I was helping my daughter make a scrapbook for her fifth birthday party when I found a photo of me and Denise at age five, standing in the same backyard – and the woman in the background was NOT MY MOTHER.
Denise and I had been inseparable since before memory. Our moms were best friends. We grew up three houses apart on Birchwood Lane in Dayton. She was the maid of honor at my wedding. She’s my daughter Chloe’s godmother.
That photo stopped me cold.
I was sitting at the kitchen table with glue sticks and construction paper everywhere. Chloe was in the living room watching cartoons. I’d pulled a shoebox of old photos from the hall closet, looking for pictures of me at five to compare with her.
The photo was a Polaroid. Me and Denise, holding popsicles, squinting at the camera. Behind us, near the sliding glass door, a woman with dark hair was watching us. She was young, maybe mid-twenties.
My mom was blonde her whole life.
I flipped the photo over. Someone had written “Tina + Denise, summer ’94” in blue ink.
I called my mom that night. Kept it casual. Asked who took pictures at Denise’s birthday parties back then. She got quiet for a second too long, then said she didn’t remember.
My mom remembers everything.
Two days later I asked Denise about it over coffee. Showed her the photo on my phone. She looked at the woman in the background and her face changed.
“Where did you get this?”
I told her. She handed my phone back and said I should ask my dad.
My dad died in 2019.
I went back to the shoebox. Found eleven more photos from that same summer. The dark-haired woman was in SEVEN of them. Always near me. Always watching me. In one, she was holding my hand.
I reverse-searched her face through an old Dayton High yearbook archive online.
Her name was Christine Purcell.
I GOOGLED HER AND THE FIRST RESULT WAS AN OBITUARY FROM 1996. She died at twenty-eight. The obituary listed one surviving family member – a daughter, age seven, placed in the care of family friends.
I sat down on the floor without deciding to.
I called Denise. She picked up on the first ring, like she’d been waiting.
“Tina,” she said, and her voice cracked. “Your mom made me promise. But you found the photo, so I can’t do this anymore.”
She took a breath.
“Christine wasn’t some stranger. She was trying to get you BACK.”
What Denise Told Me
She talked for forty-five minutes. I didn’t say much. I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and I listened.
Christine Purcell had been my biological mother.
She was nineteen when she had me. She wasn’t ready, or she couldn’t cope, or both. Denise didn’t have the full story on that part. What she knew was that Christine had given me up to her older sister and her sister’s husband. My parents. The people I called Mom and Dad my entire life.
It was private. Family. Not a formal adoption through any agency, just paperwork arranged by a lawyer in Kettering who was a friend of my dad’s. 1989. The kind of thing that happened and then got buried under years of ordinary life.
Christine got clean in her early twenties. Denise’s word: clean. So there was something before the getting clean. She found steady work. She started writing letters to my mom asking to see me. Not to take me. Just to see me.
My mom said no, then yes, then no again. It went back and forth for a couple years.
Summer of ’94, she said yes.
That was the summer in the photos.
Christine came to Dayton twice that summer. Stayed with a friend, not with us. She came to Denise’s backyard because Denise’s mom, Patty, was the one who’d helped broker the arrangement. Patty was the one person my mom trusted to supervise it. So Christine got to stand in a backyard and watch me eat a popsicle. She got to hold my hand. That’s what she got.
And then in 1995, my mom said no again. Final answer this time.
Christine died eight months later.
The Obituary
I read it again after I got off the phone with Denise. Liver failure, was the official cause. She was twenty-eight. The service had been held at a funeral home on Salem Avenue. The obituary was short. It mentioned a brother, Kevin, in Columbus. It mentioned a daughter, age seven, placed in the care of family friends.
Family friends.
That was me. That was how they described me.
I’d been in the shoebox the whole time. Buried under thirty years of birthday parties and Christmas mornings and Chloe’s first steps. Seven of eleven photos, and in every single one of them, Christine Purcell was watching me like she was trying to memorize something she knew she wasn’t going to get to keep.
I don’t know how long I sat on the floor. Chloe came in at some point and asked why I was sitting like that. I said my back hurt. She accepted this and went back to her cartoons.
