“Emma,” I said. “I’ve spent thirty-two years talking to a photograph. I deserve a conversation with someone who can actually answer.”
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I lay on the narrow hotel bed and listened to motorbikes buzzing past on the street below. I kept seeing that picture. Richard on the bridge, his hair blowing, his arm around her.
I tried to remember if I’d ever seen that tan jacket. I hadn’t. I knew every piece of clothing that man owned. I’d ironed all his shirts for fourteen years. I’d sewn the buttons back on his coat. I’d never seen that jacket in my life.
Around three in the morning, I got up and opened my notebook to write to him.
Dear Richard,
I sat there with the pen over the page for a very long time.
Then I closed the notebook without writing another word.
The next morning, I bought flowers.
There was a flower stall on the corner by my hotel, run by an old man with a white mustache. I pointed at some yellow roses and some little white flowers I didn’t know the name of. He wrapped them in brown paper and tied them with string. I paid him too much. He tried to give me change. I shook my head.
Then I took a taxi back to the narrow street with the trees.
I climbed the stairs again. Slower this time. I stopped on every landing.
I knocked on the blue door.
The same woman opened it.
She looked tired. Like she hadn’t slept either. Her glasses were on her nose this time, not on her head.
When she saw me, she sighed.
“You again?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I told you…”
“I’m not here to take your apartment,” I said.
She hesitated. Her hand stayed on the door.
“I don’t want it,” I said. “I promise you. I don’t want your home. I don’t want anything from you except to talk.”
She didn’t close the door. But she didn’t open it wider either.
“My husband was Richard,” I said. “Richard Hale. He died thirty-two years ago. A heart attack in our driveway. He was thirty-eight.” I swallowed. “And I’m very ill. I have cancer. The doctors say I don’t have much time left. I don’t know how much. Months, maybe.”
Her face changed again. Slowly this time. Her shoulders came down a little. Something in her eyes softened.
“I only want the truth,” I said. “That’s all I came for. I’ve been wondering since the airport in Chicago. I don’t want to die still wondering.”
She looked down at the flowers in my hands.
“Why did you bring those?” she said.
“Because my mother taught me not to arrive empty-handed.”
For a second, almost against her will, the corner of her mouth moved. She almost smiled.
“My name is Claire,” she said.
“Mrs. Wilson,” I said. “Margaret.”
“I know,” she said.
My heart sank all the way into my shoes.
“You know me?”
She took the flowers from my hands. She held them against her chest.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Claire said quietly. “When I saw you, I panicked.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought you’d come to take the apartment.” She looked down at the yellow roses. “And I was terrified you’d discover the truth about Richard.”
“What truth?” I said. My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. “What are you hiding from me?”
She hesitated for a long moment.
Then she stepped aside.
“Come inside,” she said.
The apartment was beautiful.
That was the first thing I noticed, and I hated that I noticed it.
It was small, just one big main room with a kitchen at one end and a hallway leading to a bedroom. But it had tall ceilings and wooden floors that creaked and big windows full of morning light. There were books everywhere. Plants on the windowsills. A soft blue couch with a knitted blanket over the back. And the balcony, with its two little chairs and the round table.
It smelled like coffee and old paper.
It was exactly the kind of place Richard and I used to dream about, lying on that blanket on the floor above the dry cleaner, eating popcorn out of a mixing bowl.
Claire put the flowers in the blue vase on the shelf.
Right next to the photograph.
She picked it up and looked at it for a moment.
“He loved this picture,” she said.
I stood in the middle of her living room with my purse in both hands.
“Did you work with Richard?” I said.
She shook her head.
“Then how did you know him?”
She put the picture down. She turned around to face me. She folded her arms across her cream sweater like she was cold.
“Richard and I were together,” she said, “for almost four years.”
I felt the room tilt.
The floor seemed to slide a little under my feet, the way the stairs had the day before.
“Together,” I said.
“Yes.”
“As friends?”
“No.”
I sat down.
I didn’t mean to. My legs just did it. There was a wooden chair by the little dining table, and I sat in it, hard.
“Four years,” I said.
She nodded.
“His business trips brought him to Paris,” she said. “That’s how we met. I worked at a bookshop near his hotel. He came in looking for a French phrase book.” She almost smiled again, then stopped herself. “He said his was falling apart. He said he could only say one sentence.”
