“That’s the letter?” Amy asked. “He left that in your secret place? The tree that you two planted?”
“He knew I would come to look for it someday. Only I would ever know where to find it.”
I sat hunched forward from the waist. I still had trouble breathing; I had almost begun to wonder if I would ever catch my breath again. Amy kept her arm around me. The long, slow shudders that come after a cry trembled up and down my body.
“Raef should have told you before. I’m super angry at him right now.”
“He had given his word to Jack. You should like that Constance married a man who keeps his word. I don’t blame Raef. He was in an impossible situation.”
“Then why tell you now?”
“I think he thought I was in too much pain.”
We sat in a small love seat in the corner of the hotel lobby. A forest of potted ferns hid us from direct observation. Across the lobby, two sleepy kids worked at getting a tray of pastries displayed for the coffee shop. Now and then an older woman, apparently in charge, swung by to speak to them and to push them to hurry up. The smell of coffee filled the lobby.
“So you think he’s sick?” Amy asked. “Is that it?”
“I think he’s dying. I know he is. Jack is dying.”
“Oh, come on,” she said, and she reached across to grab my hand. “You don’t know that.”
“He was sick. Raef told me. He has leukemia. He went to a hospital with Raef to check on a condition. Don’t you see? He came with me to the airport because he wanted me to know that he had made a choice to go with me. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t cross that line. It wasn’t about New York or jobs or anything like that. He just let me think that.”
“And that’s why he didn’t come with you?”
I nodded.
“Yes,” I said. “That would be the way Jack would handle things.”
“That’s a bunch of bullshit, though. Why wouldn’t he tell you what was going on?”
“Because that’s not how Jack lives. He wouldn’t want my life to be diminished by his.”
“It wouldn’t be diminished.”
“He wouldn’t see it that way, Amy. What would he do? How would it go? Was I going to be his nurse? Is that the life he wanted me to have? Think about it. Would you want that for someone you loved? If we had been married for twenty years, okay, then that’s part of it. But we had just met. We were just finding out about each other. He didn’t want to be a patient.”
She weighed that. Despite Amy’s sometimes wildness, she saw the world as an orderly place, and this did not fit into that mold.
“And that’s why you loved him,” Amy said. “That’s part of who he is. That’s who Jack is.”
“Yes.”
“The world is just too damn complicated for me,” she said. “Do you want some privacy while you read the letter?”
I nodded.
She squeezed my hand and then leaned over the table to kiss me.
“I’ll grab us some coffees if it’s ready,” she said, leaving. “Remember to breathe.”
I nodded again.
I put the letter on my lap and stared at it. It took me a long minute or two to force my hands to touch it.
52
I slid the letter out of the envelope carefully. I separated the two pieces of paper—the envelope like a pursing bird mouth—and placed them side by side. I wanted to absorb every detail. The two young people arranging the pastry display paid no attention to me. I smelled coffee still brewing and the faint odor of cleanser. Far away, a clock chimed. I didn’t count the chimes.
I looked inside the envelope to make sure nothing remained inside it. It was empty. I bowed it open farther so that I could be sure, then turned the envelope upside down over the table. I shook it several times. Satisfied, I placed it carefully back in its position.
Then I unfolded the letter and read:
Dear Heather,
I am writing this after leaving the airport. I’m sorry. I know I caused you pain, and I grieve about that. If your pain matches mine at this moment, then I am doubly sorry.
I couldn’t follow you to New York, because I am not completely my own to give. I’m sick, Heather, and I’m not going to get well. I can’t—I won’t—shift that onto you, onto us. Believe me when I say I am not being melodramatic. I am being as hardheaded as I know how to be. Call it what you will—fate, a roll of the dice, a bad card. It came up against us this time. Our luck didn’t hold.
But it was pretty to think so for a time, wasn’t it? It was for me.
You made my days rich, Heather. I loved you from the bottom of everything. Love finds us, passes through us, continues.
J.
I read the letter three times, ten times, read it until my hand shook so hard I could no longer hold the paper steady. I placed it back on the table and held my breath. I looked up through the deep blue of the pool water and tried to empty myself. I held my breath for a long time.
Then I went to Amy.
“Will you do me a favor? Will you run up to our room and bring me down my book bag? You know the one.”
“Sure, honey. Can you tell me what the letter said?”
“Bring me the bag, please, and then I’ll know. I’d go myself but I don’t trust my legs right now. The bag. It’s on the table.”
She nodded, touched my hand, then left. She returned in no time to our tiny island behind the ferns. She put the bag in front of me. I slid out Jack’s grandfather’s journal.
“You have it here with you?” Amy asked.
“I carry it everywhere. I carry it to work sometimes. When I have it I can almost believe I will run into Jack.”
“Oh, you poor lamb. You’ve got it bad. So bad.”
I pulled out the journal. It had a familiar, kindly feeling in my hand. I knew the passage. I opened to the beginning of the journal and found it almost immediately.