The Letter Keeper

by Charles Martin

  This whole thing is a cyclical downward spiral. We can’t protect us. Fear would suggest we can, but fear is a liar. Always has been.

  While I’d written my way through and out of my pain, stories that had resonated with millions, I’d never invited anyone to walk down into my basement with me. Which was what I needed. I’d simply adorned it. Made it pretty. But as in Pharaoh’s tomb, the body was still dead. My life’s work, everything I’d done with pen and paper, had brought attention to the fact that I, unlike many men, could talk about my pain. This alone had brought great accolades and praise to the mysterious and still unknown writer of my books, but here’s the unwritten truth: If a man has a telephone pole stuck through his chest, just pointing it out does nothing to remove it. He doesn’t need you to sit alongside and empathize. “I know that must hurt. I’m here with you . . .” That’s total horse crap. The man needs surgery. And quickly. Otherwise he’ll bleed out, if he hasn’t already.

  Summer knew this, as she intuitively knew most everything about me. So as we walked down a candlelit path en route to a seated dinner, she turned left, held up a finger, said, “Wait right here,” and disappeared. A moment later, Angel appeared through the same door, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “She’ll see you now, Padre.”

  I pushed open the door and found Summer standing in front of a mirror. Fussing with her hair. A second dress hanging beside her. The intoxicating residue of her perfume hanging in the air. I stood looking nervously over my shoulder, not quite sure what to do with my hands. She read me and pointed toward the room full of people. “They can wait. It’s our reception.” She handed me a slender box about the size of a sheet of paper, covered in gift wrap and tied with a ribbon. “Open it.”

  “I thought we agreed not to exchange gifts.”

  She nodded. “We did.”

  “Can’t believe I fell for that.”

  While I fumbled with the ribbon, she lifted her hair off her shoulders and said, “Unzip me.” Then pointed at her wedding dress. “Can’t dance in this thing.”

  I did as instructed and then returned to the gift. Inside the box, I found an 8.5” x 11” ebony picture frame. No picture. No glass. It was simply a smooth, see-through wooden frame. I studied it like a monkey staring at a Rubik’s Cube.

  Laughing, she said, “Hold it up.”

  When I did, my eyes focused on the image through the frame.

  She smiled. “Stop moving it around.”

  Centered in the frame stood Summer. Her dancer’s body laid bare. On stage yet shared with a singular audience—me. The only thing she wore was the cross I’d bought her. Both my jaw and my arms dropped, which brought another giggle out of her. She shook her head, saying, “Nope,” and reached forward and lifted my arms. “Keep ’em up.”

  I tried.

  She walked closer. Then she just stood. Unashamed. Unafraid. Unfiltered.

  She whispered, “You’re blushing.”

  I nodded and swallowed. “Yes, I am.”

  She placed her thumbs on both of my temples. “Before we go any further . . . in that room . . . with those people . . . in our life . . . I want to replace the pictures”—she tapped both sides of my head and tilted hers just slightly—“rolling around in here. I want to give myself to you, before I give myself to you.”

  Her skin was warm and soft. Another swallow. I managed, “Mission accomplished.”

  She lifted the ebony frame, focusing my eyes once again through it, and then stepped back and twirled. Once. Then twice. She half turned. “You good?”

  I shook my head. “Not really.”

  Sweat misted on her temple and across the top of her breast. I handed her my folded handkerchief, which she used to dab the sides of her face and top lip. She eyed the unwrinkled and spotless white cloth, reading the date and our names. “You do this all by yourself?”

  I shook my head. “Clay.”

  She laughed. “Love that man.” Another twirl as she clutched my handkerchief. “You starting to get the picture?”

  Music and laughter from the reception spilled through the walls. “You don’t actually expect me to eat dinner with these people now, do you?”

  “And dance.”

