The Letters

by Luanne Rice

  She poured me some strong coffee, offered to add a shot of Irish whiskey “for some holiday cheer.” I said thanks anyway, but that she should go ahead—which she did. She told me to call her Eileen, and I said I was Hadley, and she said I was lucky to have caught her. She was just getting ready to clear out. Just as you said, she sold the business, and she and her daughter were heading to Idaho to spend Christmas with her sister.

  I asked her to tell me everything she could about Paul. You’re right about her being evasive. She talked around and around. How he’d been carrying too much stuff for the plane, they were over on the weight and he had to leave two bags behind.

  And Sam, how at the last minute he was uncertain about leaving his luggage—so he changed his mind, let some other young man take his place. She said that during the busy season it’s so hard to get a flight, the charter companies are booked up weeks, months in advance, and people jockey for planes.

  I asked her what other young man, asked her to show me the manifest. That’s when I saw the dishonesty you picked up on—she looked down, away, anywhere but at me. But then she stared straight into my eyes, dug into a box of papers she’d already packed. She pushed the register toward me and said,

  “Your son’s name is on the manifest, but he wasn’t on the plane.”

  And I looked, and there in his handwriting was his name, Paul West…I nearly sobbed at the sight.

  “That’s why I need the money,” she said. “Because…well, everything in this office hasn’t always been so aboveboard. Let’s say that not everyone who flew on a Kilkenny Charter filled out the proper paperwork. And once your son made up his mind not to fly, there was someone ready to take his seat…”

  I came right out and asked her. “Drug dealer?”

  She just shrugged again. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Then she grinned, said we both—you and I, that is—must like mysteries, she could tell by the questions you’d asked as well. I couldn’t respond because all I could think of was that Paul hadn’t gotten on the plane, soon I’d know why and where he was, soon I’d be hugging him the way I hugged you this morning…

  I heard her saying something about how she was going out on a big limb to tell me this, reveal the fact she’d broken federal aviation law by not filing proper documents…she’d reported Paul’s name after the plane crashed, and she’d go to jail if the truth surfaced. I gather it wasn’t the company’s first offense.

  So…that’s when I called my lawyer. He started to try to talk me out of it, at least until we investigated further, but I wouldn’t let him. It’s the holidays, and everything will be closed, and besides—Eileen’s flying down to see her sister. So he asked for her routing number, and I had him wire the money. Five thousand.

  I still owe her another five, but she said she could tell I was good for it. In fact, she said the two payments would work out in her favor—apparently any financial transactions ten thousand dollars or more are automatically reported to the IRS. She said she likes being “under the radar.”

  Okay, Sam. She didn’t just tell me something—she gave me something. One of the bags that wouldn’t fit on the plane. At first my heart sank—because I thought, well, if the reason Paul didn’t get on the flight was because his baggage wouldn’t fit, why wouldn’t he have taken the bag? But she said it was because he had to hitchhike to where he was going, and he didn’t want to carry it with him. He told her he’d be back.

  She led me to the storage room—amazing what people leave behind. She said she’d sold most of it on eBay, but there were still a few things left. An old golf bag containing a few battered clubs, a fishing creel, a wicker picnic basket, a child’s tricycle. And Paul’s backpack. His faded purple one, Amherst colors, with the little orange key ring clipped to the strap. I could barely breathe, thought I might pass out. Eileen started to support me, but I gestured her away. I wanted to be alone with his things…

  I opened it up—felt as if I were standing underwater. Pulled out his Block Island sweatshirt, a pair of worn-down Nike sneakers, a book of Gary Snyder poetry and Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, and three Sports Illustrateds, each issue featuring an article by his father. Including his favorite, your interview with Muhammad Ali, where Ali repeated that quote: “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.” He’d said it once before, in a different interview, but you got him to explain his philosophy in a way that never stopped resonating with Paul. That underscored why he came north after losing the baby, why he was on his way to the village—he knew he had to serve others for a while.

