Penpal

by Dathan Auerbach

  “I Love You.”

  Whoever had given me this card hadn’t written anything in it, but they had circled the message in pencil a couple times.

  I chuckled a little and said, “Gee, thanks for the awesome card, mom.”

  She looked at me inquisitively, and then turned her attention to the card. She told me it wasn’t from her and seemed amused as she took the card from my hand and showed my friends, looking at their faces, trying to discern who had played the joke. None of the kids stepped forward, so my mom said,

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart; at least you know now that two people love you.”

  She followed that with an extremely prolonged and excruciating kiss on my forehead that transformed the group’s bewilderment into hysteria. They were all laughing now, so it could have been any of them, but one of the boys named Mike seemed to be laughing the hardest. To become a participant rather than the subject of the gag, I said to him that just because he had given me that card, he shouldn’t think that I’d kiss him later. He gave me a slightly bewildered look, and we all laughed; as I looked at Josh, I saw that he was finally smiling.

  “Well, I think that gift might be the winner, but you have a couple more to open.”

  My mom slid another present in front of me. I was still feeling the tremors of suppressed chuckles in my abdomen as I tore the colorful paper away. When I saw the gift, however, there was no more laughter in me to stifle. My smile dropped as I looked at what I’d been given.

  It was a pair of walkie-talkies.

  “Well, go on! Show everyone!” my mother encouraged.

  I held them up, and everyone seemed to approve, but as I drew my attention to Josh, I could see that he had turned a sickly shade of white. We locked eyes for a moment, and then he turned and walked into the kitchen. As I watched him dial a number on the corded phone attached to the wall, my mom whispered in my ear that she knew that Josh and I didn’t talk as much since one of the walkie-talkies had broken, so she thought I’d like it. I was filled with an intense appreciation for my mom’s thoughtfulness, but this feeling was easily overpowered by the emotions resurrected by the returning memories I’d tried so hard to bury.

  While everyone was eating cake, I asked Josh whom he had called. He told me he wasn’t feeling well so he called his dad to come get him. I understood that he wanted to leave, but it was so hard to get Josh to come to my house that I, perhaps selfishly, wished that he would stay, despite how he was feeling. I told him that I wished we could hang out more. I extended one of the walkie-talkies to him, but he put his hand up in refusal.

  Dejected, I said, “Well thanks for coming, I guess. I hope I’ll see you before my next birthday.”

  “I’m sorry … I’ll try to call you back more often. I really will,” he said.

  The conversation stalled as we waited by my door for his dad. The rest of the kids watched my mother’s coworker perform magic. Rather than sounds of amazement, most of the vocalizations were critical but in good fun. Despite the haranguing, the magician and my mother seemed happy; perhaps it was exactly what they had expected.

  I repeatedly opened my mouth as if words would just pour out and catch the interest of my friend, but I would silently shut it each time. I looked at his face. Josh seemed genuinely remorseful that he hadn’t made more of an effort, but I thought I perceived some other brooding emotion behind his regret, though I couldn’t tell what it was. As I stared at him, perhaps a little too intensely, his mood seemed suddenly bolstered by an idea that had struck him.

  He looked over to me and said that he knew what he’d get me for my birthday – it would take a while, but he thought that I would really like it. I dismissed it outright. I told him it wasn’t a big deal and that I didn’t need a gift. But he insisted. He seemed in better spirits and apologized for being such a drag at my party. He said he would call me soon, and when I said that he didn’t have to treat me like a baby, he told me that if he didn’t bother to call, then he wasn’t worth being friends with anyway.

  There was a knock at the door. Josh opened it and stepped out of my house and next to his father, and I could see Veronica sitting in the truck waiting impatiently. I thought about giving Josh a hug, but realized that might be embarrassing for the both of us, so I just gave him a low five. He apologized again as he walked off; he said that he was tired and that he hadn’t been sleeping well, and I asked him why that was. He turned back toward me and waved goodbye as he answered my question.

  “I think I’ve been sleepwalking.”

  That was the last time I saw my friend, and a couple of months later he was gone.

  Since I began this attempt to learn more about my childhood, the relationship between my mother and me has grown increasingly strained. Each time she would give me a piece of my past, I could feel myself becoming more complete – the structure of my autobiography finally falling into place with the connecting of milestones or the introduction of a never-known fact – but I don’t think I realized how much of herself she was losing in this process. Still, I thought we could take it. But maybe I was letting my wishes about the strength of our bond distort my perception of how strong it actually was; it’s often the case that one cannot know the breaking point of a thing until that thing fractures.

  The last conversation that I had with my mother left me with what I’ll now share with you. I’m not sure where this last discussion, and all of the ones that preceded it, will leave me and my mom; I imagine that we will spend the rest of our lives attempting to repair what had taken a lifetime to build. She had put so much energy into keeping me safe, both physically and psychologically, but I think that the walls meant to insulate me from harm were also protecting her emotional stability. As the truth came pouring out the last time we spoke, I could hear a trembling in her voice that I think was a reverberation of the collapse of her world. I don’t imagine my mother and I will talk very much anymore, and while there are still some things I don’t understand, I think I know enough now.

