Every time I look at it, I think, “I know exactly how she feels.”
Without thinking about it, I fish a nubby pencil out of my pocket, and I press it to the paper.
Just below the girl’s shaky script, I add two words of my own.
CHAPTER TWO
Me too.
The words are shaking, and I realize it’s not the paper; it’s my hand. The foreign handwriting is almost burning my eyes.
Someone read my letter.
Someone read my letter.
I look around as if it just happened, but the cemetery is empty. I haven’t been here since Tuesday. It’s Thursday morning now, so it’s a miracle the letter is still intact. More often than not, the envelope is gone, taken by weather or animals or possibly the cemetery staff.
But not only is the letter here, someone felt the need to add commentary.
The paper is still shaking in my fist.
I can’t—
This is—
What—who would—how—
I want to scream. I can’t even think in complete sentences. Rage is burning up my insides.
This was private. Private. Between me and my mother.
It has to be a guy. Greasy fingerprints line the edges, and the handwriting is blocky. It smacks of arrogance, to insert himself into someone else’s grief and claim a part of it. Mom used to say that words always carried a bit of the writer’s soul, and I can almost feel it pouring off the page.
Me too.
No, not him too. He has no idea.
I’m going to complain. This is unacceptable. This is a cemetery. People come here to grieve privately. This is my space. MINE. Not his.
I stomp across the grass, refusing to allow the cool morning air to steal any of my fire. My chest hurts and I’m dangerously close to crying.
This was ours. Mine and hers. My mother can’t write back anymore, and his words on my letter seem to drive that point home. It’s like he stabbed me with the pencil.
By the time I crest the hill, tears hang on my lashes and my breathing is shuddering. The wind has turned my hair into a mess of tangles. I’m going to be a wreck in a minute. I’ll show up late for school with reddened eyes and running makeup. Again.
The guidance counselor used to have some sympathy. Ms. Vickers would pull me into her office and offer a box of tissues. At the end of my junior year, I was getting pats on the shoulder and whispers of encouragement to take all the time I needed.
Now that we’re in the middle of September, Mom’s been dead for months. Since school started, everyone has been wondering when I’m going to get my act together. Ms. Vickers stopped me on Tuesday, and instead of giving a kind look, she pursed her lips and asked if I was still going to the cemetery every morning, and maybe we should talk about more constructive uses of my time.
Like it’s any of her business.
It’s not every morning anyway. Only the mornings when Dad leaves for work early—though half the time I’m convinced he wouldn’t know the difference either way. When he’s home, he makes himself two eggs and eats them with a bowl of grapes I’ve washed and pulled from the vines. He sits at the table and stares at the wall and doesn’t speak.
I could light the place on fire and it’d be even odds that he’d get out in time.
Today was an early-work morning. The sunlight, the breeze, the peaceful tranquility of the cemetery all seemed like a gift.
The two words scrawled on my letter feel like a curse.
A middle-aged Hispanic man is blowing leaves and lawn clippings from the paved road, and he stops when I approach. He’s wearing some type of maintenance uniform, and the name across his breast reads Melendez.
“May I help you?” he says with a hint of an accent. His eyes aren’t unkind, but he looks tired.
There’s wariness in his voice. I must look fierce. He expects a complaint. I can tell.
Well, I’m about to give him one. There should be some kind of regulation against this. My fist clenches around the letter, crumpling it, and I inhale to speak—
Then I stop.
I can’t do this. She wouldn’t want me to do this.
Temper, Juliet.
Mom was always the calm one. Level-headed, cool in a crisis. She had to be, what with jetting from war zone to war zone.
Besides, I’m about to sound like a jacked-up freak of nature. I already look like one. What am I going to say? Someone wrote two words on my letter? A letter I wrote to someone who isn’t even alive? It could have been anyone. Hundreds of graves line the field around my mother’s. Dozens of people must visit every day—if not more.
And what’s the lawn-care guy going to do? Babysit my mother’s headstone? Install a security camera?
To catch someone with a hidden pencil?
“I’m fine,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
I walk back to her grave and sit down in the grass. I’m going to be late for school, but I don’t care. Somewhere in the distance, Mr. Melendez’s leaf blower kicks up again, but here I’m alone.
I’ve written her twenty-nine letters since she died. Two letters every week.
When she was alive, I wrote her hundreds. Her career kept her on the cutting edge of technology, but she craved the permanence and precision of the old-fashioned. Handwritten letters. Cameras with film. Her professional shots were always digital, stuff she could edit anywhere, but film was her favorite. She’d be in some African desert, shooting starvation or violence or political unrest, and she’d always find time to write me a letter.
We did the normal thing, too, of course: emails and video chatting when she had a chance. But the letters—those really meant something. Every emotion came through the paper, as if the ink and dust and smudges from her sweat lent weight to the words, and I could sense her fear, her hope, and her courage.