The last letter arrived on a Tuesday.
I know this because I had just crossed Tuesday off the wall calendar in
my bedroom a small ritual I had performed every morning for two years,
ever since the doctors sat across from my mother and me in a room that
smelled of antiseptic and fluorescent light and explained, in careful,
measured language, that my lungs were not going to improve. Each red X
was an act of defiance. A declaration. Look another day. You made it.
The envelope was cream-colored. The expensive kind, the kind that
comes in small packets at stationery shops and costs more per sheet than
any practical person would justify. My name was written on the front in
handwriting I almost recognized looping, deliberate, the handwriting of
someone who had learned to write slowly and kept that slowness their
whole life, even when the world around them sped up.
There was no return address. No stamp. It had been slipped beneath
my bedroom door, which meant someone had come into the house.
My mother was at the hospital. I was alone.
I sat on the edge of my bed, with the oxygen concentrator humming
beside me that faithful, graceless machine I had named the Hummingbird,
because it was constant and small and kept me alive even when I resented it
and I held the envelope for a long time before opening it.
Inside was a single page. At the top, in that careful script:
Elara.
I know what happens.
I know what happens and I am so sorry for the parts that hurt and
there will be parts that hurt, I won't lie to you about that. But you
need to read everything I am going to send you before you make
any decisions. You need to trust a process that will seem
impossible from where you're standing.
There is a boy. There is a box. There is a truth that has been kept
from you out of love, and love is not always the same thing as
kindness.
Promise me you will stay open.
E
I read it five times. Then I read it again. I turned it over, as though the
back might offer explanation. It did not.
I knew no one whose name began with E. I knew no one who wrote
like this with urgency and sorrow and the particular intimacy of someone
speaking across a great distance. I knew no one who could have gotten into
my room.
The Hummingbird hummed. Outside, it was November, and the oak
tree in the courtyard had gone bare, and a crow I had been watching for
months I called him Borges, after the writer, because he seemed to
understand the architecture of things was sitting motionless on the highest
branch, looking directly at my window.
I thought: this is either the strangest thing that has ever happened to
me, or the beginning of the strangest thing.
I did not know, then, that it was both.