Sadness took over me. I picked up the envelope and studied the drawings. I read them as though they were a map guiding me back to Yuri. The happiness and enthusiasm of his spirit lifted off the paper.
I had forgotten, up until that moment, that I had neglected to tell him to leave his envelope unsealed. At that time, I hadn’t had the heart to ask him to redo his art-filled envelope and had decided to just tuck his sealed envelope in with the rest of the letters from his graduating class. But now, as I held this letter in my hand, I wrestled with what to do.
I couldn’t bear to tear open the envelope and destroy any part of those drawings, images that were one of the few permanent memories that came from Yuri’s hands. And did this letter really belong to me? Was it mine to even read? All I could think about was Katya and Sasha. This envelope and whatever he had written inside were something that came from their beloved child. Didn’t they deserve to have it?
And yet I was paralyzed to send it to them.
I hadn’t spoken to Katya or Sasha since that terrible afternoon when, years earlier, her Russian words, angry and condemning, vaulted at me through the air. In another life, I would be able to call Katya on the telephone and tell her that I had something precious that she should have. But all the calls made after Yuri’s death had remained unanswered. How could I send a letter like this in the mail without letting her know it was on its way? The shock of receiving it would be unimaginable.
I pulled myself off the ground, pregnant and hot. I climbed up the basement stairs and found Daniel in the kitchen, replacing a burned-out bulb over the dinette table.
He took one look at me and knew something was upsetting me. “What’s wrong, honey?”
I lifted the envelope toward the stepladder, showing him the outside without letting him actually take it in his hand.
“It’s the letter Yuri wrote to his future self.”
“‘A Letter from the Past with a Message for the Future,’” he read aloud. “Oh, geez.”
“It’s the only one of the letters that’s sealed,” I told him.
He looked at the envelope in my hands. “If you want to read it, we could steam it open, Maggie,” he suggested softly. “We could still keep all the drawings intact.”
“But is it for me to read?” I started to shake as I stood there next to him. I felt my baby kick again; perhaps my heightened emotions were causing an increase in fetal movement.
“I don’t know,” he said gently. “But let’s go sit down and try to figure it out.”
I nodded and waddled over to the living room couch.
Daniel came over and nestled next to me, his large hand folding over my smaller ones, which still clasped the letter.
“Had you forgotten you even had it? You never mentioned it before.”
I was quiet. The truth was those letters from Yuri’s class were a time capsule. I always thought to myself that I still had years before I would have to mail them back. And, all of a sudden, this year his class was graduating.
“I’m paralyzed about what the right thing to do is, Daniel,” I said, my voice shaking. “Maybe if I was already a mother, I’d have more confidence.”
“You could call your mom, Maggie. Ask her what she thinks you should do.”
He tightened his grip around my fingers, and I felt another kick inside.
“Baby thinks that’s a good idea,” I said, lifting myself off the couch. I went upstairs to make the call.
70
“I think you need to let her know you have the letter, sweetheart,” my mother told me. “But I also think you don’t need to do that tonight or even this week. If anything, I think it’s better if you wait. I’m sure she’s already suffering knowing that his former classmates are all graduating this week. In the paper, they even mentioned some of the great colleges that many of the students are going to.”
I knew she was right. I had seen a profile in Newsday that Finn had been accepted to Columbia on a scholarship, and I had made a mental note to write and congratulate him.
“Why don’t you hold off a week or two and then reach out to her? You can leave a message and tell her that you have something that was written by Yuri and that she might want it . . .”
“But I don’t know what’s inside, Mom. What if it’s something that will upset her?”
My mother was silent for a moment. “I have to believe, honey, that there isn’t anything in the world I wouldn’t want that was written by the hands of my child. And if I had ever lost you”—her voice broke—“I’d want it even more.”
* * *
• • •
I had always planned on bringing the letters to school on the last day so the other teachers could look at them first and we could share our memories of the kids together.
I would keep private the fact that I had Yuri’s letter, showing the envelope only to Suzie because I knew she would be touched to see the beautiful drawings he had done on his envelope.
In the faculty room, Florence marveled at Lisa Yamamoto’s paper cranes, and Suzie reminded me how Oscar once spilled glue all over the floor and sealed one of Jackie’s shoes to the ground. Everyone remembered Finn with great fondness, and Angela remarked how wonderful it was that he was off to Columbia in the fall.
After all the letters were read, I licked the envelopes and sealed them, bringing them back to my classroom to mail them later that afternoon.
My room looked painfully bare now. All the decorations had been taken down, I had returned the last papers to the students, and their writing journals were probably still in their backpacks. Most of them would likely throw theirs out when they got home, thrilled to put all the past year’s work behind them and eager to begin their summer vacation.
