The Curse on Our Family Turned Out to Be a Sister No One Named

The curse in my family was famous, at least among us. Bad things came in threes, and they came to the women, and there was nothing you could do but hunker down and wait for the third one to land. A broken engagement, then a lost job, then an illness. A miscarriage, then a fire, then a death. My mother could recite the threes back four generations like a rosary of misfortune.

I never believed in it, exactly, but I grew up inside it, and that is almost the same thing. When two bad things happened in a season, the whole family would go quiet and watchful, waiting for the third, and the waiting was its own kind of harm. We were not so much cursed as convinced, and being convinced was plenty.

The one artifact of all this was the family Bible. Big, black, cracked, with the family tree printed in front and filled in by hand across a hundred and fifty years -- births, deaths, marriages, in a dozen different inks and hands. It was the official record. It was the thing that said who we were.

I inherited the Bible when my mother passed. And one rainy afternoon, being careful with the loose front pages, I noticed something I had somehow never noticed in all the years of it sitting on my mother's shelf. On the oldest page, the marriage of my great-great-grandparents in 1871, and then their children listed below -- but the spacing was wrong. Between two of the children the gap was too wide, and the paper there was slightly rougher, and when I held it to the window I could see the faint ghost of writing that had been scraped away with a blade.

Someone had erased a child. Deliberately, carefully, with a knife, so that the name was gone but the wound in the paper remained.

It took me the better part of a year and a lot of parish records to reconstruct who she had been. Her name was Ada. She was the third daughter, born in 1878. And she does not appear in a single family document after the age of twelve, except one: a county record that I will not describe in detail except to say that in that time and place, a girl of a certain kind, who behaved in a certain way, or who was simply inconvenient to a family's standing, could be committed by her own father's signature and never spoken of again.

Ada was erased from the Bible the same year she was committed. I found the two dates. They are one month apart.

And here is the thing that stopped my breath. My great-great-grandmother -- Ada's mother, the woman who presumably watched her husband sign that girl away -- is the first woman in our family that the curse-in-threes stories attach to. The legend starts with her. The bad luck in threes begins in the exact generation that a daughter was cut out of the family with a knife.

I do not think we were cursed. I think we were haunted, in the only way that is real -- by a guilt so large and so unspeakable that it had to be turned into something else to be survivable. You cannot live with the fact that your family locked a girl away and scratched her name out of the book of who you are. So instead you tell yourself the family is cursed. The bad luck comes in threes. It is fate, it is the beyond, it is anything at all except the plain fact that once, we did a terrible thing to one of our own girls and then pretended she never existed.

The curse was Ada. The curse was her mother's grief with no permitted outlet. The curse was every daughter after, sensing that something in the family was owed and unpaid, and having no name for it because the name had been scraped off the page.

I found where Ada is buried. It is a numbered plot, no stone, in the corner of a cemetery attached to the institution, where the residents who died with no family willing to claim them were put. I bought her a stone. It has her name on it, Ada, and her dates, and underneath, because I did not know what else to write, I had them carve: daughter of this family, restored to the record.

Then I did the thing that felt most important. I took the Bible, and on the oldest page, in the too-wide gap where a blade had done its work in 1878, I wrote her name back in. Ada. In fresh ink, next to her brothers and sisters, where she should have been all along.

My mother believed in the curse until the day she died. I wish I could show her that it had a name, and a face, and a grave with a stone on it now. I wish I could tell her it was never fate. It was only ever a girl we owed an apology to, waiting a hundred and fifty years to be written back into the family.