  There were other things—a notebook, a picture of Julie, one of me. One of Boing’s fur mice. Did Paul really take that mouse with him, or did you stick it in as a joke for him to find later?

  I admit being thrown by the fact he hasn’t returned to Kilkenny’s to pick up the pack, but wait till you hear where he went. You’re not going to believe it—I’m in complete shock myself.

  St. Luke’s Abbey.

  The Cistercians have a monastery in the native village Acush, on an island in Prince William Sound. He told Eileen he was going, and she helped him hitch a ride on a logging truck heading down to the ferry dock.

  I’m on the ferry myself right now. Forgive my writing—the water is choppy, and the boat is bouncing on the waves. I’m in the cabin; it’s very snug, and it comforts me to think of Paul taking this same voyage. I wanted to write you this letter instead of calling, because I know you’d try to get out of bed and come with me. I wish my motives were completely selfless—that I could tell you I’m thinking only of you and your health—but the truth is not so straightforward.

  I need to go there by myself, Sam. How do I say this? I want to believe so badly. She seemed honest—she has to be, right? There’s no way a person—a mother herself—could get our hopes up like this if the story were untrue. Part of me wants to protect you from disappointment if he’s not there. And if he is—which I have to believe—then I’ll find him and call you. It’s a more personal form of Pascal’s wager. Act “as if.” We have no way of knowing whether Eileen told the truth and Paul is at the abbey, but I’m impelled toward him as if he himself were calling for me. Nothing could keep me from taking this trip.

  Something else drives me as well. I told you that after so many years of no-faith, no-belief, I started praying again. I felt a bolt, a connection with God. All my childhood faith came flooding back, and more; memories of that visit to Gethsemani, in Kentucky…when I felt such peace and found my own heart and self again. And you know, the Trappists are Cistercians as well…it’s an ancient order, and it seems like no coincidence that Paul found his way to their only outpost in Alaska, especially after the trauma of losing the baby.

  Right now I feel as if we’re in the middle of a miracle. It’s almost Christmas—two more days. I’m so focused on Paul, I’d almost forgotten. You’re not religious, but you’ve always been so spiritual. You’ve always found meaning and beauty in love, nature, poetry, even in the grace you see in sports. We’ve been led here for a reason—to Alaska, this icy land, this place I’d thought had stolen our son, taken his life. And now it’s going to give him back.

  It’s already given me back my love for you, for us. We have each other again, and soon we’ll have Paul. Rest well, Sam…get better and know that we will see you soon.

  Hadley

  December 23

  Dearest Hadley—

  You are mine, aren’t you? It feels almost like a dream. And I am yours, never to leave again. That’s decided and it was always inside us. What fools we’ve been—what a reckless thing we almost did.

  I’m writing this sitting up in bed. My cough is better and I feel stronger by the hour. I don’t hate you, Hadley, for going to where you believe Paul must be. I love you for it. I worry that what you discover will break your heart. And it’s my heart now, again, always, and I need it whole and strong.

  I want to return your gift of poetry with a poem that I love. And I will. It i
s the saddest poem in the English language, one that is five hundred years old. It is about the death of a son and I found it shortly after Paul’s death. I didn’t share it with you before because it is a father’s poem for the death of his son. You’ll understand when you read it. I’ll close with it. Right now I am thinking of you, and your brave search, and I am sending you my love to protect you. But of course my love can’t protect you, as much as we would like to believe such things. We know that now. We know it more deeply, more truly than we can know anything. Our love could not protect Paul; his love could not protect Julie. Love is not a shield, or a guard. It’s the hand we give to each other, and we cannot live our lives holding on for balance. But the hand is there, waiting and willing the return, and the hand is never quite at rest without the other.

  I am getting mushy. I blame it on the medicine. Maybe I am still a little tired.

