My Elderly Mother Returned From a Seven-Day Visit Looking Half Her Size, and the Suitcase She Carried Wasn’t Hers

The Black Suitcase

My mother had always been a cheerful, slightly overweight woman.

That’s how I’d describe her if you asked. Round face. Soft arms. A laugh that came from somewhere deep in her stomach and filled up every room she walked into. She wore cardigans with pockets full of tissues and butterscotch candies. She smelled like vanilla extract and Jergens lotion.

She loved baking. Cinnamon rolls every Saturday. Apple pie every Sunday. Banana bread whenever a banana got a single brown spot, because she couldn’t stand to waste anything.

And she never missed Sunday dinner.

Never. Not once in my whole life. Not when my father had his heart attack in 2009. Not when she broke her wrist in 2016. Not during the pandemic, when we did it over FaceTime with her propping her iPad up against the gravy boat.

Every Sunday at four o’clock. Pot roast or roast chicken or meatloaf. Mashed potatoes. Green beans with bacon. Rolls from scratch. Pie.

So when she announced in October that she was spending a week with her childhood friend Margaret, I was happy for her.

I really was.

“Margaret?” I said. “Margaret from Erie?”

We were sitting at her kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon. After the pot roast. Before the pie. She was cutting the pie into eight perfect slices with the same knife she’d used since 1971.

“Margaret Feeney,” Mom said. “We grew up together. On Plum Street. We were best friends from first grade until…” She paused. The knife stopped. “Until we weren’t. For a while. Then we were again.”

“I remember her,” I said. “She came to Dad’s funeral, didn’t she?”

Mom set the knife down.

“No,” she said quietly. “That was her sister. Margaret couldn’t make it.”

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

Mom thought about it.

“Twenty years,” she said. “Maybe a little more.”

“And she just called you? Out of the blue?”

Mom picked the knife back up. She started cutting again.

“Something like that,” she said.

Margaret lived three hours away. In Erie, Pennsylvania. Up on the lake.

Mom said she’d take the train. Amtrak. The Lake Shore Limited. From Cleveland to Erie. It would take two and a half hours.

“I can drive you, Mom.”

“Annie, you work. You have the kids. You have Dave. I’m eighty, not dead. I can sit on a train.”

“For a whole week?”

“Seven days,” Mom said. “Monday to Monday. Margaret has a guest room. She said I can stay as long as I like.”

She smiled.

“We have a lot to catch up on,” she said.

My name is Annie Cole. I’m fifty-four years old.

I’m a dental hygienist in Lakewood, Ohio. Just west of Cleveland. I’ve been married to Dave for twenty-nine years. He manages a Home Depot. We have two kids. Tyler’s twenty-six and lives in Columbus. Grace is twenty-two and just started nursing school at Kent State.

My mother is June Abernathy.

She lives alone in the little white Cape Cod on Hilliard Road in Rocky River where I grew up. Seven minutes from my house. My father, Bill, died in 2009. They were married forty-four years.

She’s eighty years old. She drives to the grocery store. She volunteers at the library on Wednesdays. She goes to Mass at St. Christopher’s every Saturday at five. She plays bridge on Thursdays with three women she’s known for fifty years.

She’s never been anywhere without telling me first.

I drove her to the Amtrak station in downtown Cleveland on a Monday morning at five a.m.

She had one bag. A small blue travel bag. Hard-sided. With wheels. I bought it for her in 2018 when she went to visit my aunt in Florida. It had a little pink ribbon tied to the handle so she could find it on the baggage carousel.

She was wearing her good navy coat. And a cardigan underneath. Gray. Too big for her. I noticed that. I remember noticing it.

“New sweater?”

“Old one,” she said. “From the back of the closet.”

It hung on her. The shoulders were too wide.

I didn’t think anything of it.

At the station, she kissed my cheek.

“Call me when you get there,” I said.

“I will.”

“And call me every night.”

“Annie.”

“Every night, Mom. I mean it. You’re eighty.”

She smiled.

