The Letters (17 page)

She nodded again.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

“If I told you that things might not be as they appear, what would you say to that?”

“You’re going to have to give me more to go on,” I said.

The stove by this time had started to warm the place. She pushed back in her desk chair. I suspected she didn’t want to meet my eyes when she said the next thing.

“What if I told you your son wasn’t on the plane that day?”

I expected a million things, but never that. Choose your cliché: you could have knocked me over with a feather, or whatever it is people say when they get a shock. I stared at her. I drank some coffee. Not for a second did I think it could possibly be true, but this woman had more nerve than I had estimated. I gave her a careful nod.

“Say again?” I said, which is an old expression my grandmother used to employ when she didn’t understand something. She came from Tennessee. I hadn’t used that expression in years.

“What if your son hadn’t been on that plane?” she said. “Would that be a thing worth knowing?”

“Who was it then?”

“A boy about your son’s age. But not your son.”

“This sounds a little desperate on your part, you know.”

“They do an autopsy?”

“No,” I said. “No point to it.”

“That’s right,” she said. “It was my husband, all right. But your son wasn’t with him.”

Her plan folded out easily from that point. I admit I was fascinated. You may feel a little furious reading this, sweetheart, but you shouldn’t. Think of a pale spider on a pine hedge, spinning for flies or insects. That’s all she was. She had hatched this plan in a feeble attempt to extort us. If I paid her ten thousand dollars, she would tell me where he went. If not, this conversation never happened and I could believe anything I liked. She didn’t really give a damn, she said. She was selling the business and heading down to Idaho, and her husband had died, true enough, and he hadn’t been such great shakes to begin with. She could use the money, she didn’t deny that, but our son, she said, had gone into hiding. Some men do, she said. Some women, too. They decide they don’t like the way their lives have gone, and things feel so piled up that they figure it’s easier to burn it down and rebuild than try to remodel.

You have to hand it to her, honey. As deplorable as her tactics were, for the smallest instant she had me going. What if Paul had decided at the last minute to do something different? What if he
had
run off somewhere, establishing himself in a new life? I knew it was absurd, but I also know the human heart does crazy things at times.

Good sense—reality—reasserted itself. I told her I appreciated her offer, but if Paul still walked the earth no power in the world could keep us all apart. She smiled and said you never know. I told her you do know. I told her I know. I told her my wife knows. Then I left her.

Driving back to the motel, I felt I had been locked in a room with a small, feral animal. I don’t mean that to be overly cruel. But her humanity had slipped away by circumstances, and what remained was simply appetite and worry. She reminded me of a pound dog, the type that no one will adopt, the type that walks back and forth in its enclosure and is the source of its own misery—though the world has done horrible things to it—but it cannot still itself long enough to accept kindness. Neither did any conscience remain. Our son’s death, the rent, repair bills for the planes—they no longer differentiated themselves in her mind.

Okay, last subject. No worries, really, but the doctor didn’t like the sound of my chest. He suspects pneumonia. Knows it is. I confess he’s probably right and it is almost a relief to give in to it. He said I will feel better soon if he gets the right medicine pumping through me. I haven’t stopped coughing in a while, and it will be a mercy to draw a decent breath.

I am thinking of you. Our last business is finished on Paul’s behalf. Now we have to trust in time.

Sam

December 22

Sam,

I am on my way to you. Made arrangements for Turner and Rosie to look after Cat, left the island at first light—didn’t even wait for the
Laura B
, but got Turner to take me to Port Clyde in his lobster boat. He arranged for me to catch a ride to Portland with Jim Nealy from the co-op, and I was able to get a flight to New York. I’m on the plane now, and hoping to connect with an Alaska Air flight to Anchorage this afternoon.

So much to say to you, but my hands are shaking. I’ve tried calling your motel, and you’re registered, but you’re never in the room. I’m in shock at what you wrote. Paul…is it possible? I’m afraid to fly right now. It’s completely crazy, but I’m terrified the plane will crash before I have the chance to see him—and you—again.

My mind is spinning. Did I dream your letter?

Is this
all
a dream?

H.