  It’s silly to be writing this, of course, but these letters brought us back together. So this is my last to you. I am writing it to tell you how I love you, how your body fits mine, how what has been broken is now mended. It is not a seamless repair; I wouldn’t want it to be. We are dented, scraped, more fragile than before. I wouldn’t trade those marks of our life together. We should never be afraid of them or embarrassed by them. I am proud that we did not let go. Perhaps it is Paul’s last gift to us, our son, who in his goodness reminded us of our own.

  This is your quest, Hadley. I cannot bring myself to believe Paul is alive, dearest. You are alone in that, and I would not for a moment permit my cynicism to color your search. He was your heart and I cannot ask you not to follow him.

  So much has happened in such a short time. Let me just tell you what I thought when you came through the gate at the airport. Would it surprise you to know that for the slightest instant I didn’t recognize you? A heartbeat, no more. Maybe that was the slight hesitation you observed. Then—you will think I am crazy—I saw you. But I saw you as I never have before. You were that college girl I met and courted so many years ago, the young mother who gave me a son, my lover, my mate, my friend, my enemy, my joy. Although the movies always portray such moments as high drama, that was not how I felt. I experienced, instead, a flush of pure contentment, pure knowledge that this person belongs in my life, and will always, and that we will not be separated again unless fate takes one of us. The metaphors are lousy—like an old friend, a slipper, a well-worn pair of jeans. Those images make my vision of you sound farcical and shopworn. No, you were the rising from the bed after illness, the garden loaded with fresh seed, the window wiped clean and fresh with vinegar and old newspaper. The sun in the window, the clock ticking, the jay calling, the kettle whistling. Everything, Hadley, and small things, and big things, and all things. That was your return to me.

  I have canceled the adjoining room.

  We have started to begin again, as some poet or song-writer said somewhere.

  Okay, the poem. It will make you sad. I found it in an old college textbook down in the basement some gloomy Sunday and I did not understand it at first. The opening two lines pierced me and I have kept them in my mind since Paul has been gone. Ben Jonson, a contemporay of Shakespeare’s, wrote it at the death of his seven-year-old son, Benjamin. It begins with him saying goodbye not only to his son, but to joy…all joy forevermore:

  Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

  My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.

  Then he says God lent him the child. The child died precisely on his seventh birthday…

  Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

  Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

  It concludes, sweetheart, by wishing his child soft peace. And he says in the final couplet that he, Ben Jonson, hopes never to risk his heart so profoundly again:

  For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such

  As what he loves may never like too much.

  Jonson wrote the poem in 1616 and you can hear the agony still. I loved Paul in every way a father can love a son. But I am not going with Jonson and abandoning my hope to love again. I will not say goodbye to love. Not while you are here. Not while you remain my wife.

  Sam

  December 24

  Dear Sam,

  Paul was at the monastery.

  That said, you were right about Eileen Kilkenny…I didn’t want you to be, but you were. She timed it well, too; I’m sure she’s far from Anchorage by now. I wonder if there’s really a sister in Idaho. I don’t suppose it matters. You’re at the Fairtown Motel, I’m on yet another island, in a different ocean, at St. Luke’s Abbey. The winds of Prince William Sound howl at the door. Except for chanting the hours, the monks here keep silence…they live like the early Desert Fathers, only instead of hot and arid desert sands, the land here lies buried beneath snow and ice.

  How do I tell you this? I know now that Paul is dead. I finally feel it, in a way I never could before. Surrounded by ice, everything in me has thawed. I couldn’t take that journey to the crash site as you did, with so much strength and courage. But I’m here in the far country where he died, and I feel his death. Because of a con woman, as motivated as she was by greed, I’ve been led to this place. Eileen did me a favor.

  I’m embraced by the wind and the feeling of more snow on the way, and the sound of the deep voices echoing from the chapel. It’s vespers, dark outside, candles burning in the windows. From my very spare room on the second floor I look outside, across a bare courtyard, and see silhouettes of the monks bowing in prayer. They know my story—I told the abbott—so I know they are praying for us. For Paul.