“Où est la bibliothèque,” I said.
Claire stared at me.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “That one.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
The phrase book. The one we bought at a garage sale for a quarter. The one he practiced with in our bathroom mirror.
He’d used it to meet her.
“He was married,” I said.
My voice sounded flat and strange. Like someone else’s voice.
“I knew,” Claire said.
“From the beginning?”
“From the second time he came into the shop. He showed me pictures of his children. Emma with her missing tooth. Daniel on a tricycle.” She looked at the floor. “He talked about you.”
“And you continued?”
“Yes.”
I had a terrible feeling, sitting in that chair, that the affair wasn’t going to be the last secret Richard had kept from me.
“He bought this place for you?” I said.
“For us,” Claire said. “He purchased it in his name.”
“He wrote that it was for me.” I took the letter out of my purse and held it up. My hand was shaking. “I finally bought that little apartment in Paris we always dreamed about. That’s what it says. For your anniversary.”
Claire looked uncomfortable. She looked at the letter, and then away from it.
“I know about that letter,” she said.
“You knew?”
“Not everything. But enough.”
“Then why is this apartment yours?” I said. “Your name was on those papers you showed me yesterday.”
Claire went to the drawer and brought back the folder. She sat down across from me at the little table. She opened it and turned the papers around so I could see them.
“Richard transferred it into my name,” she said. “A few months before he died.”
“Wait.” I shook my head. “How would he know he was going to die? His heart attack was sudden. He was thirty-eight years old. He was scraping ice off his car.”
Claire looked at me with something like pity.
“He’d been having serious heart problems,” she said. “For almost a year. There was something wrong with one of the valves. Something he was born with. He had pains in his chest. He fainted once, here, in this kitchen. I took him to the hospital. The doctors here told him he needed surgery. They warned him another attack could happen at any moment.”
I stared at her.
“He never told me,” I said.
“He didn’t want to worry you.”
I laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh. It came out of me like a cough.
“He didn’t want to worry me,” I said. “He had a broken heart, and a mistress, and an apartment in Paris, and he didn’t want to worry me.”
Claire didn’t say anything.
I thought about the last year of Richard’s life. He’d been tired. He’d been quiet. He’d started taking little pills he said were for heartburn. Once, he’d sat down on the stairs halfway up and stayed there a long time, and when I asked him what was wrong, he’d said, “Nothing, Sparrow. Just getting old.”
He was thirty-seven.
I’d believed him. I’d believed everything.
“Then why did he give you the apartment?” I said.
“He wanted to make sure I had somewhere to live,” Claire said, “even if we separated. Even if something happened to him.” She pushed a paper toward me. “I had very little money. I lived in one room above the bookshop. He said if anything happened to him, he didn’t want me left with nothing.”
I looked at the papers. A date thirty-two years ago. October. Five months before the ice in the driveway.
“So that’s why I never knew about it,” I said slowly. “That’s why the lawyer never mentioned it. That’s why nobody found it.”
Claire nodded.
“It was no longer part of his estate.”
I sat there and looked at the papers for a long time.
At least I finally understood what had happened to the apartment. That part made sense now. It was a clean, simple, legal fact, the kind of thing you could write down in a notebook.
But everything else was falling apart.
I was beginning to wonder whether I’d ever really known the man I’d married. The man I’d written twenty-six notebooks of letters to. The man whose picture I said goodnight to every night for thirty-two years.
“I can’t believe Richard lied to me,” I said. “All those years.”
Claire lowered her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But there’s something else he never told you.”
I stood up.
My chair scraped on the wooden floor.
“I don’t think I can hear another thing,” I said.
“Please.”
“Did he have another family?” I said. “Is that it? Are there children? Do my kids have a brother or sister walking around Paris?”
“No,” Claire said quickly. “No. Nothing like that.”
“Then what?”
She got up and went to the drawer again. She took out an envelope. A plain white one, old and worn soft at the corners.
“He was going to tell you everything,” she said.
I laughed bitterly.
“Dead men make wonderful promises.”
Claire flinched like I’d slapped her. But she didn’t put the envelope back. She placed it on the table between us.
“This was written shortly before he died,” she said.
I looked at it. There was handwriting on the front. Just one word.