“I’ll call you every night,” she said.

She went through the door to the platform. Pulling her little blue bag with the pink ribbon.

She didn’t look back.

She called the first night.

She sounded tired. She said the train was fine. She said Margaret’s house was lovely. She said they’d stayed up late talking.

“What did you talk about?”

“Old times,” Mom said.

She called the second night. Shorter. Tired again. She said they’d gone for a walk by the lake. She said she was going to bed early.

She called the third night. Very short. Two minutes. She said she was fine. She said she loved me.

She didn’t call the fourth night.

I called her. It went to voicemail.

I called again. Voicemail.

I almost drove to Erie.

Then at eleven p.m., she texted. Sorry, sweetheart. Phone died. All fine. Love you.

Mom never texts. She hates texting. She says her thumbs are too old.

She didn’t call the fifth night either.

Or the sixth.

She texted both nights. Short texts. Fine. Tired. Love you.

Seven days later, I picked Mom up at the train station.

Monday afternoon. Four-ten p.m. The Lake Shore Limited, arriving from the east.

I stood on the platform with a cup of hot chocolate for her. Her favorite. From the Starbucks in the station. Extra whipped cream.

The train pulled in. People got off. Business travelers. College kids. An old man with a cane.

And then her.

I barely recognized her.

I mean that. For about three full seconds, I looked right at her and didn’t know who she was.

A small old woman in a navy coat. Stepping carefully down from the train with one hand on the rail. Her clothes hung loosely from her shoulders. The coat that used to fit snug across her middle was hanging on her like a tent. Her gray cardigan underneath was swimming on her.

Her cheeks were sunken. The round face I’d known my whole life was gone. Her cheekbones stood out like I’d never seen them. There were hollows under her eyes. Dark circles. Her skin looked gray.

Her hands were bony. Her wrists were thin.

She’d lost so much weight. In seven days.

And she was dragging an enormous black suitcase.

I dropped the hot chocolate.

It splattered on the platform. I didn’t care.

I ran to her.

“Mom,” I said. “Mom, what happened to you?”

She looked up at me.

She forced a smile.

It didn’t reach her eyes. Her eyes were red. Swollen. Like she’d been crying for days.

“Just a little stomach trouble, sweetheart,” she said.

“Stomach trouble?” I put my hands on her arms. I could feel the bones through her coat. “Mom, you’ve lost twenty pounds. Thirty. You look sick. You look like you haven’t eaten in a week.”

“I haven’t been very hungry,” she said.

“We’re going to the hospital. Right now.”

She pulled her arm away.

“No,” she said.

“Mom—”

“No, Annie.” Her voice was sharp. She never uses a sharp voice with me. “I don’t need a hospital. I need to go home.”

“You look like you’re dying.”

“I’m not dying,” Mom said. “Please. Just take me home.”

Then I noticed the suitcase.

Black. Huge. The kind of hard-shell suitcase that costs four hundred dollars at Macy’s. With four spinner wheels and a telescoping handle and a brushed metal finish. Expensive. Nothing my mother would ever buy.

Mom had left home with a small blue travel bag. With a pink ribbon.

“Mom,” I said. “Where’s your luggage?”

She gripped the black handle. Tighter. Her knuckles went white.

“Margaret gave me this one,” she said. “Mine broke.”

I drove her home.

She sat in the passenger seat with the black suitcase in the back. She didn’t say anything. She looked out the window at Lake Erie as we drove west on the Shoreway. Gray water. Gray sky.

I kept glancing at her.

At her hands in her lap. Thin. Shaking a little.

At her face. Gaunt. Older than I’d ever seen it.

“Mom,” I said. “Did something happen? At Margaret’s?”

She didn’t answer.

“Mom.”

“I’m tired, Annie,” she said. “I’ll tell you later. I promise. Not now.”

At home, Mom carried the suitcase straight into her bedroom.

She didn’t let me help. She dragged it up the front steps by herself. Through the living room. Down the hall.

Into her bedroom.

And she locked the door.