It was hard to believe I wasn’t coming back in the fall. I had elected to stay home for the first year of my baby’s birth. Fortunately, Mr. Nelson had already hired my substitute teacher, Katherine, a twenty-four-year-old fresh out of graduate school who had been shadowing me most of the past week and could hardly contain her excitement that she’d gotten a full-time teaching position for the year. Looking at the packed-up boxes around me, I could tell she had made herself useful while I was reading the letters in the faculty room.
As I started to throw some more pens and Post-it pads into one of the bins, I heard Suzie’s voice suddenly emerge.
“Do you want to go to McCann’s and get an iced tea?” She looked at her watch. The kids had had an early dismissal, and it was now one thirty.
“Why not?” I looked around my classroom. I was in good shape thanks to Katherine. The walls were now bare. I had even taken down the large butterfly I had taped behind my desk and packed it gently away. The butterfly was something I had vowed to do every year after befriending Florence, as a reminder to myself just how important this job was.
“That’s my girl! It’s too beautiful a day to waste it inside, and you look like a dream in that blue dress.” Suzie bubbled over with excitement. I smiled at her. I had always loved the happy feeling her own outfits had transmitted over the years. If my dress was the sky, her watermelon top and lawn-colored capris were certainly channeling the impending summer.
“Let’s go. There isn’t anything here that can’t wait until we get back.”
71
THE large iced tea with extra sugar had given me the boost I needed to transfer the last bit of my classroom items to my car. Suzie and I walked back to Franklin with big smiles on our faces.
“You’ll have to come out to visit me and Joe in Montauk after the baby is born,” she insisted. They had been dating for three years, and I knew she was hoping they’d get engaged soon. “I still can’t believe that kid of yours will be here in mid-July.”
“He could come sooner,” I joked, patting my enormous stomach. Inside, I felt my baby move. His internal gymnastics had become constant at this point. Sometim
es I felt as if he were going to literally kick himself out of my stomach.
“I’d like it if he came sooner. I feel like I’ve been pregnant along with you from the moment you took that First Response test.”
What she said was true. She had been the fourth person I called. First Daniel, then my parents. Then Suzie. She had been my biggest cheerleader all along.
* * *
• • •
WE split up halfway down the hallway. “I’ll come by your room before I leave,” she promised. I smiled and waved before dipping back into my classroom.
I walked over to my desk and immediately felt that something was different, that something was clearly missing. I glanced over my desk blotter and saw that the pen holder I had emptied of all its contents an hour before was still there. But all the letters and Yuri’s envelope were gone.
Panic swept through me. I opened every drawer in my desk and looked all around the room. Then I searched a second time, repeating in my mind every one of my movements since I had returned from the faculty room. I scoured the windowsill where I sometimes left my papers, behind the bookshelves, and around and under the children’s desks.
But nowhere could I find the letters or envelope.
I began to think I had lost my mind. I patted the space on the desk where I had last seen them. I rummaged through every box, thinking maybe with my pregnancy brain, I had inadvertently placed them inside one of them. But I was still unable to find them anywhere. The letters had vanished without a trace.
Suddenly, as I was crouched on my knees, looking beneath my desk one last time, my belly nearly pushing against my chin, I heard a voice in the room.
“Maggie, I just wanted to tell you . . .” It was Katherine, the young substitute teacher who was replacing me in the fall. She was standing in the threshold, thin and beautiful in her tangerine-colored summer dress, her long chestnut hair gleaming. “I mailed those letters that were on your desk. I was heading to the post office anyway, so I sealed them and mailed them for you.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “What?”
“I thought I’d save you a trip to the post office.” She pointed to my oversize belly. “I wanted to give you one less thing to do . . . I know how much you have on your mind.”
“But . . . ,” I stammered, trying to process what she had just said. “You mailed them, Katherine? All of them?”
“Yes.” She looked at me, radiant and confident. She truly believed she had done a good deed.
“All of them?” I said it again. I could barely get the words out. I thought I was going to faint. “Even the envelope that was off to the side of the rest of them?”
“Oh, you mean the one with all the cute baseball drawings? Yeah, that one, too.”
I immediately went pale, and my knees felt weak. All I could think of was that she had mailed Yuri’s letter before I had a chance to alert Katya.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” I said, my voice cracking. I grabbed my purse and rushed out the door to find Suzie.
72
“WE need to get Yuri’s letter back,” I insisted to Suzie, frantically imagining Katya opening her mailbox and unexpectedly seeing the letter with Yuri’s handwriting and drawings on the outside.
“Katherine thought she was doing me a favor, but she mailed all the letters, including Yuri’s.” I was hyperventilating. “Jesus . . . Suzie, what am I going to do?”
“You need to calm down.” Suzie gripped my shoulders and looked straight into my eyes. She took a tissue from her sleeve and blotted my tears.
“Now you just need to breathe. We don’t want anything happening to that baby of yours.”
