by Leah Stewart
My dear Cameron,
I suppose you think yourself now relieved of duty—alas, I have one final task to charge you with before I release you from my employ. Deliver this wedding present to your onetime friend, the charming Miss Sonia Gray. Do not mail it—it must be delivered in person, by you. You will, of course, be compensated, at twice your normal rate, for however long it takes you to complete this task. Please show this letter to Ruth (unless of course I have outlived her) as a sort of invoice.
Your Miss Gray thinks perhaps you never replied to her letter because you are genuinely indifferent to her. She imagines you have at last become as detached as you always wanted people to think you were. I differ from her in this opinion. Still, I can well imagine your indignation at being sent to her. Right now you are thinking that the package is empty and its delivery just another scheme I have devised to torment you. I assure you this is not so. Remember that you have a long life yet to live, as I do not. I know you will not refuse me the time it will take to do this one last thing.
Yours, as ever,
Oliver Doucet
P.S. Don’t open the package. I invoke your overdeveloped sense of honor. And if there’s life after death, I’m watching you.
There were many things in the letter to upset me, but at first all I felt, like a punch in the throat, was disappointment that the package was not for me. Three years together, and Oliver’s parting words were instructions to deliver something to another, instructions not even signed with love. He’d never even met Sonia, but he’d chosen her over me.
I read the letter again. What did he mean when he said Sonia thought I was indifferent? How did he know what Sonia thought about anything? It took longer than it should have for me to realize that he was telling me he’d corresponded with her. He must have taken it upon himself to answer her letter when I wouldn’t, the way I answered the letters that he ignored. And what had they said to each other, these two people who had nothing but me in common? What other opinions on my psychology had they shared as they formed their secret bond? What had they told each other that I wouldn’t have wanted them to know?
I stood and paced away from the bed, then back. “Son of a bitch,” I said. My voice came out funny, like I was about to cry.
“What?” Ruth said.
I looked up to find her watching me from the foot of the bed.
“What do you have?” she asked.
I didn’t want to tell her. The thought of her reading the letter pained and embarrassed me. I didn’t want to explain about Sonia. I didn’t want her to know I merited not a final, sentimental gift but a task. “Nothing,” I said. She looked at me sharply, and I braced myself for more questions. But then she blinked, and her face relaxed. She gave me a sad smile. “Okay,” she said.
I picked up the package and headed for the door. Ruth said nothing as I passed her, but when I looked back, she met my gaze. She looked so small there on the floor, dwarfed by the large room and the enormous quantity of Oliver’s things. When Oliver was alive, she and I had fought about the best way to care for him, but now there was no one else in the world who could understand how much I missed him, how hard it was to accept that he was gone. I went back, sat beside her, and put the package between us on the floor. I handed her the letter.
As she read, I tried to imagine the other letters, the ones that began Dear Sonia or Dear Oliver, and went on to dissect me. I felt like I’d joined a laughing crowd only to have a hush fall over them at my arrival, everyone looking away. After the day we argued about Sonia, Oliver had never mentioned her to me again. I’d never seen him writing her a letter, never come upon any replies from her in the mail. I prided myself on being a good liar. Why, then, was I amazed over and over at other people’s capacity for deceit?
Ruth looked up from the letter. To my relief, she didn’t ask for explanations. She said, “You don’t have to do it, you know.”
“He pulled out all the stops to make sure I would.”
“You could just mail it.”
I shook my head. As betrayed as I felt, I couldn’t bring myself to dismiss the last lines of the letter. I know you will not refuse me, he’d said. “I need the money,” I said.
“I could pay you whatever you would have made. For someone who lived the life of the mind, he actually left behind quite a bit of money.”
I took the letter back from her. “He said I had to go.”
“I know how much you hate to disappoint him,” she said quietly. “I know what that’s like. But now he’s dead. You can’t disappoint a dead person.”