Claire.
Those loops. That T crossed too far to the right.
“Why do you have it?” I said.
“Because he gave it to me.”
I didn’t pick it up. I couldn’t make my hands do it.
“Read it,” I said. “Please. I can’t.”
Claire sat back down. She unfolded the paper with careful fingers. She read it silently first. I watched her lips move a little. Her eyes went shiny.
Then she cleared her throat.
“He wrote that he couldn’t continue living two lives,” she said. “That he’d been selfish. That he’d been a coward.”
“Go on.”
“He wanted to end our relationship,” she said. “And return to his family completely.”
I stared at her.
“He was leaving you?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t he tell me?” I said. “If he was coming back to us? If it was over? Why didn’t he just come home and tell me?”
“He was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of losing you,” Claire said.
“He’d already betrayed me,” I said. “He’d already lost me. He just didn’t know it.”
Claire looked down at the letter.
“He also wrote about the apartment,” she said.
“What about it?”
She read for a moment, then looked up.
“He admitted that he’d turned the apartment he’d bought for you into our secret home,” she said. “He said it was the worst thing he’d done. Worse than the rest. He wrote that he wanted to tell you everything. All of it. And then, if you’d ever forgive him, he wanted to finally take you to Paris. The real way. The way he’d promised you.”
Tears were coming into my eyes. I didn’t wipe them.
“So the anniversary letter?” I said. “The one Emma found?”
“He wrote that letter before our relationship began,” Claire said softly. “He told me about it. He bought this apartment for you, Margaret. He really did. He’d been saving for years. A little from every trip. He was going to bring you here for your anniversary and hand you the key.”
“Then he met you,” I said.
She lowered her eyes.
“Yes.”
I walked to the window. I looked out at the balcony. At the two little chairs.
One day, we’ll sit on the balcony together. I’ll bring the coffee. You bring the phrase book.
“So he turned our dream,” I said, “into a place to meet his mistress.”
“I’m sorry…”
“And he never even gave me the letter,” I said. “He hid it in his cufflink box. Under the felt. For five years. While he came here. To my apartment. With you.”
“I think he was too ashamed,” Claire said. “To give it to you. After.”
I turned around.
“Did he tell you he was leaving? To your face?”
“Yes.” She folded the letter carefully along its old creases. “He came here in February. One month before. He gave me this letter, and then he told me himself, sitting right there on that couch. I begged him to stay. I cried. I said terrible things. But he’d made his decision. He said he’d come back once more in March to bring me the last of the papers and say goodbye properly.”
March.
The Tuesday in March. The suitcase by the door. The ice on the windshield.
“He was coming here,” I said. “That morning. When he died. He was going to the airport to come here.”
Claire nodded slowly.
“I waited at the café on the corner for six hours,” she said. “He never came. I called his hotel. They said he’d never checked in. Two weeks later, his company sent a letter to the bookshop. To all his European contacts. We regret to inform you.” Her voice broke. “That’s how I found out. A typed letter to the bookshop.”
“Thirty-two years,” I whispered.
Claire looked at me.
“I spent thirty-two years believing Richard was a faithful husband,” I said. “I wrote him letters. I told him about our children. I told him when Daniel got married. I told him when Emma had her first baby. I told him every single thing. And he was…”
I couldn’t finish.
“I’m sorry,” Claire said.
I sat back down in the wooden chair. I was so tired. My whole body felt like it was made of wet sand.
“Did he love you?” I asked.
She took a long time to answer.
“I believe he did,” she said.
“Did he love me?”
“He said he did,” Claire said. “All the time. Even when it hurt me to hear it.”
I laughed through my tears.
“Apparently,” I said, “Richard had a very generous heart.”
Claire gave a sad little smile. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“I hated you for years,” she said.
“Me?”
“He chose you,” Claire said. “In the end. He chose you, and the children, and that house in Ohio. I thought you had won.”
I stared at her.
“Won what, Claire?” I said. “Won what? A husband who lied to me? A husband who sat in my kitchen and kissed my neck and told me Paris was for the mortgage? Thirty-two years of mourning someone I didn’t truly know? Is that what I won?”
She didn’t answer. She looked away, out the window, at the balcony.
“I never thought about it like that,” she said quietly.
