I found the letter when I was restacking the books beneath the windowsill, creating order from chaos. Jonathan Livingston Seagull was missing, and the room looked wrong without it.
“I read it to her too sometimes, when she’s agitated,” Sylvia told me when I went looking for it. “Sometimes in the middle of the night, when she’s trying to find her daughter, I get it from her room and show it to her, and then we sit down and I start reading.”
Neither of us mentioned the fact that I was the daughter my mother was looking for. We were used to that by now. It was accepted between the two of us that the daughter was an entity, a not-me named not Clara but “my daughter.”
An aide brought it back as I was restacking the book pile for the third time. You had to get the proportions right. You had to make sure the ratio of fat book to thin book to tall book to short book was balanced; otherwise the woodpile would be unsteady and precarious. When you went to remove a piece of wood from one end, the entire pile might fall, and then where would you be? Standing in the middle of a mess of wood, trying not to cry.
“Here you go, Clara,” the aide said. “Sorry. I started reading it and forgot to bring it back. Strange book.”
I flipped it open and kept flipping, the way you did when you were nervous and you didn’t know what to say. Don’t take it out of her room again, were the words on my tongue, but they seemed so harsh, and why? Who cares if they take it out of the room, I said to myself, but I did. I cared. I nodded my thanks and the aide smiled and left.
The letter fell out. A plain small envelope, thin and white. On the back: a circle of yellowed tape that must have stuck it to one of the back pages and a sketch of the village green in front of the Twin Churches. On the front, in pencil gone over again with pen: Tamar Winter, Route 274, Sterns, NY 13354. No return address. Unopened.
The image of Eli Chamberlain, his head bent over Annabelle Lee’s kitchen table and his hand moving laboriously on a sheet of stationery, reared up in my mind. The address, penciled and then penned over the pencil, the way someone unsure of himself would do it. The way we had been taught in elementary school to write our book reports. “Write it in pencil, then read it over and check the spelling and your word choices and your grammar,” our teachers said. “Take your time. If you want extra credit, you can rewrite the whole thing in pen.”
Eli Chamberlain had not rewritten, he had traced.
That big man, hunched over the table. That big man, writing in pencil. That big man, making his last stand for my mother. I did not slit the seal. I put the envelope back in the book. All these years, she had kept it.
* * *
Next day the Subaru and I pointed ourselves south on Route 28. We were nearly at the junction of 28 and 12 when, instead of going left, I went straight across. Gravel road, cornstalk stubble on the right, Christmas tree farm on the left. Deeper into the countryside north of Sterns we went, past the water tower with the red dragon painted on it, past the old stone schoolhouse, past the one-room church. Left onto a dirt road, rumbling in the frozen ruts left by tractors and pickups. The closer we got to Asa’s house, the house where Eli lived alone, the more my heart hurt. The hurt was real, like a bruise inside my chest. I pressed my hand against it, the other gripped hard on the steering wheel. Tamar would not approve of one-handed driving.
“Nine and three,” she used to say. “Both hands on the clock.”
Her voice was quiet and even when she taught me to drive. I used to have a safety-belt system rigged up with the seat belt and bungees, a corsetlike system that kept me strapped in. It was a system I had come up with after the old man died, when everything seemed breakable, perishable, destroyable. All the bad –able words, and none of the good ones. Those were the days of Dog and the seat-belt safety system, of scrabbling monkey mind and scrolling words. Those were the days of fear.
“Put your foot on the gas and then on the brake. Smooth, now. Not jerky. Check the rearview mirror. Check the side mirrors.”
She wanted me to be safe. To stay on my toes. To pay attention. I knew that now.
The Subaru and I pulled into Eli’s driveway and parked. My heart thumped in its cage, strained against the ribs that held it tight. Fifteen years since I had been here, at this house and this barn, this place where I used to spend so much of my time. I took my hand off my heart and got out of the car.
Eli opened the door before I could knock. I started to say something but I couldn’t, because his arms were around me and I was crying so hard that nothing came out but snot and tears. He tightened his arms and I cried into his coat. He smelled the same, like himself, and the like-himself smell brought the smell of his son over me, rolling in like waves. Asa, Asa.
“I loved him,” I said. “And I loved you too.”
The words came choking out, a strangled scream wrapped inside them. Eli nodded.
“I know you did, baby girl. I know you did.”
Baby girl. He used to call me baby girl. The shock of hearing it again—no one in my life had ever called me baby girl but Eli Chamberlain, as if I were his beloved daughter, his girl who had never grown up—made me laugh and then cry harder. Because I had never talked to him. Never called him, never written anything, when Asa died over there.
“I’m sorry, Eli. I’m so sorry. I know all about it now.”
His arms were still around me. He was so much older now, a man in solid middle age, but half my life ago, when I was seventeen, he had been a young man. I could see that now, could picture his face and his big shoulders and his big laugh, back when I was a girl and his son and I used to go riding around with him. He had barely been in his forties then, a decade younger than my young mother was now.
“IshouldhavecalledIshouldhavecomeseeyouIshouldhavewritten.”
Words tumbled out of me, not enough space in between them to make any sense, but they must have made sense anyway, because he nodded, I felt him nodding. Then we were sitting on the old bench that was still on the little front porch. So many summer nights his son and I had snuck back late, sat on that same bench and held each other as dark smoothed into dawn.
“I feel so guilty,” I said. “I was so angry at her when things must have been so hard for her.”
“You couldn’t have been as angry at her as Asa was angry at me.”
“How did he find out?”
“Martha told him. She wanted him to know why she moved out. She blamed me. Which was justified.”
Martha Chamberlain, the tough nut.