A letter.
I glanced over at the little round table in the corner of the kitchen, and it was still there, untouched, which was no miracle since it was only me and Aunt Gina.
Three days after the knock on our door, I’d come in from a walk with Lilah, actually laughing over a story about Finn, and then in an instant, all the air whooshed right out of me. Sitting on the kitchen table was an envelope, addressed to me, in his handwriting. I stared at it. Lilah put her hand on my shoulder, tentative.
“Oh, Honor . . . ,” she started. “He must’ve sent it before . . . and probably no one knew. . . .”
I’d stepped toward it like it was a sleeping animal I didn’t want to disturb. Picked up the envelope. Run my thumb over the address, over Finn’s writing. And then put it down in the exact same spot and backed away. “I can’t. . . .” Looked at Lilah. “You wanna go out for a while? We can drive the Pala this time.” She’d nodded quickly, and we walked straight back out the door. I didn’t go in the kitchen much after that.
The thing was, Finn didn’t write letters. He wrote e-mails, once a week. And every time I got one from him, I’d give him a hard time about writing me a real letter, with real thoughts, instead of just telling me it was all “fine” over there and how the dusty desert wasn’t all that different from central Texas, and how combat drills reminded him of football. I wanted him to tell me the truth, even if it was a hard truth, because those things are too heavy to carry alone. He’d always been that person to me, the one I could tell everything to, and I liked to think I could be the same for him. But once he made up his mind to enlist instead of go to college and play football, it felt like he decided I couldn’t.
Lilah said he was trying to protect me and that I should just let it go, but it sat like a rock in my gut and I tried to tell him as much. I wanted him to know he didn’t have to be so sunny and upbeat all the time—that it was okay to be honest, for once, about how it really was, and if he was scared or wished he’d never gone.
Which was why I hadn’t opened the letter.
I was afraid, when I saw it, of what I’d find. And now, especially after the fact, I didn’t want to know that he’d been scared or lonely or homesick, because any one of those things would be enough to break what was left of me. Now I needed to keep thinking he’d been happy over there and it wasn’t as bad as I imagined.
But he’d written it, a real letter. I owed it to him to read it.
I glanced through the doorway into the living room at Gina, who seemed to have aged twenty years in the last two weeks. Her blond hair fell loose and dull around her face, and her chest moved rhythmically up and down beneath her wrinkled black blouse. She didn’t flinch at the sound when I slid a chair out and sat at the table. I picked the envelope up, surprised at the thickness of it between my fingers. A deep breath didn’t feel near enough to prepare me for reading whatever he’d written, but I drew one in anyway then slid my finger under the top flap and tore up through the seam of the envelope. I exhaled once more before I brought out the folded pages and opened them to read.
Dear H—
First off, I know this is gonna get to you late—that’s just the way things work around here, but I’m hoping that since I’m finally sending you a “real letter” you won’t hold it against me.
I wish more than anything I could’ve come home to see you graduate, tried every which way to figure it out, but there was just no way that was gonna happen. But you have to know how damn proud of you I am. Mom and Dad would’ve been too, you know. So proud.
And now you got a wide-open road ahead of you with nothing standing in your way. I hope by now you’re all packed up and ready for school. It’s a big thing, you know. You better go and do it up right or I’ll have to come back there just to kick your ass into gear. There’s a big world out there and I’m seeing it now—the good and the bad. And you will too. Have a few adventures while you’re out there. Put your feet in the ocean. Watch the stars disappear into morning. Then when I get back we’ll compare notes.
How’s that for a “real letter”? Everything you thought it’d be? Wise and inspiring, since it’s on paper? I tried. Just so you know, that took me twice as long as an e-mail would have. Hope you’re happy.
Love,
Finn
PS — Do me a favor—next time you see Kyra Kelley, make sure you tell her all about your handsome older brother.
Something deep in my chest unhinged. Overflowed. Tore through every little space in me until I thought I might burst. It was so Finn, so what he’d say, that I let myself think for a second that he wasn’t actually gone. I ran my finger over the indentations of his pen strokes. He had no idea when he wrote it that I would sit at our kitchen table and read it after his funeral, or that I wouldn’t laugh or shake my head but weep as quietly as I could, so I wouldn’t wake Gina.
Hot tears cut silent paths down my cheeks. I set the letter down on the table and wiped the wetness from my face. The seconds ticked away in the heat of the evening, and the pages in front of me fluttered lightly beneath the lazy current of the ceiling fan.
Pages. There were more than one. After another deep breath, I gently lifted the one with his handwriting on it away from the two behind it, almost afraid of what they might be. And seated alone at the kitchen table, in the sad quiet of the house, I laughed when I saw.
I laughed out loud, but without any sort of joy, because this had to be a joke. All of it. The car accident that took my parents, the hand-rigged bomb that took my brother, and now this. A letter he had to have sent to me months ago, when the road really was wide open, and the two tickets to Kyra Kelley’s farewell concert were the perfect punch line to his PS joke.