Chapter 8: The Letter That Came Back
Anneke wrote back within the week.
The envelope was thin, the handwriting precise and careful, the paper slightly formal in the way of someone who had grown up writing letters rather than messages.
*Dear Harold,*
*I read your letter to my father on a Tuesday morning.
He asked me to read it twice.
After the second time, he sat quietly for a while, and then he said — and I'm translating as closely as I can — "Tell Harold that I already knew.
Tell him I've known for a long time."*
*I'm not sure exactly what he meant by that, but he seemed very settled after he said it.
He asked me to write back for him because his hands make it difficult now, but he wanted you to know that he would like to speak on the phone when you're ready.
He said, and I'm quoting directly: "Not too long.
But enough."*
*He also asked me to tell you something else, which I'll pass on exactly as he said it: "The cassette was Ray's idea.
Tommy and Nick wanted to write letters.
I said no, letters are too easy to put down.
I wanted him to hear my voice.
I'm glad I was right."*
*He smiled when he said that.
I thought you should know.*
*— Anneke*
I read the letter at the kitchen table with my second cup of coffee.
Then I read it again.
*I already knew.*
I thought about that for the rest of the morning.
Ray, in Hamburg, with his careful daughter and his slow speech and his cassette tape — Ray had known.
Had understood, from whatever distance, that the shame and the silence and the drifting apart had not been one-sided.
That we had all been cowards in our own ways.
That the fifty-five years of quiet had not been a wound inflicted by one person on another but something we had all allowed, together, without anyone choosing it.
I called Nick that afternoon.
Elena answered, as before, and I heard the same warmth in her voice, the same brief pause before she went to find him.
"Harold," Nick said.
"I got a letter from Anneke," I said.
"She told me what Ray said."
"Ah." A breath.
"He told me he was going to say that."
"Did he tell you what he meant by it?"
"He meant that he'd forgiven himself," Nick said.
"And that he'd forgiven all of us.
A long time ago.
He just wanted you to know it was mutual."
I looked out the kitchen window at the garden.
"Nick," I said.
"The journal entry.
The one about how nobody ever made a production of being kind."
"You found that one."
"I've read it four times."
A pause.
"I meant it."
"I know you did," I said.
"That's why I keep reading it."
We talked for an hour.
He told me about a letter he had received from Tommy, written six months before Tommy died, which Elena had kept and read to him twice since.
He told me what was in it — not word for word, but the shape of it, the things Tommy had needed to say before he ran out of time to say them.
"He wasn't afraid," Nick said.
"That was the thing.
He was sad about leaving, but he wasn't afraid.
He said the only thing he regretted was the years we lost in the middle.
He said he wanted the four of us to have had more time."
"We did have more time," I said.
"We just didn't use it."
"Yes," Nick said quietly.
"That's exactly what he said."
The garden outside was overgrown, the way it got every autumn when I let things go too long.
I had been meaning to deal with it for weeks.
"I'm going to come to Lisbon," I said.
"In the spring, when you're stronger.
If Elena will have me."
Nick didn't answer immediately.
"She'll have you," he said.
"She's already asked twice when you were coming."
"Then tell her spring," I said.
"Tell her I'll bring something from the lake.
A photograph, maybe.
The one from Tommy's box."
"She'll like that," he said.
"She's heard about the lake her whole married life."
After we hung up, I went outside and started on the garden.
It was cold, the ground firm, the light thin and pale.
I worked for two hours without stopping, clearing back the growth, finding the edges of things again.
My daughter called while I was still outside.
I let it ring and called her back when I came in, hands dirty, coat damp, more awake than I had felt in months.
"You sound different," she said.
"I've been in the garden," I said.
"No," she said.
"Different than that."
I thought about how to answer.
"I think I've been waiting for something for a long time," I said.
"And now I know what it was.
And it came."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Good," she said.
"Dad, that's really good."
May you like
I hung up and stood in the kitchen with the photograph on the table and the journal beside it and the cassette player at the edge, and I thought about Tommy, who had planned all of this from a hospital bed, who had thought of the portable cassette player and the boxes and the bench and Claire and the timing of everything, who had spent the last year of his life making sure that the four of us would find each other again even after he was gone.
He had always been the one who remembered to do the thing.
