Chapter 2: Forty-One Letters
I read all of them that night. It took until nearly four in the morning.
They are not what anybody imagines.
There is no grand reconciliation in them, and there is no rage. What there is, is a man writing one page a year to another man for forty-one years, about nothing very much, in handwriting that gets worse and then briefly better after 2004 and then much worse.
1985 is four lines long.
“Mr. Crane. I was told not to contact you and I am going to anyway, one time, and then stop if you want me to. I have not driven since. I am sorry is not a thing that fits on paper. — A. Lachance.”
1986 is two lines.
1987 is a full page, and it is about his own wife’s illness, because — I worked this out slowly, over four or five letters — at some point in 1986 Marlon must have written back.
I never found Marlon’s letters. Of course I didn’t; they are in some house on the other side of the state, in a drawer of their own, and I have thought about that a great deal since.
But you can read his side in the gaps.
1989: “The money came. My wife opened it. I want you to know I sat in the kitchen with that envelope for two hours. We used it for the hospital. I don’t know what to do with the fact that it came from you.”
1993: “You asked about the girl. She’s in high school. I think about her being in high school more than I think about most things.”
There is one year missing.
2007 is not in the box. Every other October from 1985 to last year is there, in order, and 2007 simply isn’t, and it took me two visits to work up to asking about it.
Abner did not answer straight away.
“That was the year I stopped,” he said eventually. “My wife got very bad in the spring. I decided I’d earned the right to stop thinking about it.”
“And?”
“And in November your father wrote to me anyway.” He looked at the window. “One line. Everything all right? — M. That’s it. Two words and a name, and I sat in the kitchen and cried like a fool, because in twenty-two years it had never once occurred to me that he’d notice.”
So 2007 exists.
It is just in the wrong house: a single line, in Marlon’s handwriting, on the other side of the state, in a box I have been invited to read after.
I have thought about that letter more than any of the forty-one I own.
Because it means the arrangement was not what it looked like. For twenty-two years I had assumed — the whole time I was reading, on that garage floor — that Abner wrote out of guilt and Marlon received out of need, and that the traffic went one way.
It didn’t.
The year the man who k*lled his wife went quiet, my stepfather checked on him.
Wait.
You asked about the girl.
I went back through every letter after that and found eleven more like it — brief answers to questions I could not see, scattered across four decades.
1997: “Glad she got in. You must be proud. Don’t tell her about me.”
2002: “A wedding. God. Thank you for telling me.”
2011: “A boy and a girl. I’m 71 this year and that made me sit down.”
For forty-one years, my stepfather wrote once a year to the man who had k*lled his wife, and told him how I was doing.
Not to torture him.
That was my first thought, sitting on a concrete floor at three in the morning, and it is wrong, and I knew it was wrong within about twenty minutes, because of 1990.
1990 is the only letter that is about the accident itself.
“You asked me to write down what I remember and I have put it off for four months. Here it is. The light was green when I entered. I have said that to four people and none of them believed me and I have stopped saying it, but you asked for what I remember and that is what I remember. I was 51 hours into a 60-hour week. I don’t say that as an excuse. It is the reason.
She had the little girl in the back. I saw the car seat when I got out. I have never in 6 years been able to say that sentence out loud to my wife.