“Neither of us got an honest choice,” I said. “He made all the choices. For both of us. He decided what I got to know. He decided what you got to have. And then he died and left us both holding the pieces.”
We sat there for a while without talking.
Down on the street, someone was laughing. A church bell rang somewhere far away. The yellow roses I’d brought sat in their blue vase next to Richard’s picture.
Finally, I picked up my purse.
“Thank you for telling me,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Claire said.
“So am I.”
I went to the door. My hand was on the knob when Claire said, “Margaret.”
I turned around.
She was holding out the white envelope. The one with her name on it.
“This should be yours,” she said. “I’ve read it a thousand times. Most of it is about you anyway.”
I looked at it for a long moment.
Then I took it and put it in my purse next to the other letter, and I walked out of the apartment that was supposed to be mine, and I went down the stairs very, very slowly.
Outside, I walked.
I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t care. I walked along the narrow street with the trees, past the bakery, past a café where people were eating breakfast in the sun like nothing had happened. I crossed a bridge. The river was green and slow beneath me.
I wondered if it was the same bridge from the picture.
I walked until my legs gave out, and I sat down on a green bench in a little park with gravel paths. Pigeons came over, hoping I had bread. I didn’t.
My illness was draining my strength. I could feel it, sitting there. Every day there was a little less of me.
And I’d already wasted so much of my life mourning Richard.
Thirty-two years.
I’d turned down that gym teacher. I’d gone home early from the dentist’s dinner. I’d stopped going to the teachers’ Christmas party because I couldn’t stand being the only one without a husband there. I’d never gone on the summer trip to the Grand Canyon that the other teachers took. I’d never learned to swim. I’d never gone dancing again.
Because I was Richard’s wife. Even after he was gone.
I sat on that bench for a long time.
An old woman sat down at the other end of it, with a little white dog on a leash. She smiled at me. She said something in French. I smiled back and shook my head. She patted my knee anyway, like she understood something about my face, and then she and the little dog went on.
That evening, back in my hotel room, I opened my notebook.
Not to write. Just to read.
I flipped through the pages. Then I opened my suitcase and took out the two other notebooks I’d brought. The newest ones.
Almost every page was about Richard. Or our children. Or my students.
Dear Richard, the Henderson boy finally learned to read.
Dear Richard, Daniel’s boys are both playing T-ball now.
Dear Richard, Emma’s worried about her job.
Dear Richard, I miss you.
Dear Richard.
Dear Richard.
I went through every page.
There was hardly anything about me.
There were no pages where I wrote what I wanted. No pages where I wrote what made me happy, just me. No pages where I was the main character in my own life.
I’d been writing a story for thirty-two years, and I wasn’t in it.
I called Emma.
“Mom? Are you okay? I’ve been waiting all day. I didn’t want to call and bother you.”
“Dad had an affair,” I said. “For four years.”
There was a sharp breath on the other end of the line.
“What? With whom?”
“The woman living in that apartment. Her name is Claire.”
“Oh my God. Oh, Mom.”
“He met her on his business trips. In a bookshop.”
“Oh, Mom,” she said again. And then her voice broke completely. “This is my fault. I sent you there. If I hadn’t found that stupid letter… if I’d just glued the lining back down and left it alone…”
“No, sweetheart,” I said. “No. Listen to me.”
She was crying.
“You helped me learn the truth,” I said. “That’s not a bad thing. It hurts. It hurts more than anything. But it’s the truth. And I’d rather die knowing it than die believing in someone who wasn’t real.”
“But you loved him.”
“I did,” I said. “I really did. I spent thirty-two years writing letters to him instead of making new memories.”
She was quiet for a while. I could hear her blowing her nose.
“And the apartment?” she said finally. “What will you do about it? Can we… can we get it back? Should I call a lawyer?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t want it. It’s legally hers. And even if it weren’t, I wouldn’t want to sit on a balcony where he sat with her.”
“Do you… forgive her?”
I thought about Claire’s face when she said I waited at the café on the corner for six hours.
I thought about her saying He showed me pictures of his children.
“No,” I said. “I haven’t forgiven Claire. She knew he was married. She knew about you and Daniel. She knew from the second time he walked into that bookshop. That’s something she’ll have to live with.” I paused. “But I don’t hate her, either. I don’t have time to hate anyone, Emma. I’m not going to spend my last months on that.”