My eyes filled with tears. “Just help me make this right, Suzie. I can’t cause any more pain to that family. I just can’t . . .”
“First off, Maggie, this was an accident, so stop blaming yourself.” She sucked in her breath. “Now I could just kill that toothpick, goody-two-shoes Katherine . . . Those goddamn first-year teachers are always trying to outdo us veterans.” Suzie was doing her best to make me laugh.
“You and I both know she thought she was helping me out.”
“And look how that worked out . . . But seriously, I have a buddy, Jack, who works at the post office. We’re going to call him right now and see if he can pull some strings for us.”
I tried to slow down my breathing. I didn’t want to put any unnecessary stress on my baby, but the sense of panic was flooding through me. I couldn’t get the image of Katya and Sasha out of my mind.
* * *
• • •
SUZIE pulled her cell phone from her purse and flipped it open, dialing the number of her friend.
“The letter’s government property from the moment it leaves your hand and enters that box,” Jack told her. “You will never be able to get it back. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”
“Can’t you call in a favor?” she begged. “Please.”
“I wouldn’t just lose my job,” he answered. “We’d all probably go to jail, too.”
* * *
• • •
AFTER Suzie hung up, she pulled up one of the art stools and sat down next to me.
“You told me you were going to reach out to Katya and tell her about the letter.”
“I was . . .” I dabbed my eyes with the tissue. “But I was going to wait until after graduation week . . . I knew it was going to be a really hard time for her.”
“Maybe this was meant to be, Maggie,” she said, forcing herself to make sense of it all. “The letter needed to be sent, and this accident just set it in its rightful motion.”
“I can’t bear the thought of her seeing it without any warning. You have to imagine what this will be like for her. The letter will be arriving in his twelve-year-old handwriting, with his drawings of stick-figure players and baseball diamonds. And even more upsetting, the letter is written to himself about his future . . . but he never got to have a future, Suzie. He was robbed of it.”
Suzie was silent for a moment. Her hands reached for mine, and at her touch, my baby kicked again. “Do you want me to make the call for you?”
I loved her so much at that moment. She would have done it in a heartbeat for me, I knew it. But it wasn’t her call to make. As difficult as it was going to be, it had to be mine.
73
I dialed the Krasnys’ number slowly. I hung up the first time midway and then tried one more time to complete it in full. When the phone finally began to ring, I became so sick to my stomach, I thought I was going to drop the receiver on the floor.
Katya picked up, the sound of her voice pulling me back to the past. “Hello?”
The words halted in my throat for a second, but then I finally pushed them out.
“Mrs. Krasny, it’s me, Maggie Topper.”
“Maggie?” I could hear the surprise in her voice.
“I am sorry to bother you,” I began.
“You’re not bothering me, Maggie,” she said softly.
“It’s terrible it’s been so long since you heard from me.” My voice started to shake. I began to apologize for the last time I had visited them, and said that I felt that I had intruded upon them when they were still coping with their grief. I told her that I had never stopped thinking about Yuri, and her and Sasha, too. And only after I said all that did I tell her about the letter that had just been put in the mail.
She was quiet for what seemed like several minutes.
“Maggie, I would have wanted to see it. I want to read his words.”
I began to cry on the phone, but she asked me to stop. “Please,” she said, her voice almost stern. “No more tears. If you start now, I won’t be able to stop.” A painful blade of silence emerged between us. I stumbled to find the right words to fill the space.
Katya, though, found them firs
t. “Why don’t you come for tea next week? It’s been too long, and by then I will have received the letter.”
Her words were a huge relief for me. I knew the letter would probably be in her mailbox by tomorrow or the day after at the latest, so we made a date for the following Tuesday.
* * *
• • •
A few days later, as I drove the once-familiar back roads to their house, my mind flooded with memories of my year with Yuri. His face flashed in front of me. The bright blue eyes. The infectious smile. I had some difficulty remembering the sound of his voice, but I could recall with ease the memory of his laughter, the way its vibrations could immediately lift my spirits.
As I neared the Krasnys’ house, I noticed three older boys playing street hockey. But when I pulled closer to the curb, I saw the small figure of a little girl in a pink tutu twirling on the grass, her slender arms swaying above her.
Katya was sitting on the steps outside the house, watching the girl, who looked to be close to three years old. Her eyes immediately struck me, for they were neither sad nor happy, but rather strangely calm. As though this was just another moment for her to soak in—like a ray of sunlight—to store for a rainy day.
74
THE house seemed different when I entered it. In the corner, where Yuri’s chair used to be, was a pile of My Little Ponies and a box of pink and white plastic toys. Katya already had a pot of tea and a plate of cookies waiting for us on the small table by the sofa, just like she had when I used to visit years before.
The little girl came and sat down between us.
“This is Violet,” Katya said as she pulled her into her arms and buried her nose in the girl’s wispy blond hair.
The Secret of Clouds Page 28