My mother has never locked a door in her life.

Not the bathroom. Not the front door, most nights. I yell at her about it. She says she’s lived on Hilliard Road for fifty-four years and nobody’s ever broken in.

She locked her bedroom door.

I stood in the hallway and listened.

I heard the suitcase unzip.

Then nothing.

Then, very quietly, through the door, I heard my mother crying.

I knocked.

“Mom? Can I come in?”

“Not right now, sweetheart.”

“Mom, please. You’re scaring me.”

“I’m fine,” she said through the door. Her voice was thick. “I just need some time. Go home, Annie. Go home to Dave. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“I’m not leaving you like this.”

“Please,” she said. “Please, honey. I’m begging you. Just give me one night.”

I didn’t go home.

I sat in her living room. On her floral couch. Under the framed photo of my parents on their wedding day in 1965.

I called Dave. I told him what happened. He said he’d keep dinner warm.

Then I sat there for a long time.

Thinking.

Margaret gave me this one. Mine broke.

We have a lot to catch up on.

Twenty years. Maybe a little more.

That evening, I called Margaret.

Mom had given me the number before she left. Written on a Post-it note. In her neat Catholic-school handwriting. Margaret Feeney and a phone number with an 814 area code. Erie.

I’d stuck it on my refrigerator.

I’d brought it with me in my purse. I don’t know why. Just in case.

I dialed it.

It rang four times.

A man answered.

“Hello?”

Older. Gruff. Like a man who’d been watching TV and didn’t want to be interrupted.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m looking for Margaret Feeney. This is June Abernathy’s daughter. My mother’s been staying with her this week.”

There was a pause.

“Who?”

“Margaret Feeney,” I said again. “She’s an old friend of my mother’s. My mom gave me this number.”

He went quiet.

A long, strange quiet.

Then he said:

“Ma’am, Margaret hasn’t lived here for eight years.”

My stomach dropped.

“What?”

“Margaret Feeney,” he said slowly. “She was my mother-in-law. She lived in this house. She passed away in 2018. My wife and I bought the house from the estate. We kept the phone number.” He paused. “I’m sorry. Nobody’s asked for her in a long time.”

I couldn’t speak.

“Ma’am?” he said. “Are you okay?”

“She died?” I whispered. “Eight years ago?”

“March of 2018,” he said. “Cancer. She’s buried at Calvary Cemetery. Up on Peach Street.”

“And nobody’s been staying there? This week? An eighty-year-old woman? June Abernathy?”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “It’s just me and my wife. Nobody’s stayed here.”

I hung up.

I checked the number again. On the Post-it note. In my mother’s handwriting.

It was the same one.

The same one Mom had given me before leaving.

I sat on my mother’s couch with the Post-it note in my hand and stared at her bedroom door.

Margaret Feeney had been dead for eight years.

My mother had known her since first grade. Of course she knew.

She’d lied to me.

For seven days.

I didn’t knock again.

I didn’t go home either.

I fell asleep on the couch around one in the morning.

The next morning, I found her asleep in her armchair.

In the living room. The old blue recliner by the window that used to be Dad’s. She must have come out of her bedroom sometime during the night.

She was wrapped in a quilt. Still wearing the gray cardigan. Her head was tipped to the side. Her mouth was a little open. She was breathing softly.

In the morning light, she looked even thinner.

I stood over her and watched her sleep.

Then I looked down.

Beside her, on the little side table, lay a train ticket.

An Amtrak ticket. Printed. Folded in half.

I picked it up.

ERIE, PA (ERI) to CLEVELAND, OH (CLE).

No.

Wait.

I looked again.

PITTSBURGH, PA (PGH) to ERIE, PA (ERI).

Dated Friday. Three days before her supposed return.

She hadn’t been in Erie on Friday.

She’d been in Pittsburgh.

Then she’d traveled from Pittsburgh to Erie on Friday. And from Erie to Cleveland on Monday.

What was in Pittsburgh?

And underneath the ticket was a luggage tag.