“Then what about you, Mom?”
I looked at the bedside table. My pill bottles were lined up in a little row. The anti-nausea ones. The pain ones. The ones for sleep.
“I spent my whole life putting everyone else first, Emma,” I said. “Your father. You and Daniel. Thirty-nine years of other people’s children. I’m not spending my last months doing the same.”
“So what will you do?”
I looked out the window. The sun was going down over the rooftops. Everything was turning gold.
“Enjoy Paris, sweetheart,” I said. “Finally. Just for me.”
After I hung up with Emma, I called Daniel.
He listened to the whole thing without saying a word. I could hear his boys yelling in the background, and Rachel telling them to quiet down because Grandma was calling from France.
When I finished, he was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped.
“Daniel?”
“I’m here,” he said. His voice was rough. “I’m just… Mom, I had that Eiffel Tower keychain until I was in college. I used to hold it at night after he died. I used to think about him in Paris, working so hard for us.”
“I know, honey.”
“Was any of it real?”
I thought about that for a long time.
“Some of it,” I said. “The phrase book was real. The popcorn on the floor was real. The way he held you when you had the croup was real. He loved you two, Daniel. Claire said he talked about you constantly. He showed her pictures. Whatever else he was, he was your father, and he loved you.”
“And you?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I think he loved me in the way he knew how. I just don’t think it was the way I deserved.”
He took a breath.
“Do you want me to fly out?” he said. “I can be there tomorrow.”
“No,” I said. “Thank you, honey. But no. I want to finish this myself.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Mom.” Then, after a moment: “I’m proud of you. I don’t think I ever said that before. I’m really proud of you.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
I just held the phone against my ear and cried quietly, and he let me.
Over the next few days, I explored Paris.
I took a river cruise on a long glass boat. A guide with a microphone explained every bridge in three languages. I sat by the window with a cup of hot chocolate and watched the city slide past, the stone walls and the willow trees and the people sitting on the riverbank with their legs dangling over the water.
I visited museums. I stood in front of paintings I’d only seen in textbooks, paintings I used to show my third graders on a projector. Water lilies. Starry skies. A woman with a mysterious little smile. I stood there until my legs hurt and then sat on a bench and kept looking.
I ate pastries. Expensive ones, from a shop with gold letters on the window. Little round cookies in colors I’d never seen cookies come in. A cream puff the size of my fist. A chocolate tart so rich I had to stop halfway and rest.
On the third day, I walked into a restaurant by myself.
The waiter asked, “Pour combien?” and held up fingers. How many?
I held up one finger.
“Just me,” I said.
He nodded like it was the most normal thing in the world and showed me to a little table by the window.
I ordered a glass of red wine and a bowl of onion soup with cheese melted on top. I sat there for two hours. I watched people walk by. I didn’t read a book or look at my phone. I just sat there and ate my soup and drank my wine and watched Paris.
Sixty-eight years old. My first meal in a restaurant alone.
It was wonderful.
On the fifth day, I passed a little shop near the river with scarves in the window.
There was a blue one. Not navy, not sky blue. Something in between. The color of the water just after the sun goes down. It was silk, and it moved in the breeze from the open door like it was breathing.
I went in. I touched it.
The woman in the shop told me the price.
It was more than I’d ever spent on anything for myself that wasn’t a car or a winter coat.
For thirty-two years, I’d have put it back. I’d have thought about Emma’s braces or Daniel’s college or the roof or the furnace. I’d have thought, What do I need that for?
I bought it.
I didn’t check the price twice. I didn’t do the math in my head. I just handed the woman my credit card and smiled while she wrapped it in tissue paper.
I wore it out of the shop. I wore it every day after that.
There were bad moments too. I won’t pretend there weren’t.
One afternoon, on the fourth day, the pain under my ribs got so bad that I had to sit down on the curb outside a church. A young couple stopped and asked if I needed an ambulance. I said no. I took one of my pills and drank half a bottle of water and sat there for forty minutes until it eased.
That night, I threw up twice and didn’t sleep at all.
The next morning, I called Dr. Patel’s office back in Dayton, the way I’d promised Daniel. His nurse talked to me for twenty minutes and told me to rest for a day and adjusted one of my medications.
