My brother had once lived for years with his first wife, an English lady whose sharp tongue was matched only by her uncanny talent for wrangling over every penny. She never missed a chance to speak poorly of his parents, and though he weathered her storms for the longest time, eventually his patience ran dry, and they parted ways. In time, he remarried. His new wife came with a daughter from her prior life. My brother, sadly, had no children of his own from either marriage. Before too many seasons passed, misfortune struckhis second wife slipped away from this world. The girl, his stepdaughter, soon found love and moved out.
The house became far too silent. It was as if the wallpaper sighed with loneliness. My brother, seeking some company in the midst of repairs, began to move the bookcase, and there behind it he stumbled upon a neglected stack of paperold letters, yellowed and sighing dust.
Through dreamlike haze, he deciphered crumpled handwriting from a young girl. She wrote again and again to her father she missed, pouring out chapters about her schooldays and yearning for a fathers word. When he spotted the return address, the air hummed: the name of some little English town where he had once been garrisoned, wrapped up in a long-ago romance. Fragments of memory assembled suddenlyhad he left something unfinished there?
The impossible dawned on him: hed fathered a child, but never known. His first wife, it seemed, had intercepted all the letters and shrouded the truth in silence.
Flooded with wrath and wonder, he rang his ex-wife. The shadows on the line held no lies nowshe confessed, yes, the girl was his own daughter. Praise be for modern times, for with the help of the internet and his stepdaughters nimble fingertips, the way to his long-lost child was uncovered.
Then, as if in a labyrinthine dream, the telephone rang with a voice claiming kinshiphis own flesh and blood on the line. He felt adrift, words floating just out of reach. The young woman explained through tears that her mother had departed years before, that she herself was now married with a daughtera granddaughter hed never imagined.
A meeting was arranged in breathless anticipation.
Tears of joy shimmered on my brothers face as he prepared to finally embrace the daughter hed never known. His heart hoped fiercely that she could understandhe carried no blame for the years lost in shadow. Had he known, he would never have let silence stand between them. The world seemed, for a moment, both impossibly strange and beautifully whole.