  She turned, pressed her body to mine, and kissed me, her hands hanging behind my head. “I can’t compete with your past. No woman can. It’s been there too long, and to make matters worse, you immortalized it in books that are now in every civilized country in the world. In maybe the most beautiful way imaginable—of which I’m your biggest fan—you idealized a painful reality. And because of your magnificent words, and a heart that is bigger than this body, we all love Marie, and I love you all the more for it. But”—she laid her hand flat across my heart—“we cannot start the rest of our lives staring through the rearview mirror of that life. So, rightly or wrongly, I brought you here to push pause for just a moment and give you a glimpse of me with”—a laugh—“all my cellulite and wrinkles, and my dancer’s body, which lacks some things men find attractive, before we walk in there.” She held my face in her hands. “I brought you here to give you an unedited image into our future that, I hope, drowns out the written, rewritten, and edited echo of the past.”

  “There’s that word again.”

  She closed her eyes. “Which one?”

  “Hope.”

  She nodded. Waiting.

  I stood in wonder. “I don’t see any cellulite.”

  She pointed above us. “It’s the lighting.”

  “Or wrinkles.”

  She pressed her forehead to mine. Exposing the risk she was taking in this moment. When Summer had stolen the boat and set off down the Intracoastal, full throttle, in search of her runaway daughter, she did so while unable to swim. Driven by love, she risked the consequences. Even death. Here and now, she was risking her heart to rescue another.

  Me.

  Summer had rescued me.

  Her heart was pounding and a single vein throbbed on the flush of her neck. When the sweat dried across her chest and chill bumps rose on her arms, I realized what this moment had truly cost her—and I loved her all the more for it. She whispered, “Good answer.”

  I was wrong about one thing. While a deep need in each of us is to know and be known, there is one deeper. One that undergirds everything else. It’s the stuff of us. Out of it, we breathe, or not. We wander the earth like shipwrecked castaways, intersecting other island dwellers, and when we meet them, we hold ourselves out in offering and grant them a chance to accept or reject us. With our souls held together with twine and tape and glue, we bounce from rejection to rejection until we find the one who accepts us.

  This is the thirst of the human soul, and only one thing satisfies it: to be accepted in the knowing.

  Prior to that night, I’d not laughed that much in all my entire life put together. We danced until my feet blistered. Toward the end of the night, as I sat soaked in my own sweat staring at Clay dance with a dozen Broadway dancers at once, I realized what Summer had done. What she’d pulled off. Single-handedly. She’d created a reception at which I—a man who can easily get wrapped up in his own mind—never thought about my first marriage. Not once. I never equated this with that. And it wasn’t as if she buried it or shied away from it. She did no such thing. She just celebrated us in this moment, and in so doing didn’t compete with my past.

  It was like being married for the first time. A priceless gift. One I could not repay.

  At midnight, just moments before Clay drove us in the golf cart to the plane that would take us on our honeymoon, Bones gave me the sign. My turn to toast my wife. I tapped my glass with a fork and waited while the audience quieted. Behind me, the band played softly. Not one for long speeches, I did not plan one here: “It’s winter outside. Supposed to drop to single digits tonight.” I turned to Summer, who stood glowing. A glass in one hand. My handkerchief in the other dabbing the corner of her eye. “Thank you for throwing your blanket over me, for without it, I would have grown cold.”
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br />   I lifted my glass aloft and said, “To Summer.”

  Only then did I smell the smoke.

  Chapter 30

  Bones and I were the first out the door. Below us, a quarter mile away, flames climbed out of the Planetarium and one corner of the hospital. The children’s ward.

  Gunner and I hit Main Street at a dead run. A minute later, I screamed at Gunner, “Stay! Do not go in that building!”

  He did not obey me.

  I ran through the hospital door and up the stairs, where five or six members of our security team were lugging coughing, smoke-charred children via fireman’s carry. Most men carried two children. Kids connected to IV medications either carried their clear bags or their lines had been cut and hastily tied like umbilical cords.