So I rested. I sat on my little hotel balcony with the red flowers, wrapped in a blanket and my blue scarf, and read a paperback mystery I’d bought at the airport. I ate bread and cheese from the shop downstairs. I watched the pigeons on the rooftop across the street.
It was one of the best days of the whole trip.
On my second-to-last day, there was a note waiting for me at the hotel front desk.
The young man behind the desk handed it to me. “A lady left this for you, madame. This morning.”
It was written on thick white paper, in careful, slanted handwriting.
Margaret,
I don’t expect anything from you. I only wanted to say that I put your roses on the balcony, in the sun, and they are still alive. I took down the photograph. I have kept it for thirty-two years, and I think now that I was keeping a man who did not really exist either.
I hope Paris is kind to you. You deserve that it is.
Claire.
I read it twice standing at the front desk.
Then I folded it and put it in my purse with Richard’s two letters.
I didn’t write back. I didn’t go to see her again.
But I didn’t throw it away, either.
On my last evening in Paris, I sat on the little balcony of my hotel room.
The sky was turning from orange to purple. Somewhere down the street, someone was playing an accordion, badly, the same four songs over and over. The city lights were coming on, one window at a time.
I’d bought a new notebook that afternoon. Not a spiral one from the drugstore. A real one, from a stationery shop near the river, with a soft leather cover and creamy pages. I’d also bought a pen. A nice one. Dark blue ink.
I opened the notebook to the first page.
For thirty-two years, every letter I’d written had started the same way.
Dear Richard.
I held the pen over the page.
I thought about Richard on the floor of our first apartment, saying, Obviously. I thought about him in a bookshop, holding our phrase book, asking a pretty Frenchwoman for help with the one sentence he knew. I thought about him sitting on our stairs, telling me it was nothing, just getting old, while his heart was failing inside him and he didn’t trust me enough to say so.
I thought about all twenty-six notebooks sitting in a box in my closet in Ohio.
And I thought about all the pages that weren’t in them.
Then I wrote:
Dear Me,
I’m sorry I kept you waiting so long.
Whatever time I have left, I promise to live it for us.
I put the pen down.
I sat there on the balcony in my blue scarf and watched the lights of Paris come on, and for the first time in thirty-two years, I was glad I’d come to Paris without Richard.
Emma and Daniel were both waiting at the airport in Dayton when I got home.
They weren’t supposed to be. I’d told them I’d take a cab. They came anyway. Daniel had driven two hours from Columbus. Emma had left work early.
They were standing together at the bottom of the escalator. Emma was holding a bunch of grocery-store daisies. Daniel had his hands in his pockets and was rubbing the back of his neck.
When Emma saw me, she burst into tears.
“Mom,” she said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I sent you there.”
“Stop it,” I said, and I hugged her right there at the bottom of the escalator, with people stepping around us. “Stop it. You gave me the best gift anyone’s ever given me.”
“Being lied to?”
“The truth,” I said. “And a reason to go.”
Daniel put his arms around both of us.
“Nice scarf, Mom,” he said into my hair.
“It was very expensive,” I said. “I didn’t even check the price twice.”
He laughed. It sounded exactly like his father’s laugh. For the first time, that didn’t hurt.
A week after I got home, I took down the cardboard box from my closet. The one that said RICHARD in black marker.
Twenty-six notebooks.
Emma came over that afternoon. I’d asked her to. We sat on the floor of my bedroom with the box between us.
“What are you going to do with them?” she said. “Are you going to… burn them?”
I’d thought about it. I’d thought about it a lot on the plane. Some grand gesture in the backyard fire pit, watching thirty-two years go up in smoke.
But it wasn’t the notebooks’ fault.
“No,” I said. “They’re not really about him, Emma. Not really. Read some of them.”
She opened one. She read a page. Then another.
“Daniel lost his first tooth at school today,” she read out loud. “He showed it to the mailman.” She looked up. “I remember that. He was so proud.”
“They’re about you two,” I said. “They’re about my students. They’re about the furnace breaking and you backing into the mailbox. They were just addressed to the wrong person.” I pushed the box toward her. “They’re yours. Yours and Daniel’s. Your whole childhood is in there. Every little thing. I want you to have it.”
Emma held the notebook in her lap.
“What about the letters he wrote? The two from Paris?”
