The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

It was this reason I had to leave. I was not up to the task of grieving Gilbert’s death and still being a decent father or a decent husband. I know that by the time we separated it was what we both wanted.

But what I want to say to you is this: I cannot take back things I said to you in those early dark days.

The grief that must fill the world is incomprehensible. Our small dose felt as large as the sun, didn’t it?

I’m ready to go, but I don’t think Fiona is OK. Please make sure she is OK. Dear Sybil, I do love you. The children are fortunate it’s not you they’re losing. You’ve been a wonderful mother to them. The first thing I will do is kiss Gilbert for you.

You have a DNA match. To access the details of this information, please log into your Kindred profile by clicking here.

My teacher didn’t know you lived around the corner from the school, and she wants you to come speak to her class next year. (I’m sorry, I told her you hate public speaking.) I wanted you to know how much I liked interviewing you, and even enjoyed writing the paper.

I have just now logged into your profile, and it appears that the box was checked. Do you have any memory of doing such a thing? Did you give account access to someone else, like your brother? The date of this change was June 15.

The person with whom you share DNA is, in fact, alive in the world. Furthermore, at the time you were sent notification of the match, this member would have also received a similar communication. I can ask my manager about the possibility of blocking contact between this individual and yourself. Would you like me to do that?

I am pleased to hear your paper turned out a good score. It was well written, if a little exaggerated. There were a few dates you mixed up, but that’s no matter to anyone but myself, and the undergraduate college I attended was Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, but otherwise I did think it well done.

She can’t just say you did well, she has to be brutally honest.

It’s kind of you, but I was no hero, Caroline. I made errors, decisions that bore lasting effects on the lives of strangers. It doesn’t matter that it’s not in your paper, it doesn’t matter at all, but it matters to me that you know that.

I’m sorry you lost your grandmother to Alzheimer’s. My brother-in-law is dealing with the same thing and it’s ugly ugly. Awful to witness, and probably worse if you’re inside the body, but nobody knows and that makes it worse. I feel sorry any child has to bear witness to a thing like that.

The letters are the mainstay of my life, where I was only practicing law for thirty years or so. The clerkship was my job; the letters amount to who I am. I haven’t the foggiest idea how many I’ve written. I certainly didn’t keep track along the way, and I’ve never gone back to count the ones I’ve received.

I had a pen pal, she was a friend who lived down the street from me and then she moved away in high school, and we are still pen pals writing every month or six weeks, give or take, for sixty years. We married brothers (I divorced mine). Oh! Hers is the one with Alzheimer’s.

An e-mail can in no way replace a written letter. It does concern me that one day all the advancement of technology will do away with the post, but I hope to be dead and gone long before then.

My desk faces a small window toward the river and there are honeysuckle bushes beneath it, which, in summer, attract hummingbirds, and my garden lies beyond.

Typically I write on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for about two hours. Whatever I don’t finish gets pushed to Saturday, and of course, if the mood strikes me at off times (a shocking current event or anger, usually), I’ll sit down then as well. I mail-order my letter writing paper from England; once I discovered it, I quit trying anything else. I visit the post office once a month for stamps. I never buy seasonal stamps, only your classic stars and stripes, because there is a certain structure, an ORDER, that needs to be obeyed.

I write slowly. A letter might take me an hour or more. I do not rush. I think through each sentence. My hand does not get tired. You mustn’t rush. When you rush you pen things you didn’t mean and you tire. It takes patience to say exactly what one means, to think of the right word. Sometimes I write a draft and mark it up, then write a clean copy to send. I believe one ought to be precious with communication. Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal. Sometimes, Caroline, the easiest inroad is to begin with a thank you, for a gift or a kindness or a letter, you know, and then take it from there.

Daan died last night. I wanted to tell you that.

Who is she writing to?

Several times I sat down to write him back, but my mind was blank, an event that I cannot recall at any previous time.

Oh, Rosalie. My life has felt enormous, but what do I have to show for it?

If there is a map of the world in my mind, I don’t look there at the border of Canada and the US, but this morning I tried to remember. I even went looking for photographs of the trip, but I guess I’ve thrown them all away, but what I was trying to remember was how we were before Gilbert died, what was the last way we were—my whole family.

In the weeks leading up to the trip there had been heavy tension between us because he wanted to take the position, and of course I was totally unwilling to consider leaving my job, but I do think we’d largely managed to leave that impasse at home and I remember laughing a great deal on this trip.

It’s my memory! He won’t allow it, stands unyielding. It is like blindness. So that’s as far as I got. I couldn’t get in. But I know what happened. He dove into the lake, he hit the rock shelf and snapped his neck. I have this image in my mind of his back, slick, he’s lying on his side. It’s his body. Beads of water on his tan back. They must have pulled him out—who? Did I? And laid him on his side on the dock. There were two moles on his back and I must have stared at them because I see his tan, wet back, the two moles. Did I scream for help? Who got him out of the lake? Was it me? In my memory, it’s all silence.

Dear lord.