My throat tightened. I certainly felt like I could. Rereading the letter, I heard Oliver’s voice as clearly as if he were in the room, giving me a set of instructions to follow—how to make a sandwich, how to interpret an event, how to deliver a package. When he wrote those words, he was still alive. We both looked at the package. “What do you think is in it?” I asked.
“Well,” Ruth said. “It’s smaller than a bread box.”
“It’s also smaller than an elephant.”
“Yes, but that’s imprecise. Better to say it’s smaller than a bread box.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s no bread in it,” I said.
Ruth picked up the package and turned it gingerly in her hands. “He said it’s a wedding present, right? It’s so light. Maybe there’s jewelry in it. Something like the ring he gave you.”
At this, I felt a surge of anger. “Or maybe it really is empty,” I said. I snatched the package back and gave it a good shake.
Ruth gasped, her hands flying up. “What if it’s fragile?”
“Then it’s broken.” I shook it again. A rustling and thumping. So Oliver hadn’t been lying—there was something inside, something for Sonia. “This is going to be awful.” I set the package down, gently now. My anger drained away as I began to worry that I had indeed broken something precious. “Why would he do this to me?”
Ruth didn’t answer. She was staring at the package, a half-smile playing on her lips. After a moment she said, “Because he was a bit of a bastard. Didn’t you know?”
I got Sonia’s number from information. A recording picked up—not even her voice, which I’d been braced to hear for the first time in eight years, wondering if I’d recognize it, but a hollow, computerized one. When I spoke, I sounded as strange and stilted as the recording. “Sonia, it’s Cameron. I’m bringing you a package from Oliver. I’ll be there in a few days.” I paused, and let the pause go on too long. I felt like I’d dialed the wrong number and somewhere a stranger was bent over an answering machine, listening to me breathe. I hung up without saying another word.
From the backseat of my car I retrieved my battered old atlas, which I hadn’t used since a back-roads trip to see a newly divorced friend in Sewanee, Tennesee, two years before. Ruth and I pored over it at the kitchen table, plotting my route. It looked to be about fifteen hundred miles, passing through seven states in three days. In spite of myself, I felt the stirrings of a certain familiar excitement—the anticipation of departure. I was not looking forward to the arrival in Boston, and I didn’t know where I would go after that. But I knew how good it would feel to be driving into darkness, singing along with Nebraska, alone in a traveling world. With moving, I have always been partial to the in-between, the blurred highway outside the window, that suspended time when everything you were lies behind you like a molted skin, and everything you might become shimmers at the horizon. You might choose anything and make it happen, constrained by nothing but your own imagination, sure that not even gravity can hold you.
Ruth tried to persuade me to wait a week or two. She said there was no need to pack all my things, that I could come right back and take my time moving out. But I knew, even if she didn’t, that once I was out of the house it would be anticlimactic if I returned. The single day I took to pack was far more time than was necessary, and so I paid many visits to the attic, looking over all the fragments of Oliver’s history I would never see again. On m
y last trip up, after some deliberation, I added the sad-eyed picture of Billie to my box of photos. When Ruth came over the next morning to say good-bye, I asked her if I could have the picture, and she said of course, she had no idea who the girl was. I didn’t tell her. My request inspired her to offer me many more things. I let her press on me a carved box from Russia, a small framed copy of a portrait of young Oliver, a first edition of his first book, the value of which she dismissed with a wave of her hand. She kept insisting that I wait one more moment; she was sure there was something else Oliver would have wanted me to take.
“I doubt it.” I did my best to smile. “It’s not like he wrapped anything up.”
She sighed. We stood at the open front door. It was already early afternoon. My car waited in the driveway, the trunk full, Sonia’s package in a place of honor on the passenger seat. I was anxious to go, rattling my keys in my hand just like my father always did. I could hear him saying, “We’re burning daylight!” If I didn’t get moving, I’d soon be jingling the coins in my pocket in imitation of him, whistling under my breath.