  After Josh disappeared, his parents had done all that they could do to find him. From the very first day, the police had suggested that they contact all of the parents of the kids that knew Josh to see if he might be with them. They did this, of course, but no one had seen him or had any idea of where he might be. They placed notices in the newspaper and posted flyers all around the old neighborhood; they even solicited message boards and chat rooms in missing children networks. The police had been unable to turn over any new information about Josh’s whereabouts, despite the fact that they had received several anonymous phone calls from a woman urging them to compare this case with the stalking case that had been opened about six years before.

  One day, however, they got a call. The person said that he had seen Josh. Josh’s father sat down on the couch with his wife. Holding a pen to a pad of paper, he asked the caller where he had seen the boy. The caller said, “In Florida.” The father pressed further, “Where? Where in Florida did you see him?” The caller yelled, “At Disneyworld!” laughed, and hung up.

  His wife was clutching his free hand waiting for the information. She asked what the person had said, and Josh’s father tore the piece of paper that read “Florida. Dis—” out of the pad and crumpled it up.

  “Nothing. It was nothing.”

  These calls persisted for months. People from all over the country would call and offer fake tips or brutal mockery. There weren’t many of these calls – maybe a dozen. But there were enough. They couldn’t just change the number – Josh might call, or at least someone who had actually seen him – so they transferred the phone number to a friend who offered to act as a buffer from these kinds of callers. The friend said she would press anyone who asked about Josh, but otherwise she would just treat it as an ordinary wrong number. She was a good friend to them, and my mother struggled to remember her name, but I already knew it from the time that I had talked to her. Her name was Claire.

  Josh’s mother was not as strong as her husband was. If her
grip on the world loosened when her son vanished, it broke when Veronica died. She had seen many people die at the hospital, but there is no amount of desensitization that can fortify a person against the death of her own child. She would visit Veronica twice a day, since she was recuperating at a different hospital: once before her shift, and once afterward.

  On the day Veronica died, her mother was late leaving work, and by the time she arrived at her daughter’s hospital, Veronica had already passed. This was too much for her, and over the next couple of weeks, she became increasingly more unstable. She stopped going to work, but unlike the leave of absence she had taken almost three years before when Josh had disappeared, this time she had nothing to focus her attention on except her own pain. She would sometimes wander outside yelling for both Josh and Veronica to come home, and there were several times her husband found her staggering around my old neighborhood in the middle of the night, half-clothed and frantically searching for her son and daughter.

  Due to his wife’s mental deterioration, Josh’s dad could no longer travel for work, and so he began taking construction jobs that were less lucrative in an effort to be closer to home. When they began expanding my old neighborhood more, about three months after Veronica died, Josh’s dad applied for literally every position that was vacant. He was hired.

  Although he was qualified to lead the build sites, he took a job as a laborer. He would help build the frames and clean up the sites and do whatever else needed to be done. He even took odd jobs that would occasionally come up: mowing lawns, repairing fences – anything to keep from traveling. When they began clearing the woods in the area next to the tributary in order to transform the land into inhabitable property, Josh’s dad was tasked with the responsibility of leveling the recently deforested lot; he accepted it eagerly, as this job guaranteed him at least several weeks of work close to home.

  On the fourth day, he arrived at a spot that he could not level. Each time he would drive over it with the machine, the patch of land would remain lower than all the surrounding earth. Frustrated, he got off the tractor to survey the area. He was tempted to simply pack more dirt into the depression, but he knew that would only be an aesthetic and temporary solution. He had worked construction for years, and he knew that root systems from large trees that had been recently cut down would often decompose, leaving weaknesses in the soil below that would manifest as weaknesses in the foundations above.

  Part of his motivation to do the job thoroughly was out of self-interest – with any luck he would be contracted to help with the building, or at least placing, of the future homes on this property, so he didn’t want to sabotage himself. But this was only a small part of his reasoning. Ultimately, he was a builder; ignoring the problem was simply not a possibility. He weighed his options and elected to dig a little with a shovel in case the problem was shallow enough to fix without needing the backhoe that he would have to retrieve from another site.

  I asked my mother where this site was, but it was almost a rhetorical question. I knew where it was. I had been to that spot before the soil was broken and before it had been filled in; I had fallen in that hole when I was ten years old.

  I felt a tightening in my chest as my mother continued.

  He stabbed his shovel into the dirt to test its consistency, and to his surprise and disappointment, the shovelhead disappeared almost entirely below the earth. The soil was weak, and while that would make it easier to move, he had not anticipated what might be such an extensive delay so soon into the job.

