Inside: a bundle of letters, tied with faded ribbon. A photograph, black and white, of a woman I did not recognise — perhaps thirty, dark-haired, standing in a garden I didn’t know. A folded document that unfolded to a single handwritten page.
I read the page twice before the shape of it landed.
The woman in the photograph was my grandmother. Not my father’s mother, whom I had known — my mother’s mother, who had died before my mother emigrated, whose name had never been spoken in our house with anything other than closed doors and changed subjects. The woman my mother had, as far as I knew, never described to me.
The letter was addressed to me. It was written in 1987, the year after I was born, and it was from my grandmother, and it was the kind of letter a person wrote when they understood they were not going to have the chance to say these things in person. Careful, specific, full of things she had needed me to know.
At the bottom, a line that I had to put the page down to absorb properly.
Your mother knows none of this. It is yours to decide what to do with it. I trust you to be wiser than we were.
I do not know yet what I am going to do with what the box contained. There are things in that letter that belong to my mother and things that may belong only to me, and the line between them is not clean.
What I keep coming back to is 1987. The year my grandmother sat down and wrote to a child she had met once, who lived in another country, and arranged for the letter to travel forward in time to an address she should not have been able to know.
The solicitor would not tell me how the key had arrived at my flat. Only that the instruction had specified the conditions and the method, and that the firm had fulfilled them as directed.
My grandmother had written to me when I was one year old. She had addressed the letter to my flat on Greave Street. She had deposited a key for an envelope she trusted would reach me.
I am still working out what it means that she knew where I would be.
I am still working out whether I am more moved by the fact that she knew, or frightened by the question of how.
Some doors, when you open them, lead to rooms that are larger than you expected.
I have barely stepped across the threshold.
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