Chapter 7: The Letter She Wrote at Twenty
I drove home too fast and didn't notice.
The box was on the kitchen table where I'd left it.
I'd moved the keys to the counter.
The two envelopes — Thomas's letter, the second envelope with Daniel's name — were stacked beside it.
I had thought the box was empty after that.
I lifted the keys.
Beneath them, pressed flat against the bottom, was a small brown envelope.
Thin.
Old.
The paper had gone soft with age.
My handwriting was on the front.
Not Thomas's.
Mine.
My own handwriting from fifty-four years ago, when I was twenty years old and homesick and too proud to say so plainly.
I sat down at the kitchen table and held it for a long time without opening it.
I knew what was inside.
I had written it.
But knowing and facing are different things, and I sat there for several minutes doing neither.
Then I opened it.
The paper inside was thin and slightly yellowed.
Three pages, covered in my own young handwriting — smaller and more careful than it is now, the letters formed with the deliberate effort of someone who was choosing every word.
I read it.
I had written to him about the college dormitory, about how strange it felt to be somewhere new.
I had written about missing the town, missing the familiar streets, missing the way autumn smelled there.
I had written — and I had forgotten this entirely, or perhaps buried it — that I had cried on my first night and thought about calling him and decided not to because I didn't want him to know I was struggling.
I had written: *I think about you every single day.
I don't know if that makes things better or worse.
I think it makes them both.*
I had written: *I'm sorry I didn't stay.
I'm also not sorry.
I don't know how to explain that.
Maybe you understand it.
You always understood things I couldn't say properly.*
And at the bottom of the third page, in handwriting that pressed harder into the paper than the rest, as though the pen had needed the extra weight:
*If you ever want to write back, I'll be here.
I'll always be here.
I just needed to go first.*
I set the letter down on the table.
Outside, a car passed on the street.
Somewhere nearby a dog barked twice and stopped.
He had read this.
He had held these pages.
He had kept them for fifty-four years in a box that he then placed in another box that he arranged to be delivered to me the day after his funeral.
He had kept my letter longer than most people keep anything.
My phone rang.
I looked at the screen.
Daniel.
I answered.
"Did you find it?" he asked.
"Yes."
A pause.
"Are you all right?"
I looked at the letter on the table.
My twenty-year-old handwriting.
The harder pressure at the bottom of the third page.
"I wrote to him," I said.
"After I left.
I told him I thought about him every day.
I told him to write back." My voice was steady but only just.
"He never did.
And he kept the letter for fifty-four years."
Daniel was quiet.
"He was afraid," I said.
"That's what his letter said.
He was afraid."
"Yes."
"I was afraid too," I said.
"I just — I wrote the letter anyway."
"I know," Daniel said.
"I think that's what he admired most about you.
He said something like that once, when I was young.
He said the bravest thing a person can do is say something true when they don't know how it will land." A pause.
"I didn't know who he was talking about.
I do now."
I pressed my hand flat against the letter on the table.
"Daniel," I said.
"The house on Maple Street."
"Yes?"
"Would you take me there?
I haven't been inside yet.
I don't want to go alone the first time."
A silence.
Not an uncomfortable one.
"Tomorrow morning?" he said.
"Tomorrow morning," I said.
After I hung up I sat at the table for a long time.
The letter in front of me.
The keys on the counter.
The photograph of Thomas at seventeen or eighteen, standing in front of a house he had just bought, smiling at a camera with his whole face.
*She'll come.*
He had written that fifty-three years ago.
May you like
He had been right.
He had just run out of time to see it.
