Letters. Not from her — to her. Two hundred and something, in his handwriting, addressed and stamped and never mailed, one every few weeks from November 1996 forward. The stamps go from thirty-two cents to sixty-eight, which is how you can date the last one to the spring before he died. Underneath them, at the bottom, was a single envelope that had been mailed, postmarked 1997, addressed to him and returned, marked with a forwarding address that had also expired.
His daughter sat down on the garage floor. She was seven when her mother left and she has spent her whole life being told, gently, by everyone in that family, that her mother was gone and that her father had moved on and that dwelling on it wasn’t healthy. She said she’d always thought he was the one who’d stopped looking.
They aren’t love letters, most of them. She’s read maybe forty so far and she says it’s mostly ordinary — the roof, the car, the daughter’s report card, a neighbor’s dog. He wrote to her the way you’d write to somebody who was coming back next month and would want to know what she’d missed. A few of them are hard. One from 2003 is four lines long and says he understands now and isn’t asking anymore, and then he kept writing for another twenty-two years anyway.
We found her in November. She’s seventy-six and she’s in Michigan and she has been sober since 1999 and she has never once known that light was on. His daughter drove up in January with the shoebox and I have not asked what happened in that room and I’m not going to. What I know is that the porch next door is dark now, and that his daughter took the boxes of bulbs home with her, and that she has three cases of a yellow bulb discontinued in 2004 in her own garage, and no plan for them that she can explain to anybody.
