The letters were her one link to the world in those first maddeningly scary months. Especially the time she was incarcerated, before the trial, when she’d lost her temper and punched the investigating cop and they’d tossed her in county overnight. She’d mouthed off to the judge and he’d given her three more days to cool her heels while they decided whether to make things official. She couldn’t sleep, not a wink. The jail’s doctor had finally given her Ambien because they were afraid she was going to get psychotic without proper rest. She slept. The sleep of the dead. Every night for two months, they gave her the pills.
When she got out, she couldn’t sleep without them. She liked the deep oblivion of the pills. They kept her sane. Every night, she’d write until the pills washed her brain clean of thoughts and sleep dragged her under.
The letters didn’t take a cohesive form. Some were long, rambling accounts of her moments, some short snippets. Some were angry, some full of longing. Some pleaded, some accused.
But none were ever answered.
As the days stretched into months stretched into years, she continued the habit. Her therapist had suggested it as a way for her to cope, and Aubrey found the idea appealing. It made her feel and look weak, so she didn’t tell anyone what she was doing. After a while, she realized she was using the letters to hold on to her sanity. Even during that time, the time she didn’t like to remember, when she’d slipped, she kept writing. The letters became her lifeline, a way she could talk to Josh again.
They added up. Pages and pages and pages. She printed them out and kept them all in boxes, coded by year, one through five. There were hundreds. Details of her life without him, of what he was missing. Of what she missed about him.
She knew the words to all the communiqués. One of her favorite pastimes was opening the boxes and reading through them. Sometimes it was a good exercise, a measurable gauge that she was moving on, getting by. Other readings would devastate her for days. She could conjure them in her mind as if she had the photocopies sitting in front of her, and often ran them through her head while she jogged. There was a section of letters she didn’t like to revisit, from the time before she found the physical outlet, but the rest she had memorized. It was obsessive, yes, but it helped her cope.
She stroked the carved initials on the tree. She could almost fit her pinkie finger into the edges of the heart.
The sad segments of her life: Before, During, After—seven, seventeen, and five. Happiness, bliss even, replaced by shock and isolation and fear. Aubrey knew the exact moment when Before turned into During. And when During became After. When the blur began to focus, and she woke, half a woman.
She fingered the scar on her lip and pulled her cell phone from inside her running shirt’s zipper pocket. It was an outdated iPhone, no longer manufactured, but she didn’t want to get a new one because it had the text messages she’d sent Josh the night he’d disappeared. The police had given it back to her when the trial ended; they had no use for it.
The last text was at 11:59 p.m. the day of Sulman’s party. That’s how she knew the exact moment her life changed forever. A little gray screen with a green bubble that read You are the best husband EVAH! with a string of x’s and o’s, four of each, followed by quieter, more desperate messages as the night progressed, culminating with Josh, we can’t find you. We’re going to the house. Arlo wants to call the police. Please, please call me.
She didn’t have the heart to delete the texts.
He was dead. She knew he was dead. It was wishful thinking that he could be alive somewhere. Hurt, forgotten, unable to return . . . that was fantasyland, a fantasy Aubrey discarded when the police slapped the cuffs on her and threw her in jail, and she stood before the judge, all alone.
But she could still dream.
Unhealthy as it was, she could conjure Josh at will: the smooth skin of his forearm, the feel of his hands across her neck. The way he smiled at her, without reservation, always happy, always willing. The way he teased, and the way he loved. She’d been with him for so many years that she didn’t really remember the time before, when she had a mother and a father to tuck her in at night.
A college kid in a black-and-gold Vanderbilt ball cap ran by, stared at her crying by the tree. She could see the hitch in his step as he decided whether to stop and see if she was okay. She gave him a little shake of her head, and he jogged on toward campus, clearly relieved.
You’re getting maudlin, Aubrey. Best get going.
As she ran back toward the house, with Josh’s face and the words that tied her to him fresh in her mind, she realized she hadn’t written him last night. It was the first time in years she’d skipped the ritual.
She kicked up the pace a notch. Something was wrong with her. First she’d forgotten to put on her ring. Then she’d met a man, brought him home, and slept with him. Now she’d forsaken the one ritual that had given her a lifeline back to the real world.