t looking at her.

When we stood up to go, Rebecca went to a drawer in the kitchen and got out something and pressed it into Emily’s hand.

It was a small silver key.

“Safe deposit box,” she said. “First Federal downtown. Your mother put it in my name so it wouldn’t show up on anything. She said there was a letter in there for each of you. I’ve never opened it. She said not to.”

Emily looked down at the key.

“She said if you ever came to see me, I should give you the key. I didn’t know if you’d come.”

Emily didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she said, “Thank you,” in a voice that was almost normal, and she put the key in the pocket of her coat, and we hugged Rebecca goodbye at the door.

We got the letters on Friday morning before my flight. The box had three envelopes in it. One for Emily. One for me. One for Doug.

We didn’t open them in the bank. We drove to a diner off I-75 and got a booth in the back and ordered coffee we didn’t drink.

Emily opened hers first. She read it for a long time. Her face didn’t change. When she was done, she folded it and put it back in the envelope, and she pressed her palm flat over it on the table.

“You okay.”

“Yes.”

“What does it say.”

“That’s between me and Mom.”

I nodded. Fair enough.

I opened mine.

Mom’s letter to me was short. Three paragraphs. She thanked me. She said she knew I’d been the one who called every Sunday even when I didn’t have anything to say and she wanted me to know that those Sundays were what she looked forward to all week. She said she was sorry she’d asked Emily to carry the secret and she was sorry she was asking me to carry it now.

The last line said, *Take care of your sister. She thinks she doesn’t need it. She does.*

I folded it up. I put it in my bag. I didn’t cry, which surprised me. I think I’d used most of the crying up already.

Emily was looking at Doug’s envelope.

“What do we do with that one.”

“I don’t know.”

“We could open it.”

“We’re not going to open it.”

“No.”

She turned it over in her hands. Doug’s name on the front, in Mom’s shaky handwriting. Just DOUG.

“When are you going to give it to him.”

“When he calls.”

“He might not call for a while.”

“He’ll call.”

She said it with more certainty than I would have. But then, my sister had been right about most things lately.

I flew back to Denver that afternoon. I sat in the middle seat between a woman who was knitting and a man who slept the whole way. I thought about a lot of things. I thought about Dad in the garage on that Saturday. I thought about Mom driving to Toledo by herself in her Buick, an old woman with cancer going to meet a daughter she’d known about for thirty years and had never spoken to. I thought about Emily in the volleyball sweatshirt with the hole in the sleeve, sitting up with our mother in the middle of the night for eleven months, holding a secret in one hand and a bedpan in the other.

I thought about my brother getting on a plane to Boston with his mother’s letter in his coat pocket and no one to read it with.

Doug did call. Not right away. It was the second week of December when my phone lit up with his name.

“Kate.”

“Hey.”

“I got the letter.”

“Okay.”

He was quiet for a long time. I could hear traffic in the background. He must have been walking somewhere. Doug always called on walks so he could hang up when it got hard.

“I don’t know what to do with it.”

“You don’t have to do anything with it today.”

He laughed. Just a short one. Not really a laugh.

“That’s what Emily said.”

“Emily’s usually right.”

“Yeah.”

Another long pause.

“Kate. I’ve been thinking. About Rebecca.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want to meet her. Not right now. Maybe not ever. I’m not, I don’t know how to explain it. I’m not ready.”

“That’s okay.”

“Is it though.”

I thought about that. About whether it was okay. I thought about Marcus on the floor with the iPad, humming, and Rebecca at the door pressing the silver key into Emily’s hand and saying she didn’t want anything.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s okay. She’s not asking you to.”

“Okay.”

He was quiet again.

“Emily won’t pick up when I call.”

“She will. Give her a minute.”

“How long a minute.”

“I don’t know, Doug. A long minute.”

He was quiet for a long time after that. Then he said, “Tell her I called. If she won’t pick up, tell her I called.”

“I will.”

He hung up.

I sat on my couch in Denver and I looked out the window at the mountains, which were purple in the late light, and I picked up the phone and I called my sister.

She picked up on the second ring, the way she always did.

“Doug called me,” I said. “He couldn’t get you.”

“I know. I saw.”

“He wanted me to tell you he called.”

She was quiet.

“Em. He’s going to keep calling.”

“I know.”

“Are you going to pick up.”

She thought about it. I could hear her breathing. I could hear a kettle in her kitchen starting to whistle, the same kettle Mom had bought her for Christmas in 2004.

“Not yet,” she said finally. “But eventually. Yeah.”

“Okay.”

“Kate.”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks for sitting next to me.”

I opened my mouth to say something back. Something bigger. Something about how she had carried all of it alone for four years and I had barely helped and I was going to help now, from here on out, for the rest of both our lives.

But my sister had never needed speeches. My sister had needed someone next to her in a chair.

“Anytime,” I said.

The kettle kept whistling on her end. She didn’t move to get it. Neither of us said anything for a while. We just stayed on the line, breathing, the way our mother used to on Sundays when there wasn’t anything left to say and neither of us wanted to hang up first.