  Pulling back on the wooden handle, he moved a small mound of dirt off to the side and began his project. Before too long, he had dug a small hole about three feet down. When he reset his position and drove the metal blade into the earth, a tremor traveled up the pole and into his arms. His shovel had collided with something hard. He smashed his shovel against it repeatedly in an attempt to gauge the thickness of the root and the density of the network, when suddenly his shovel plunged through the resistance.

  Confused, he dug the hole wider. After about a half-hour of excavating, he found himself standing on a brown blanket that was stretched across and stapled to a large box about seven feet long and four feet wide.

  Our minds work hard to avoid dissonance – if we hold a belief strongly enough, our minds will forcefully reject conflicting evidence so that we can maintain the integrity of our understanding of the world. Up until the very next moment, despite what all reason would have indicated – despite the fact that some small but suffocated part of him understood what was supporting his weight – this man believed – he knew – his son was still alive.

  My mom received a call at six o’clock in the evening. She knew who it was, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. However, what she did comprehend made her leave immediately.

  “Down here … now … son … please God!”

  When she arrived, she found Josh’s dad sitting perfectly still with his back to the hole. He was holding the shovel so tightly it seemed that it might snap, and he was staring straight ahead with eyes that had no life or light in them. My mother approached him slowly and tried several times to get his attention, but he wouldn’t respond to any of her words. He only reacted when she tried, with delicate and hesitant hands, to take the shovel from him.

  When she touched the shovel, his vice-like grip on the handle tightened, forcing all the blood out of his fingers to the point that they were as white as bone. He dragged his eyes slowly to hers and just said, “I don’t understand.” He repeated this as if he had forgotten all other words, and my mother could hear him still muttering it as she walked past both him and scraps of broken wood to look in the hole.

  My mother told me that she wished that she had gouged her eyes out before she faced downward into that crater, and I told her that I knew what she was about to say and that she need not continue. I looked at her face; it was expressing a look of such intense despair that it caused my stomach to turn. It struck me that she had known of this for almost ten years and was hoping that she’d never have to tell me. I imagine that she made a firm decision all those years ago to never share this information, and as we sat there at the same weathered table that had forever been the meeting spot for our talks, I felt a twinge of guilt for forcing her to break the promise that she made to herself. Because she never intended to tell me, she never came up with the proper arrangement of words to describe what she saw. As I sit here now, I’m met with the same difficulty of articulation, but for different reasons.

  Josh was dead. His face was sunken in and contorted in such a way that it was as if the misery and hopelessness of all the world had been transferred to it. The assaulting smell of decay rose from the crypt, and my mother had to cover her nose and mouth to keep from vomiting. His skin was cracked, almost crocodilian, and a stream of blood followed these lines and dried on his face while pooling and staining the wood around his head. My mother wanted to look away. She wanted to move her eyes, even if just a little bit, so that she could see something else, anything else. But she couldn’t. Her eyes had locked with Josh’s, which lay open and facing up out of the tomb, and although he couldn’t return her gaze, it felt as if he were looking directly at her.

  She said by the look of him he had not been long-dead, but she couldn’t hazard a guess because she simply had no referent. Selfishly, and horribly, she wished that more time had passed before that day, so that time and nature could have brought the mercy of degradation to erase the pain and terror that was now etched into his face. She said that it felt as if he knew she’d be right there – that he had been waiting for her to enter his line of sight; his open mouth offering an all-too-late plea for help to ears that could do nothing for him. She forcefully covered her eyes to break the stare and attempted to confront the scene as a whole, but the rest of his body wasn’t visible.

  Someone else was covering it.

  He was large and lay facedown on top of Josh. As my mother’s mind stretched itself to take in what her e
yes were attempting to tell her, she became aware of the significance of the way in which he laid.

  He was holding Josh.

  Their legs lay frozen by death, but entangled like vines in some lush, tropical forest. One arm rested under Josh’s neck only to wrap around his body so that they might lay closer still, while the other arm lay limp with a bent elbow against the wood, his fingers entangled in Josh’s hair. The man’s back was covered in dirt, and as she looked back to the area near Josh’s head – ashamedly avoiding his gaze – she could see that some of this scattered earth had mixed with the blood and formed mud that lay still wet in the damp casket.

  As the sun passed through the trees, its light reflected off something pinned to Josh’s shirt. My mother stooped to one knee and raised the collar of her shirt over her nose so that she might block out the smell while she attempted to train her vision on the object rather than Josh’s face. When she saw what had caught the sunlight, her legs abandoned her, and she nearly fell into the tomb.

  It was a picture …

  It was a picture of me as a child.

  Gasping and trembling, she staggered backwards and collided with Josh’s father, who still sat facing away from the hole. She understood why he had called her now, but she could not bring herself to tell him what she had kept from everyone for all these years, not that the information could do any good now anyway. Josh’s family never knew about the night I had woken up in the woods. They never knew about the Polaroids; they never knew about the note she had found on my pillow. They never knew the real reason we had moved out of our old home with such haste.