Leather. Brown. The kind that buckles around a suitcase handle. It had been unbuckled and laid flat.

I turned it over.

There was a little plastic window. And a card inside. Typed.

Not Margaret’s name.

Not my mother’s.

SAMUEL J. REINER

1847 Beechwood Blvd.

Pittsburgh, PA 15217

I’d never heard that name in my life.

I put the ticket and the luggage tag back exactly where I found them.

I looked at my mother. Still sleeping.

Then I went down the hall.

Her bedroom door was open now. Just a crack.

I pushed it open.

The black suitcase was on the floor at the foot of her bed. Zipped closed.

I knelt down next to it.

I’d never in my life gone through my mother’s things. Not her purse. Not her drawers. Not her mail. She’d raised me better than that.

I quietly opened the black suitcase.

Inside were neatly folded clothes.

My mother’s clothes. Her nightgowns. Her underwear. Her two pairs of slacks. Her good blouse. Her toiletry bag.

Folded perfectly. The way she folds everything. In thirds.

But also something else.

A sweater. On top. Not hers. A man’s sweater. Navy blue wool. Old. Soft. Worn at the elbows.

It smelled like a man’s aftershave. Old Spice, maybe. And something else. Something like a hospital.

Underneath the sweater, there was a sealed brown envelope.

Manila. Thick. Sealed with tape.

Nothing written on the front.

And next to it, an old-fashioned digital camera.

A little silver Canon. The kind everybody had in 2006. With a wrist strap.

I switched it on.

The screen lit up. A little battery icon blinked red in the corner.

The battery was almost dead.

I pressed the button to view the pictures.

There were only four photographs.

I opened the first.

It was taken in a hospital room.

I could tell. The beige walls. The window with the vertical blinds. The IV pole. The rolling tray table. The little whiteboard on the wall where nurses write their names.

There was a man in the bed.

Sixty, maybe. Thin. Very thin. Bald. Pale. Wearing a hospital gown. An IV in his arm. A tube under his nose.

And sitting in a chair next to the bed, holding his hand, was my mother.

She was wearing the gray cardigan.

They were both crying.

Not small crying. Faces crumpled. Tears running down. My mother had her free hand pressed against her mouth. The man had his eyes squeezed shut.

They were holding hands so tight their knuckles were white.

I stared at it.

Then I looked at the second.

The same hospital room. Same man. Same bed.

This time, he was holding something. In his lap. Spread out across the hospital blanket.

A baby blanket.

Small. Knitted. Yellow. Faded almost to cream. With a white border. And a little pattern of ducks around the edges.

I knew that pattern.

I knew it the second I saw it.

My mother knits. She’s knitted my whole life. Sweaters. Scarves. Mittens. Afghans for every couch in the family. Baby blankets for every grandchild.

Every baby blanket she’s ever made has the same pattern around the border.

Little ducks.

She learned it from her grandmother in 1955. She told me once. She said it was the first thing she ever knitted. She said she’d made one baby blanket with ducks when she was seventeen, a long time ago, and she’d put a little of herself into every one since.

The man in the hospital bed was holding a yellow baby blanket with ducks around the border.

And it was old.

Very old.

Older than me.

My hands were shaking.

I clicked to the third photograph.

It was a family.

Standing around the same hospital bed. The man in the middle. A woman next to him. His age. Gray hair. Kind face. A younger woman, thirty-something, with two little kids. A boy and a girl. Maybe six and eight.

And my mother.

Standing at the end of the bed. In her navy coat. Looking small and tired and sad.

But the little girl had her arms around my mother’s waist.

Hugging her.

And my mother had her hand on the little girl’s head.

I sat back on my heels.

I looked at the man in the hospital bed.

At his face. Thin and pale and bald.

At his eyes.

Dark. Deep-set. A little crooked when he smiled.

My mother’s eyes.

My eyes.

I clicked to the fourth photograph.

The final one.

It was just him.

The man in the hospital bed. Alone. Sitting up against the pillows. Looking straight at the camera.