“I think,” Ruth said, “that it’s me I want you to take.”
I looked at her in surprise.
“My whole life I’ve lived here,” she said. She touched the doorframe as she spoke. “Sixty years in one town. Maybe that’s enough. Hell, I know it’s enough.”
“I just can’t imagine that, living in one place your whole life,” I said. “You might as well tell me you’re from another planet.”
She smiled. “I would consider you the space traveler. You and Daddy.” Her eyes went past me to the car, and for a moment she looked just like her father.
“Come on, then,” I said, at that instant meaning it. “Let’s go.”
She gave her head a regretful shake. “My dear,” she said, “I am surprised to find that I will miss you.”
I laughed. “Me, too.” I bent to hug her. Another surprise—she gave me a firm, lasting hug, not the uncomfortable one-armed embrace I expected.
“Good luck,” she whispered in my ear. She said it like there was much more at stake than the safe arrival of a package.
“Thank you,” I said, pulling away from the embrace. First she, and then I, said good-bye. It was a few short steps to my car, and then my home of the last three years was in the rearview mirror. As things always do, it grew smaller until it disappeared.
Two
8
About a month after her father’s death, Sonia and I are sitting in the common room of our suite. We’re seniors in college. I’m flipping channels, looking at her as each new show or movie appears, to see if there’s any change in the vacant expression on her face. Finally I find Dirty Dancing. This seems promising to me. Early in high school it was our favorite movie, and we watched it until we could quote lines—“Most of all I’m afraid of never feeling again the way I feel when I’m with you.” We practiced Baby’s dance steps, counting one-two-three, one-two-three.
“We used to love this movie,” Sonia says.
“Remember dancing up and down your stairs?”
“I remember your crush on Patrick Swayze.”
“That was you.”
She shoots me an amused look. “I’m not the one who had a shirtless poster on my wall.”
“I put that up for you,” I say.
“The sacrifices you’ve made.” She pats my leg. “What a friend.”
I feel encouraged, even more so when she sings along to “Love Is Strange.” Since her father died, it’s been so hard to know what to do, her grief like a fog we’ve both been lost in. Her father doted on her. He called her Princess, and when he looked at her his love was like a spotlight—it made her the brightest thing in the room. Now she seems caught up in the movie, and so I let myself pay attention to it and not to her. During the scene when Baby confronts her father, my eyes well—I’m a sucker for father-daughter scenes, especially the sentimental ones, alien to my own experience, which make me feel a weird kind of longing mixed with scorn. Normally I laugh this off, saying in a breathy, little-girl voice to the character on screen, “Oh, will you be my daddy?” Now as Baby begins to cry, I do, too. Embarrassed, I try to sniff quietly, glancing at Sonia to see if she’s noticed.
She’s not paying attention to me, her eyes riveted to the screen without seeming to see what’s on it. Her face is frozen in a mask of grief. I put my arm around her shoulders, but there’s nothing I can say. “I’m sorry” seemed used up even before the first time I voiced it. She doesn’t cry—she never cries—and so I feel like I’m crying for her. I rock her a little from side to side, patting her shoulder, like she’s the one in tears.
Later that night, drifting on the edge of sleep, I snap awake when Sonia speaks from her bed across the darkened room. “I wasn’t a baby,” she says. “I was a princess.”
I was neither. It’s hard to say whether that’s anything worth regretting. “I know,” I say.
She’s silent, and soon I’m almost asleep, so that in the morning I won’t be sure whether I really heard her speak again. She says, “Now I’m nothing at all.”
9
When you drive across country instead of flying you really know how far you’ve gone. You feel the miles roll away beneath you, and as each one disappears, propelling you that much farther from where you started, it’s easy to believe you’ve left behind not just a place but everything you felt there, even grief. On the road during the day I was nothing but forward motion. I was a rocket cutting through time and space, a sealed and impenetrable metal thing.
