Chapter 52 The Letters

They opened the letters at breakfast, which was to say they opened them around a breakfast nobody ate, at nine in the morning, with the lake flat and bright outside and Aurora on a kitchen chair eating toast with the concentration of a surgeon. There were thirty-one letters in the bundle. Most were addressed to *Mrs. E. Chen, Long Lake* in the round hand from the ledger — a girl's hand, then a woman's, growing surer year by year — and they were signed *Ruth Hartwell*, and Harold, reading the name aloud for the first time, said it twice, as if testing whether it woke anything. The earliest was dated July 1946, and it began mid-friendship, the way letters between people who see each other every day begin. Ruth was fifteen. She wrote about her brothers, about the price of gas, about a wedding at the Landing where the cake had slid off the table entire and the groom had caught it, and she ended with a request that made Maya put the page down and press her fingers against her mouth: *Mama says you will spoil me if you let me hold the camera but I don't see how holding something can spoil a person. Teach me to see properly, like you do. You look at things harder than anyone I ever met and then you look pleased, like the thing did it on purpose.* "Teach me to see properly," Harold repeated. He sat very still with his hands folded on the table. "That's what she said she gave me. The year I was taught to see." He looked at the window, at the water. "She must have been teaching everybody. It wasn't mine. She just — started with me." "She started with you first," Maya said, and passed him the letter, and he read it all the way through although his eyes went over every line twice, moving his lips. There were other letters, from other years — Ruth at seventeen, furious about a canceled fair; Ruth at twenty-two writing that she meant to marry the quiet Hartwell cousin after all, since he laughed at the right times; Ruth in every letter asking after the boy, after *the painter-boy*, after whether he was walking yet, talking yet, drawing yet. And folded separately at the bottom of the bundle, thinner paper, an officer's slanted script, five letters from *Lt. W. Chen* dated 1944 and 1945, courteous and loving at a distance of whole continents, the sentences of a man writing to someone he was afraid of loving too well in wartime. The fifth was dated three weeks before his discharge. *I am coming home to you and the boy, Edith, and I mean to be worthy of both, though I have spent four years forgetting how houses work.* Below the return address, across the face of that last envelope, in pencil, in Edith's small upright hand, someone had written six words. *He came back to the house, but not to me.* Nobody said anything for a while. Aurora finished her toast and asked for more, and Lily got it for her, quietly, and the kettle ticked as it cooled. Harold stood, slowly, and took his blanket down to the dock, and Maya watched him from the window and let him go, because she had learned from him, of all people, that some reading is done alone. Julian came to stand beside her, warm shoulder against hers. "His father," Julian said, not as a question. "His father. Four years away, then home and cold as the lake in January, and two years later she was gone, and he sold everything and moved a baby to the city." Maya looked at the pencil line again. "I spent my whole childhood being angry at my father for leaving. It never once occurred to me that leaving was something he'd learned, or that it had been done to him first, in this house." "People pass down what was done to them until somebody decides otherwise," Julian said. "Your father decided otherwise. Late, but he decided. That counts." "It counts," Maya agreed, and leaned into him. The last item in the bundle was not a letter. It was a card, small, creased once, stamped and addressed in Ruth's round hand to *Mrs. E. Chen, Long Lake*, and across its face a postal mark had returned it to sender, and beneath the postal mark, in the same round hand, older now, pressed hard enough to emboss the paper, a single sentence had been written and crossed out and written again so that it could be read through the crossing-out, deliberately, the way a person writes a thing they intend to survive the ink: *Then I will keep the light here myself, Eddy, until your boy comes home to read the ledger, and he will come home, because everyone comes home to water eventually.* There was no date on the card beyond the postmark, which was January 1950, and there was no signature beyond the R.H., and none was needed. When Maya carried the card down to the dock, Harold was standing at the end of it with his collar up, looking at the water the way he had once stood at the end of blocks in Seattle, watching windows. She gave him the card and he read it and handed it back, and for a long time neither of them spoke, and then Harold said, "Red mittens." His voice came out strange, half rusted. "This morning, standing here, I remembered — she had red mittens, wool ones, and one had unraveled at the thumb and she wore it anyway, and she smelled of pitch and film fixer, and when she picked me up her coat button was cold against my ear. I don't remember her face. But I remember the button." Maya photographed him then, at the end of the dock, with sixty years and a morning's worth of memory crossing his face, because taking photographs was how she held on and how she let go, and it was both, today, at once. "The letters stop at 1951," she said, when they walked back up the path together, slow, matching his cane. "Ruth's letters. But the ledger goes on, in her hand, year after year. Either she stopped writing to a dead woman and started writing to a house, or —" "Or there are more letters," Harold said. "And whoever kept the house has them." He stopped at the top of the path and turned and looked at the white house with its patient windows, at the smoke he had learned to read forty years ago in another town entirely. "We bought a house yesterday, Maya. Today it turns out we also inherited a correspondence seventy-five years long. I only wish —" he began, and stopped, and did not finish, and went in to sit by the fire, and the string from the letters lay coiled on the table like a thing waiting to be tied around something else. ---