He was holding a piece of paper. A sheet of printer paper. Held up in front of his chest with both hands. Like a sign.

Written on it, in black marker, in big shaky letters:

HI ANNIE.

I’M SAM.

I’M YOUR BROTHER.

I’D REALLY LIKE TO MEET YOU.

ROOM 612

UPMC SHADYSIDE

PITTSBURGH

(PLEASE HURRY)

The camera went dark.

The battery died.

I sat on my mother’s bedroom floor with a dead camera in my hand.

And I knew exactly where I needed to go.

But I didn’t grab my car keys.

Not yet.

First, I went back into the living room.

My mother was awake.

She was sitting up in the blue recliner. Wrapped in the quilt. Looking at me.

Looking at the camera in my hand.

Her face crumpled.

“You found it,” she said.

“Who is he?” I said.

My voice was shaking. My whole body was shaking.

Mom didn’t answer.

“Mom. Who is Samuel Reiner? Who is the man in the hospital bed holding a sign that says he’s my brother?”

She closed her eyes.

“Sit down, Annie,” she said quietly. “Please. Sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit down.”

“Please,” she said. “I can’t tell you if you’re standing over me. I can’t. I need you to sit.”

I sat.

On the floral couch. Across from her. With the dead camera in my lap.

Mom looked at her hands for a long time.

“His name was Michael,” she said finally. “When he was born. I named him Michael. After my father.”

I didn’t say anything.

“He was born on March 3, 1963,” Mom said. “At St. Brigid’s Home for Unwed Mothers in Erie, Pennsylvania. At four-fifteen in the morning. He weighed seven pounds, two ounces.”

She looked up at me.

Tears were running down her sunken cheeks.

“I was seventeen,” she said.

I couldn’t breathe.

“His father was a boy named Danny Reilly,” Mom said. “From Plum Street. Three houses down from mine. We’d known each other since we were little. We were going to get married.”

She swallowed.

“He enlisted in the Navy in the summer of 1962,” she said. “He was eighteen. He shipped out to Norfolk in August. He didn’t know I was pregnant. I didn’t know yet either.”

“What happened to him?”

Mom closed her eyes.

“His ship was the USS Thresher,” she said. “A submarine. It sank in April of 1963. Off Cape Cod. During a test dive. A hundred and twenty-nine men. Nobody survived.”

She opened her eyes.

“Michael was five weeks old,” she said. “Danny never knew he had a son.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“My parents found out I was pregnant in October,” Mom said. “My mother cried for three days. My father didn’t speak to me for a month. Then they sent me away.”

“To St. Brigid’s.”

“To St. Brigid’s,” Mom said. “In Erie. Run by the Sisters of Mercy. I told everybody on Plum Street I was going to stay with an aunt in Buffalo. That’s what all the girls said. An aunt in Buffalo. Or an aunt in Pittsburgh. Everybody knew. Nobody said anything.”

She wiped her eyes with the corner of the quilt.

“That’s where I met Margaret,” she said.

“Margaret Feeney was there too,” Mom said. “She was sixteen. From Erie. She had a little girl in February. Three weeks before Michael.”

“Margaret wasn’t your childhood friend,” I said slowly. “From Plum Street.”

“No,” Mom said. “I lied about that too. I met her at St. Brigid’s. In the laundry room. We folded sheets together. Every day. For five months. She was the only one who knew. The only one in my whole life.”

She looked at me.

“She was my best friend, Annie,” she said. “We wrote letters for fifty-five years. Every month. Until she died.”

“They let me keep him for three days,” Mom said.

Her voice was very quiet now.

“That was the rule. Three days. Then the adoptive family came. The sisters said it was better that way. A clean break. They said if you held them too long, you’d never be able to let go.”

She was crying harder now.

“I held him for three days,” she said. “I fed him. I changed him. I sang to him. I wrapped him in the blanket I’d knitted. Yellow. With ducks. I’d been knitting it the whole time I was pregnant. In the laundry room. Margaret helped me with the border.”