  I reached the third floor, where the heat was intense and smoke burned my eyes and lungs as I followed the screams and sounds of breaking glass from room to room. I lifted two crying kids off their beds and carried them out and into the snow before I realized that the emergency and redundant sprinkler systems had not put out the fire. What’s taking so long? Where is the sound of sirens? Nothing made sense.

  Returning inside, I passed Clay carrying three kids. One in each arm and one on his back. “Clay! Stay out of this building!”

  He laughed as he passed me, his grizzly paws tenderly cradling a toddler in each hand. “Not likely.” Something had torn his tux and his shoes would never recover.

  I helped the security team clear the fourth and fifth floors before Bones found me. I screamed, “Bones! What is going on? Where’s the—”

  He caught his breath. “This is planned, choreographed, and it’s occurring in—” He was in the process of getting the word stages out of his mouth when the first explosion occurred. Followed quickly by a second. Then a third higher up. He pulled me by my jacket, nearly yanking my feet out of my dress shoes. “We’ve got to get you out of here!”

  “But—”

  “Now!”

  I tried to grab Clay’s arm as we passed on the balcony of the second floor, but he turned and said, “One more room. Be right out.”

  Bones and I landed on the ground floor and had cleared the front door when, for the second time in less than a year, I do not remember the blast that rocketed me from the earth. The last image to pass across the lens of my eyes before someone turned out the lights was that of Bones.

  His robes were on fire.

  And this time, Clay would not pull me from the wreckage.

  Debris was still falling from the sky when I came to. I climbed to one knee, then my feet. While I could see people’s mouths moving, I couldn’t hear them. The world had gone quiet. Whether temporarily or permanently, I did not know.

  Bones had made it to his knees. He was bleeding from a gash in his head and his robes were still on fire. I launched myself at him and rolled him in the snow. “Where’s Clay?”

  Bones pointed at what remained of the building.

  I ran back in.

  Clay lay crumpled in a pile when I got to him. Folded up like a bag of sticks. I lifted his smoking and broken body and carried him back down the stairs and out the door, setting him gently in the snow. His eyes were staring above me, but the light was fading and his breathing was shallow.

  I held him until the paramedics arrived. When they did, they quickly assessed him as a LifeFlight priority and moved him to the helipad, leaving me standing in the street watching the lights of the ambulance fade and feeling something strange inside the palm of my hand. When I uncurled my fingers, I found Clay’s pocket watch, which was no longer ticking.

  The town stood in a fiery chaos. People were running everywhere. To my left, Bones stood with members of our security team. I’d never seen his face so pained. So contorted. He turned to me. “I need to show you something.”

  Chapter 31

  Security and surveillance of Freetown occurred in one of three dens, as we called them. Triangulated in strategic points around town, they served as both lookout and bunker with enough computers and screens to run Microsoft or Google. They were placed in such a way that the guys working in them could come and go without anyone knowing it. Sort of like how they run Disney World. You know there’s a person in that suit; you just don’t know how they got in there or where they came from. Bones led me to the nearest den, where a bunch of smoke-charred men were busily studying video feeds from our close-captioned cameras.

  Eddie, our lead IT tech, brought up a series of videos showing a progression from the reception, to Main Street, to the hospital. Each video was accompanied by a time-lapse depicted across the bottom, which allowed him to arrange them in a grid to show what was going on in the reception at the same time people were walking Main Street.

  The montage began inside the reception hall with my toast of Summer. You could see the bubbles rising in my glass and the sweat on Summer’s face. Every few seconds she’d dab the corners of her eyes with the handkerchief. The second set had been captured by cameras mounted on light poles along Main Street, which had recorded our full-speed run toward the hospital. The third camera had been above the hospital door and captured our running in and out of the hospital. My eyes quickly focused on Clay. At last count, he’d made five trips in and either carried or led twenty-one people to safety. In the last video, he disappeared through the front door where he passed me and said something while laughing. The next video, shot from inside the stairwell, recorded his shadow followed by the explosion.