As it turns out I did check the box by mistake when I was drunk. I’m also going blind. (I am not an alcoholic; I rarely drink. It was a bad set of circumstances.)

Perhaps this DNA matching business is nothing. I have spent most of the last year assuming it was all a scam, honestly, but here I am coming to you nonetheless. I think I would like to hear from you so I can at last shut off this particular valve in my mind.

The funeral is in Belgium and I have my plane ticket. October 3 I leave. This will be my first time out of the country, aside from the one cursed trip to Canada, which I don’t count.

I can see him the day he left. I can see him walking into the tunnel at the airport beside Fiona. He had blond hair and he wore it rather long then. He had stayed very slim and I can see him walking down the tunnel beside Fiona wearing his denim and the leather loafers he loved. He was wearing a wool blazer and he had his traveling bag. I remember Fiona looked back at me over her shoulder. She gave me a little wave, nothing dramatic, she would be coming back in the summer.

I hoped very much she was saying something about me, how I was standing there or some little thing, and I hoped, I really hoped, he said something back.

I hadn’t really believed it was happening, but then he was gone without looking back and a shock wave hit me deep down in my bone marrow. It felt like my body was vibrating, the way the air trembles after a gong is struck.

However, after some time, I guess maybe another year went by and I received the third communication from this individual, but it was evident he or she had visited my house. I know it’s true because in the letter, she or he (seems like a man) described my garden and my unique mailbox.

I get the sense that the purpose of this is rather to make me feel afraid, and not likely to actually harm me in any way, and it’s working.

I hate to feel afraid. I can think of nothing worse, so I imagine this person watching me as I go slowly blind.

At the last minute, three days ago, I didn’t go to the airport. I simply didn’t go. If I regret the decision, then so be it. My life is in winter anyway; only a little while left to nurse regrets.

The funeral was perfect. Held in the beautiful old Catholic church where Oma and Opa got married. I met some distant cousins, etc.

I know you don’t travel and I’ve told myself that’s why you haven’t ever come to visit me in London, but with all your principles of propriety, all your tenets on how one ought to be…you attend a funeral! Even if it’s someone you didn’t know well, even if you had a grudge. Fine that he’s not your husband anymore, but he was my father, Bruce’s father, Gilbert’s father. You should have been there.

You, who sit holed up at home and writing letters to god knows who every day, and knowing full well he was dying. I don’t understand you. I have never understood you.

You may or may not be surprised to learn that you are listed as an inheritor in Mr. Van Antwerp’s last will and testament for a sizable sum of money from his holdings, which grew substantially about six years ago when his uncle passed away.

Why did you keep writing? I was trying to tell you, without writing again, that I did not want to continue with the letters, but you didn’t understand. This is my last letter to you.

I have been put in the most advanced math classes, including a special course with only a few boys, and I’m the best in the class.

(Did you know I photocopy every letter before I send it so I can keep our letters in order and then they make sense and I can refer back to check things you or I have written in the past? They are kept in 2 three ring binders.)

Autism.

I usually go quiet, but what’s really crazy about it is that it feels like, inside, I actually am screaming.

My mom was in a mental hospital again, a different one, but she got out, and then she went to live with her parents in Santa Barbara. She left on October 6.

Lauren got engaged to Steve on Thanksgiving, but any time she talks to Dad about it she is crying, so I don’t know if she’s happy or sad. I definitely think it’s sad, though I understand people cry with both sets of feelings.

If you do write me again, I would like to know (a) how your vision is doing, (b) if the dean of the English school at University of Maryland let you into a class, (c) if you are still attending the garden club, and (d) if you went for dinner again with the dude from Texas.

James, has Marly gone and left you for good? I knew she was back in Sheppard Pratt last winter, but Harry indicated she went back again, and now she’s gone to live with her mother and dad? James, your girls will be alright, but Harry is fragile.

Now I’ve seen it all. I guess it’s time to change my registration card and make my party allegiance official. You never thought you’d see that day, did you? Sybil Stone becomes a Democrat. That should be the title of my memoirs.

Not long after that we had a hurricane and there was a power surge when lightning hit the transformer for my street and essentially the power surged all the way up into my very own electrical outlets and blew out my computer. It was a NIGHTMARE, it made an extraordinary pop and smoking, so I screamed and ran outdoors (humiliating). The entire computer had to be thrown away, not even worth the scrap, which was, as you can imagine, hell.

Basam no longer works for Kindred. I would be happy to help you with any questions you have!

Typically I’ll switch on the light by five to read, but I was lying in the bed and feeling agitated. It was like I’d woken to a sound but couldn’t reach back to it.

When I walked back up the path it was just barely getting light, maybe around six, and wouldn’t you know Theodore Lübeck came down the path and scared me half to death, Rosalie. Not half, 80% of the way. I nearly died. He came from behind the magnolia that rather blocks the path wearing his cap and dark jacket and I screamed and jumped, and of course I tripped, went sideways on my ankle, which rolled and positively exploded in pain, and then I fell and caught myself on the right hand (mercifully not my left, God in heaven, can you imagine if I didn’t have my left hand? Take me out back and shoot me).