She put her hand over her mouth.

“And on the third day,” she whispered, “Sister Agnes came and took him out of my arms. And I never saw him again.”

I was crying now too.

I didn’t know when I’d started.

“The adoptive family was from Pittsburgh,” Mom said. “That’s all they told me. A good Catholic family. A doctor and his wife. They couldn’t have children. They’d been waiting four years.”

“Reiner,” I said.

“Reiner,” Mom said. “I didn’t know that until this spring.”

“I went home,” Mom said. “In April. Two weeks after Danny’s ship went down. My parents told everybody I’d had a nice time in Buffalo. Nobody asked any questions.”

She looked at the framed wedding photo on the wall. Her and Dad. 1965.

“I met your father the next year,” she said. “At a church dance. He was the kindest man I’d ever met.”

“Did he know?”

Mom nodded.

“I told him before he proposed,” she said. “I thought he’d leave. I sat in his car outside my parents’ house and told him everything. Danny. St. Brigid’s. Michael.”

“What did he say?”

Mom smiled. Through her tears.

“He said, June, that’s the bravest thing I’ve ever heard. And then he asked me to marry him. Right there. In the car.”

“And then you were born,” Mom said. “In 1971. After two miscarriages. You were my miracle.”

She looked at me.

“I never told you,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Annie. I never told you. I thought about it a thousand times. When you were sixteen. When you got married. When you had Tyler. When Daddy died.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Mom looked down at the quilt in her lap.

“Because I was ashamed,” she said quietly. “Because in 1963, girls like me were a disgrace. My mother told me so. The sisters told me so. The priest at St. Brigid’s told me so every Sunday. You’ve sinned. You’ve shamed your family. The best thing you can do for that baby is disappear from his life forever.”

She shook her head.

“I believed them,” she said. “For sixty years. I believed that if anybody ever found out, they’d look at me differently. You’d look at me differently.”

“Mom,” I whispered.

“I didn’t want to be the girl from St. Brigid’s,” she said. “I wanted to be your mother. Just your mother. Who makes pie on Sundays.”

“So what happened?” I said. “This spring?”

Mom took a shaky breath.

“A letter came,” she said. “In April. To my house. From a woman named Carol Reiner. In Pittsburgh.”

“His wife.”

“His wife,” Mom said. “She said her husband had been adopted. She said he’d always wondered about his birth mother but never looked because he didn’t want to hurt his adoptive parents. They’re both gone now. His father died in 2011. His mother in 2020.”

She swallowed.

“Carol said their daughter, Jenna, did one of those DNA tests last Christmas. Ancestry. For fun. And she got a match.”

Mom looked at me.

“You did one too,” she said. “Remember? Three years ago. Tyler bought you one for your birthday.”

I went cold.

I remembered. I’d spit in a tube and mailed it off and looked at my pie chart of ethnicities for about ten minutes. Irish, Polish, a little German. I’d never logged in again.

“Jenna matched with you,” Mom said. “As a close relative. A first cousin or a half-aunt. Carol said they couldn’t figure out how. You weren’t on any family tree they knew.”

“So they found you.”

“They found Margaret first,” Mom said. “Margaret’s daughter. The one Margaret gave up in 1963. She’d done a DNA test too. She and Margaret found each other in 2014. Margaret told her everything. About St. Brigid’s. About her friend June who had a baby boy three weeks after her.”

She shook her head.

“Margaret’s daughter remembered my name,” Mom said. “June Kowalski. My maiden name. Carol Reiner found me from that.”

“Carol’s letter said Sam had always known he was born at St. Brigid’s,” Mom said. “His adoptive mother told him when he was twelve. She gave him the only thing that came with him.”

She looked at the dead camera in my lap.

“The blanket,” she said. “Yellow. With ducks. She kept it for sixty years. She gave it to him when she was dying.”

“And the letter said something else,” Mom said.

Her voice broke completely.

“It said Sam had leukemia.”

I stopped breathing.

“Acute myeloid leukemia,” Mom said. “…