At night in the motel rooms it was different. The first night, I drove as late as I could, until I began to nod over the wheel. On an empty stretch of highway in Virginia, the only motel I could find had a horror-movie look. There were two beds in the shabby room, and in the center of one of them lay a knife. In the bathtub there was a strange red stain. I lay down on the other bed, fully clothed on top of the bedspread, but I had trouble sleeping, haunted by the thought that murders might have taken place there. I wanted only to be moving again, and when I finally did drop off I dreamed of trying to overtake another car around a mountain curve. Over and over again my car flew off the road, I hung in the air for a long moment, and then, as in a video game, the picture froze and the race began again.
The next night, somewhere in Delaware, I stopped earlier and found a better motel, generic and clean, but still I couldn’t sleep, this time because thoughts of Sonia and our impending meeting circled and circled in my mind. I couldn’t decide what would be worse—if she’d changed so much I’d barely recognize her, or if she hadn’t changed at all. I imagined that what I’d always considered the falser side of her had prevailed, the side that had been a cheerleader and a sorority girl. The man she was marrying was a grown-up frat boy, a lawyer or an investment banker who wore baseball caps on the weekend, made dumb-blonde jokes, and talked about his golf game. She’d be dressed like she was going to a country-club luncheon, in a sweater set and a string of pearls, and she’d kiss both my cheeks, flash me a cocktail-party smile, one that didn’t quite reach her eyes, and tell me that if I was at loose ends it was a perfect time for me to travel through France. Or perhaps the strain of maintaining her persona had become too much—rather than poised she’d be brittle and too thin, heavily made-up, a drinker of martinis with an uncertain laugh. She’d insist on how happy she was, how perfect her life was—she’d insist she was thrilled to see me, while again and again her eyes would dart past me to the door.
Then I imagined another Sonia, one who’d emerged from the part of her that worked at the college newspaper with me. This Sonia wore vintage clothes she spent hours scouring thrift shops to find. She’d abandoned her tinted contacts in favor of angular red glasses. She worked for a nonprofit organization or made documentary films. Her fiancé was thin and earnest, an artist of some kind, or a political activist. When I arrived she’d insist we go to a funky neighborhood bar that had local beer on tap, and after a couple of pints s
he’d want to talk, really talk, about what had happened to us. I populated my mind with a crowd of different Sonias—she was an advocate for kids with learning disabilities; she was a girlish dilettante with a father complex, marrying a much older man—but I knew that none of them was real. I was dividing her into her parts—forthright and secretive, insecure and confident—as though she wouldn’t still be all of those things.
Near dawn, I finally fell asleep, and dreamed that I was up in Oliver’s attic. I was sitting on the floor and crying, though in the dream it wasn’t clear to me why. The door opened, and Oliver and Sonia appeared. They approached me with serious expressions, making urgent gestures with their hands. I knew they were telling me something important, but I couldn’t hear them, and when I tried to tell them that, they just looked bewildered. They started talking to each other, and I knew they were talking about me. They seemed less and less aware of my presence, and as they receded from me I grew increasingly frantic to know what they were saying. But I couldn’t understand them. I couldn’t make them understand.
I didn’t find Sonia’s apartment until after dark. I’d gotten off to a late start, and then miscalculated the length of that day’s drive and spent too long in a Cracker Barrel, picking out candy-stick flavors in the country store after my meal. I chose root beer for Sonia, because it used to be her favorite. Back in the car I remembered that Sonia thought me detached and indifferent, not the sort of person who’d show up bearing candy, but the sort who’d hand her Oliver’s package, shrug off good-byes, and climb back into the car. Why bother trying to be nice? I might as well be what she expected. Stuck in traffic in New York, I ate the candy, every sugar-saturated, crunchy, sticky bite. “That’ll show her, huh?” I said to the package, still resting on the seat beside me. It had come to seem like a passenger over the long three days of the drive.