  Let me start at the beginning of my time here, tell you how I learned what I know. By the time I arrived on the island, late in the afternoon, I was even more churned up than before. Partly because of the ferry crossing—against the tide, and there were ice floes in the harbors at both ends of the trip, drifts bumping the steel hull as I sat in the cabin writing to you. It made me feel better, connected, writing you and imagining that Paul had been on the boat before me.

  There was a strong headwind. We had to angle into the island dock, and as I stood at the foot of the stairs on the vessel deck, I watched as the ferry’s bow reared up and down and up and down on the slate-gray sea before the crew members were able to finally, successfully throw the line to guys waiting on the dock. By the time I stepped onshore, I had such sea legs and was so overtaken by the idea of having started this journey at sea in the Atlantic, finishing it in the Pacific, on my way to find my lost son, my lost family, I was weeping, and I nearly kissed the ground. It’s true, Sam…I’ve been at sea. We both have, my love.

  A monk met the boat. He had a heavy work coat on over his cowl, his robe. Seems that the monks make cheese and fruit preserves, and he had a truckload of boxes to send over to the mainland. I watched him lift the cartons into the ferry’s hold, my heart pounding as I wondered whether he knew Paul, trying to gauge his age, which seemed to me about thirty.

  I tried to imagine Paul as a monk. I stared at the young man, watching him finish loading. He saw me there, came to me with a big smile on his face as if he knew I was waiting for him. He walked over to me, said hello. And I couldn’t do anything but say, “I’m looking for my son.”

  “Your son?” he asked.

  “Paul West,” I said.

  “I don’t know that name,” he said. He had such kindness in his eyes, as if he knew I had come a long way to ask about Paul, but he didn’t rush to fill the silence or ask me questions that might lead to a happier answer. And the strange thing was, I didn’t feel let down or disappointed or even slightly deterred. I was still holding on to Eileen’s words, her sureness about Paul’s destination being the abbey. I suppose I was thinking that maybe Paul had taken a religious name. Perhaps he had changed his identity, been led to let go of his old self, his old name. I didn’t care if or why he’d done such a thing—I just wanted to find him.

  “I’ll take you to the monastery,” the monk said sim
ply, opening the door of his pickup truck, helping me in. I was clutching Paul’s knapsack, and I saw his eyes light on it. This is strange, but in that single glance, I felt he saw everything: saw me, saw you, saw Paul, saw our lives together, saw the endless love I have for you and our son.

  He drove in silence, but it’s funny—he had the radio on, a rock station playing the kind of indie music Paul liked, and I couldn’t help but smile to think of this young man taking religious vows but still liking Morrissey and Coldplay, and all those bands Paul listened to. After a few miles I asked him his name.

  “Brother Matthew,” he said.

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Bellingham, Washington, originally,” he said.

  “And was your name always Matthew?”

  He shook his head and smiled. “I was born Jason. But that’s not a monk’s name.”

  “Thomas Merton was called Father Louis after he became a priest,” I said.

  “You know Merton?” he asked, and his eyes lit up. I nodded and smiled, because my point had been made—twice. Men sometimes changed their names when they joined the Trappists.

  “How long have you been a monk?” I asked.

  “I came to the abbey right out of college,” he said. He glanced over. “How old is Paul?”

  “He would be twenty-three,” I said.

  “Would be?” he asked, catching me.

  “Is,” I said.

  “He’s…you think he’s here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I wanted to describe him, ask Brother Matthew if he’d seen him, but something made me keep it to myself. I’m not sure why, but suddenly my voice wouldn’t work. We’d entered a village, and I stared out the window at the houses and buildings. It was a poor place—trailers and ramshackle cabins, some of them with satellite dishes in the yards, rusty cars parked at odd angles, smoke wisping out of every chimney into the opaque gray sky. We passed what was obviously a school—a square brick building with children’s pictures taped to the windows—and the town square, with a tall totem pole rising—it had to be thirty feet—with such fierce faces carved into the wood. At the very top was a bald eagle with a sharp beak, eyes painted bright red. The sight of that eagle filled me with fear—it reminded me that this is a brutal land.