I Called My Mom the Next Morning
I didn’t sleep. I lay next to my husband Greg and stared at the ceiling and tried to figure out what I actually felt. I couldn’t get there. My brain kept snagging on logistics. The lawyer in Kettering. The letters. What does “family friends” mean on a death certificate.
I called my mom at eight-fifteen. She picked up on the second ring.
I said, “I know about Christine Purcell.”
Silence. A long one.
“Denise told you.”
“Denise told me some of it. I need you to tell me the rest.”
She cried almost immediately. My mom is not a crier. She cried at my dad’s funeral and I think maybe once before that, when her own mother died. She was crying before she’d said ten words and it was the most disorienting thing that had happened in twenty-four hours that had been full of disorienting things.
She told me what she knew. Some of it matched what Denise had said. Some of it filled in gaps.
Christine had been using when she got pregnant. Not heavily, she said, but enough. She’d agreed to the arrangement herself. My mom said that twice. She agreed herself. I think she needed me to know that. I think she’d been holding that fact like a shield for thirty years.
The summer visits were her idea too, my mom said. Christine asked and she’d thought about it for a long time and then said yes because she thought it was the right thing. But then Christine started asking for more. She wanted to tell me who she was. She wanted me to know. And my mom said no to that. Hard no. I was five years old and she’d been my mother since I was three weeks old and she said no.
“I thought I was protecting you,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“I know that’s not enough.”
“I’m not angry,” I told her. And I wasn’t, exactly. I don’t know what I was.
Kevin Purcell
I found him on Facebook that afternoon. He was fifty-one, lived in Westerville, worked for a plumbing supply company. His profile photo was him and a yellow lab at what looked like a state park.
I sat with the message box open for probably twenty minutes before I typed anything.
I told him my name. I told him I believed I was his sister Christine’s daughter. I told him I’d found a photo and that I’d only learned the truth the day before. I kept it short. I didn’t know what else to say.
He responded four hours later.
I’ve been waiting for this message for a long time. I didn’t know if you even knew. I’m glad you do now. Her name was Christine Marie Purcell and she loved you very much. She talked about you constantly. I have things she saved that I think belong to you.
I read it three times.
The things he had were a shoebox of his own. Smaller than mine. A card she’d made when I was born, never sent. A few photos of her holding me in the hospital, before everything. A letter she’d written to me in 1995, also never sent, addressed to “My daughter Tina” in handwriting that curled at the edges.
He scanned everything and emailed it to me.
The letter was four pages. She talked about what she hoped I was like. She said she hoped I was stubborn because stubborn girls did better in the world. She said she was sorry she hadn’t been able to be what I needed. She said she thought about me every single day.
She said she was glad I had a mom who loved me.
What I Did With the Scrapbook
Chloe’s birthday was eleven days after I found the Polaroid. We finished the scrapbook. I didn’t put the photo of me and Christine in it. Not because I was hiding it. Just because it wasn’t Chloe’s story to carry yet.
I put it in my own shoebox, with Kevin’s scans and the letter.
Denise came to Chloe’s party. We didn’t talk about any of it that day. We ate cake and watched Chloe tear through wrapping paper and Denise kept catching my eye across the table and I kept catching hers. We’ve known each other for thirty-five years. We didn’t need to say anything.
My mom came too. She brought Chloe a stuffed elephant she’d seen at some boutique in Oakwood and paid too much for. Chloe named it immediately. Kevin.
My mom didn’t know that. She just smiled and said that was a good name for an elephant.
I looked at her across the room. Sixty-three years old. She raised me. She made my lunches and drove me to swim practice and sat in the front row at my college graduation. She also kept a woman’s existence from me until that woman had been dead for almost thirty years.
Both things are true. I’m still figuring out how to hold them at the same time.
I’m going to meet Kevin in person next month. He’s driving down from Westerville. We’re getting lunch at a diner he picked, somewhere in between.
He sent me one more thing after the scans. A photo of Christine I hadn’t seen yet. She’s maybe seventeen, sitting on a porch somewhere, laughing at something off-camera.
She has my nose.
I stared at that photo for a long time. Chloe walked by and glanced at my phone screen and said, “Who’s that?”
“Someone I used to know,” I said.
Chloe shrugged and kept walking. Kids accept so much without needing it to make sense.
I’m still working on that.
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If this one got to you, pass it on. Someone else out there has a shoebox they haven’t opened yet.