Still Dec. 22…

Dear Sam,

I’m writing into the void. Where are you? There was no answer in your room, all the times I tried you on the road between the boat and the Portland airport. I tried you from JFK, and even had the manager slide a message under the door to have you call my cell if you came in—but now we’re in the air, all electronics turned off, with a seven-hour flight ahead of me, and I don’t know where you are. I’m so glad to be writing to you right now, anyway. To hold on to that.

Wondering about all of it, I’m losing my mind. Are you even sicker than you’ve told me—have you gone to the hospital? I’ve never felt so out of control in my life. My thoughts are racing. I find myself thinking of Mrs. Kilkenny, of what she meant. And then I think—but we saw him, we identified his body. And then—oh, Sam, you must be thinking it, too—there was so little, really, to identify. What came back to us from the crash, that wasn’t Paul. Trying to pull it together now, I’ll try to keep writing. I’ll hand you a sheaf of letters when I get to Alaska. The simple things, just forcing myself to breathe and stay sane.

I’ve got a window seat, right in front of the wing, and we’re flying west into the sunset. There’s snow on the ground below, and the lakes in western New York are frozen, and everything is orange, butterscotch, from the setting sun. The pilot warned of chop over Lake Erie, and indeed we’re just flying out of a turbulent stretch.

I’m still shaking, but not as badly as before. I’m thinking of what I’m flying to, and it’s got me careening between panic and ecstasy. I feel as if I’m levitating. Then I close my eyes and think of how shocking this all is, and I feel as if I’m going down in flames.

Taking this seat, I caught sight of a young family behind me. A mother, father, and little boy have the wing seats, and I had the strongest, wildest memory of flying with Paul. When he was—what, four? five?—you told him that flying over the wing was the most comfortable, stable place to sit on a plane, and nothing else would ever do again. He always took your word; it always became gospel for him.

I’m surrounded by people right now. That family in the seats just behind, and a couple sitting next to me, many of them part of a tour group on their way to the Alaska Railroad, some sort of train trip to see the snowfields and the northern lights. I’m overhearing conversations about Talkeetna and Fairbanks, and the flight attendant just came to ask what I want to drink, and I can barely think or speak. I just want to sit here, write to you, and ask if it is real.

I know you say Mrs. Kilkenny isn’t believable. But Sam!
Could Paul be alive?
Okay, I’m up in the air, it’s like a time capsule, far from anything in my ordinary life. Maybe I’ll rip this up before I hand it to you, if I ever find you, if you ever return to your room at the Fairtown Motel—or maybe I won’t. Right now, my grip on the pen, and the sight of my handwriting on this sheet of paper, are the only things holding me together.

My son, my boy, my baby…You have no idea what it’s done to me. What do I even mean by that? Losing him? Or that he might be alive? All of it, ripping me up, as if I’m being clawed from the inside out. I’m indulging myself here—you’ll never see this letter, so I’m just going to go for it.

He was in my body. You and I made love, and we made Paul. And I know there was never any doubt, not for a moment or a second, that you wanted him and loved and adored him—but you don’t know what it was to have him living inside you, Sam. From the moment we conceived him—I knew. I felt him there, and not just the biological fact of an embryo, but his soul. I felt the Paul he was—the little boy, the good man—all of it right then, that very first instant.

And we were together—nine months. Every breath, we took it together. Every beat his heart pumped, I felt it. My blood was his blood. And then he was born—I won’t even ask if you remember. I know that was the day of days for both of us—hard labor, I went through it, but I don’t take credit—you were there with me, and I couldn’t have done it without you, not the way we did it—that zone I got into, pain and bliss and clarity, and then Paul in my arms—you handing him to me. I don’t remember the doctor, the nurse, the midwife, none of them—I only remember you and Paul. We were three, we were one another, we were our family.

But still…in some ways, he was mine alone. I know you understand. He was in me. His body lived in mine. So that’s why I’ve felt, well…frozen. As if without him in my life, in my sphere, nothing mattered or made sense anymore, and I was something like the Tin Man—frozen in place and time. This isn’t new to you—I’ve tried to explain it many a time, even in our letters this fall. Here’s the thing, though—I was frozen, not dead. I was like one of those intrepid, sad explorers who traverse the Jasper ice fields and fall into a crevasse. They don’t freeze to death all at once; they might be upside down or sideways, but they’re still alive, just caught in the ice.