  Finally, Eddie clicked a series of keys and exchanged the videos for a series of heat-signature shots showing the mountains and trails around Freetown. Our perimeter. In the previous three days, the cameras had recorded some mule deer, a few elk, several black bears, and our team patrolling. This meant no one had slipped under the wire.

  Whoever had done this had come through the front door.

  I asked Eddie to rewind to the reception and focus on the girls. Ellie, Angel, and Casey stood together a few feet from us. Summer next to me. He slowed the video as I ran out into the street, the girls following close behind me. Then Main Street. Still they were behind me, each of their dresses flowing as they ran. A block from the hospital, I exited one frame and then entered another and finally into the hospital. The next video recorded something I had not known—the girls never hesitated. They followed me into the burning building, a contrast of dress, glitter, and flame. When I hit the stairwell, I’d climbed to the second floor. They had turned right and run toward the nursery where, unbeknownst to us, fire had already disabled the cameras.

  Minutes elapsed as Clay and I and others ran in and out. More and more smoke poured from the building. And no matter how many times I watched that video, Ellie, Angel, Casey, and Summer never reappeared.

  They never exited the hospital.

  Which meant they were still inside.

  I walked out of the den and down to the hospital, which was being showered in spray from three trucks and two teams of men on their knees bracing hoses fed by red street hydrants. Above us, black smoke spiraled upward and mixed with the lighter water droplets, some of which would freeze and fall, melting into black water on my skin.

  After a minute, I sensed Bones standing next to me. Tears running down his face.

  I’d never felt more pain in my entire life.

  Chapter 32

  Despite the pain, Bones and I had to wrestle with one question immediately: What should we do with everyone else in Freetown? Their safety was now priority number one. What if they were next? We couldn’t guarantee they were not. Bones scanned the girls huddled in groups. Crying. Shaking. Holding each other. He asked without looking at me, “Do we move them?”

  “The Bunker?”

  He nodded. “I don’t know what’s worse, the threat of abduction or the psychological damage that will occur if we move them through the night into a granite black hole in the middle of nowhere.”

  Ideally, we needed time to acclimate them to the Bunker. Take them up on weekends, treat it lik
e a retreat center, let them personalize their rooms, bowl in the underground alley, swim in the pool, pile into the theater and watch sappy romance movies. The more we could familiarize them with it, the less shock it would be to their systems and the easier it would be to evacuate if needed. Obviously, we had not done any of that.

  “I say no. It’s too much too soon. We have to hunker down here. If we drag them up there in the cold of night, dressed in their pajamas, only to parade them single file into a sterile hole in the side of a mountain with no windows and only one way out, I’m pretty sure we’ll trigger some dormant PTSD. The damage could be a long time cleaning up.”

  Bones nodded. “Agreed, but we’ve still got the problem of protecting them. I say we circle the wagons. Gather them all in one place. A giant slumber party where they can gain emotional strength in numbers and not fear the bad man they can’t see.”

  Over the next few hours, we moved mattresses and pillows and blankets and turned the floor of the gymnasium into one giant bed. And then we surrounded it with armed men. Some you could see. Most you could not.

  When finished, the POTUS was not so heavily guarded.

  By midmorning, the firemen had contained and turned the fire, which had burned too intensely throughout the night to allow any kind of search. When the sun broke the snowcapped peaks, I stood staring at the charred steel beams of the hospital—a cup of coffee in my hands and a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Bones’s face mirrored concrete. He spoke over me. “Clay is . . .” He swallowed and his voice cracked. “On a ventilator. They don’t think he’ll . . .”

  It would be late afternoon before our guys could bring in dogs and a forensics team to safely sift both the rubble and the fumes without danger of a secondary explosion. I sat on the hillside and watched the dogs as my mind replayed the evening’s events. I could not make sense of my emotions, so my mind began trying to solve a problem—the underlying fact that none of our systems had registered an alarm. Despite one programmed redundancy after another, we had no warning, no detection, and no sprinkler response. Hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on the best system known to man and yet it detected nothing.