Late that afternoon, he found an obituary.
The woman in it had died twelve years earlier.
The photograph was small and grainy, and she was much older than the Clara I remembered.
But I recognized her immediately.
I recognized the shape of her smile.
I recognized the way one eyebrow sat slightly higher than the other.
I recognized my wife.
The obituary said she had lived for decades under another last name.
More importantly, it said she was survived by a son and a daughter.
My children had grown up.
They had lived long enough to have adult lives while I had been standing in their untouched bedrooms believing they were dead.
My nephew found a possible contact for my daughter first.
We argued about who should call.
In the end, I couldn’t do it.
He made the first call while I sat beside him at the kitchen table where Clara used to leave grocery lists.
A woman answered.
My nephew explained that he was trying to locate relatives of Clara.
There was a long silence.
Then the woman asked, “Who wants to know?”
My nephew looked at me.
I forced myself to speak.
I said Clara’s name.
Then I said mine.
The woman on the other end inhaled sharply.
She did not call me Dad.
She asked me to repeat my name.
When I did, she started crying.
So did I.
My daughter had been told that I wanted them gone.
Later, she had been told that I moved away, remarried, changed my name, and never wanted to hear from them again.
Her brother had tried looking for me as a young man, but he searched under the different last name Gwen had claimed I was using.
He found nothing.