That’s been me. Sam, is this just wishful thinking—am I a Monday morning quarterback, looking back at the game, trying to make sense of what I felt by what I now know? Because I know so much more now! I know that some lady, a short strange lady who gave you a bad vibe, name of Mrs. Kilkenny, dressed in a brown bomber jacket, says that Paul is alive.

THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID.

I know you think she was conning you, all that about the spider spinning the web, and the ten thousand dollars and all, but SAM!! Here’s the truth—I know she’s right, I know he wasn’t on that plane. Think back to that moment when we identified his body—just think, Sam. We believed it was him because we were told he was on the plane. But he wasn’t. He’s alive. Those remains belonged to some other poor soul…

And here’s how I know—I FEEL IT. Haven’t you read a million stories, seen a million movies, about people, and they’re usually mothers, who say they would
know
if someone they loved was dead? Their child. They’d feel it—in their own bodies, in their skin, deep in their bones. Well, I’ve never felt that. Not at all, Sam. I’ve felt frozen, it’s true, and I’ve wanted to stay numb. But I’ve never felt his death inside me.

And that’s what I’m going on. I’m on this plane, desperately worried about you—why you’re not answering your phone in the motel room, why the manager seemed so evasive when I asked—actually demanded, and okay, at the top of my lungs—that he slide that note under the door for you. I can barely stand it, here in my window seat, two rows ahead of the wing, bouncing up and down in rocky air as the pilot keeps the seat belts–fastened light on and as the plane gains altitude as we try to find a smoother path. I’m frantic with worry over you.

But I’m also—God help me, truly—beside myself with joy. Because here’s what I think. Not hope—
think
. I think you’re with Paul. You came to your senses, and cashed in whatever it took to get ten thousand dollars to pay Mrs. Kilkenny. She’s not scary, she’s not a con—she’s an angel. That’s where my thoughts are going.

You gave her the money, and she told you where our boy is. She gave you directions, or a map, or GPS coordinates. You walked or drove or flew or crawled to wherever he is. And why ever he’s there—it doesn’t matter. He’s our sweet, sensitive boy. The trauma of Julie losing the baby—that has to be it. He had a breakdown. Maybe he had to go live alone in nature for a while. That would be our boy, wouldn’t it? Maybe he had to ford the river and climb the mountain and live in the shadows all by himself, to heal his heart.

Sweetheart, wouldn’t that be Paul?

And you’ve gone to him. I pray, and I haven’t turned to God in years, not since Paul’s been gone…that you are well. That you’ve healed enough to take the journey in safety. Your lungs are fine, your fever is down, your heart is steady…Your mind is clear, and you’re going to save our son, bring him home.

Back when I still believed—as I do again—one of my favorite prayers was by Thomas Merton. Remember when I went on that retreat, down to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, outside Bardstown, in the smoky hills filled with bourbon distilleries—back when Paul was little, when being a mother, as much as I loved it, took me away from myself, from my own heart, and from my painting—and I went down to the abbey to connect with the Holy Spirit? I chose that place because it’s where Thomas Merton had lived and written.

And I loved Merton. He was a Trappist monk—and you know the Trappists are the marines of religious life. They’re rigorous and devoted, up at three each morning to go to chapel, and he was a poet and scholar, and I loved the place. It was spring, and there were monks in silence, and chants through the hours, and redbuds and dogwoods in bloom all along the woodland paths. And although Merton had died years earlier, I felt inspired by his presence—by the fact that he had once loved a woman, a nurse he’d met while in the hospital in Louisville…he’d written her letters right there at the abbey. He’d called her “M.”

That made him so human to me. I felt that a monk who’d fallen in love, who’d felt the pull of desire—away from his religious vows, straight into the love affair that he and M had, short as it may have been—would understand a young mother who adored her husband and son more than air and sunshine, yet needed to escape those bonds for a time, felt she needed to regain her mind, life, and ability to paint.