I’d thought about that, too.
“Those I’m keeping,” I said. “For a while. Then you can decide.”
She nodded slowly.
Then she put the notebook down and took my hand.
“Mom,” she said. “What do you want to do now? With… with whatever time there is?”
I smiled.
“I made a list,” I said.
I took the leather notebook out of my nightstand and showed her.
It started on the second page, right after Dear Me.
Learn to swim.
Go to the Grand Canyon.
Take a dance class.
Eat at the fancy Italian place downtown that I’ve driven past for thirty years. Alone. Order dessert first.
Plant tulips. Even if I don’t see them come up.
Tell the truth when people ask how I am.
Teach Daniel’s boys to play gin rummy so they can beat their father.
Watch the sunrise on purpose.
Emma read the whole list. She laughed at some of it. She cried at some of it.
“The Grand Canyon?” she said.
“The other teachers went every summer for fifteen years,” I said. “They always asked me. I always said next year.”
Emma wiped her eyes.
“Okay,” she said. “Then next month.”
I didn’t get to everything on that list.
I’m telling you that honestly, because I promised myself in that leather notebook that I’d tell the truth when people asked how I was.
But I got to a lot of it.
I learned to swim, sort of. At the YMCA, in the shallow end, with a twenty-two-year-old instructor named Tasha who was very patient and called me “Miss Margaret.” I can float on my back now for almost a whole minute. I’m told this counts.
I went to the Grand Canyon. Emma drove. Daniel and Rachel and the boys came too, in a rented van that smelled like French fries. I couldn’t do much walking. They pushed me to the edge of the South Rim in a wheelchair, and I sat there in my blue scarf and looked out at all that open space, all those layers of red and orange and purple going down and down, millions of years of it.
Daniel’s younger boy, Sam, who’s seven, stood next to my chair and said, “Grandma, it’s so big.”
“It is,” I said.
“Are you scared of it?”
“No,” I said. “I used to be scared of a lot of things. I’m not scared of this.”
I went to the fancy Italian place downtown. Alone. I ordered tiramisu before my pasta. The waiter raised one eyebrow at me. I raised one right back. He laughed and brought it out with a candle in it, even though it wasn’t my birthday.
I planted tulips along the front walk. Forty bulbs. Emma helped me because I couldn’t kneel very long. We did it on a cold, bright Saturday in November, and our fingers got so numb we had to go inside and hold mugs of tea until they stopped hurting.
“You’ll see them,” Emma said, looking at the dirt.
“Maybe,” I said. “And if I don’t, you will.”
I taught Daniel’s boys to play gin rummy. They beat their father three times in a row at Thanksgiving. He pretended to be furious. They’ve never been happier.
I still write in the leather notebook. Not every day. My hands shake more now, and some days I’m too tired to hold the pen.
But on the good days, I write.
Dear Me, you floated for fifty-eight seconds today. Tasha clapped.
Dear Me, Sam said the Grand Canyon looked like a giant birthday cake somebody dropped. He’s right.
Dear Me, Emma brought over the first notebook from the RICHARD box and read it out loud to you. You laughed so hard about the dentist with the boat that you had to take a pain pill.
Dear Me, you told Mrs. Kowalski next door that you weren’t fine today. You told her you were tired and scared. She sat with you on the porch for an hour. She brought soup.
Dear Me, you wore the blue scarf to church, and three people asked where you got it. You told them Paris.
It’s the end of winter now as I write this.
The doctors were right. Months, not years. I can feel it. I sleep a lot. Emma comes every afternoon. Daniel comes on weekends. Some days I’m clear and some days I’m foggy.
But this morning, I woke up early. Before anybody. Before the sun.
I wrapped myself in a blanket and my blue scarf, and I took the leather notebook, and I went out on the front porch and sat in the old wicker chair.
And I watched the sunrise. On purpose.
It came up pink and gold over the rooftops across the street. It was nothing like Paris. It was just Dayton, Ohio, with its power lines and its gutters and its gray March snow.
It was beautiful anyway.
When the light reached the front walk, I looked down.
There, in the frozen dirt along the path, where Emma and I had knelt in November with our fingers going numb, the first green tips of the tulips were pushing up through the ground.
I opened the notebook on my lap.
Dear Me, I wrote.
Look.
