They’re all brief like that. Sometimes she enclosed a picture I’d colored or drawn. I recognize the artistry of my younger self, before I learned that art should be serious, when I happily defined things on paper in a crush of color and broken lines never knowing where they’d end up. Pictures I thought I’d stashed safely under my bed or in my closet. Pictures I thought she’d taken to throw away.

In one, I find a note that reads:

Mary,

Thank you for the money. Here is a picture of Cat in her dress for Easter Mass. She has a new friend at school.

—Edna

I stuff the ridiculous card—polar bears canoodling on an iceberg—back into the envelope and toss it aside. At the bottom of the bin is my birth certificate in a large, brown envelope. I trace my fingers over the printed names.

Catia Eliza Gage born to

MOTHER’S MAIDEN NAME: Mary Therese Gage

FATHER’S NAME:_____________.

There isn’t even a name for the man responsible for my existence. Just a blank space where he should be. I think I should feel anger, and I do, but not at him. No matter how my brain tells me he should’ve been there and if he wasn’t, it was by choice, my heart only blames her. She has robbed me of both parents. She couldn’t even bring herself to write his name on my birth certificate.

I sit back on the floor and kick the plastic bin. It’s really not a surprise. Whenever I asked Moony about my dad, she would just change the subject. I always figured she knew who he was though. Now I wonder. Did my mom even tell her? Does she know? Was she seeing more than one person at the time? Is my paternity more of a question mark than a blank?

I’m not sure it matters. I remember reading a book in junior high about a girl who didn’t know her father but would write him letters. By some magic, the letters found their way to her dad, who came to meet her. I remember the girl’s desperation to know him. I did not feel that same desperation. It was as if my mother took up all the space I had inside—the space for loving, the space for missing.

There is one final envelope resting in the bin. This one is purple. The card inside is a Halloween image—a fortune-teller bent over a crystal ball and three upturned tarot cards. Jack-o’-lanterns surround her.

Moony ignored Halloween. She never bought candy for the trick-or-treaters or left the porch light on. There is something about this card that must be special for her to have sent it to my mom. There is no picture of me in this one, only a paper note. I unfold it.

Mary,

If you won’t listen to me, maybe this.