Look Closely

by Laura Caldwell

  I couldn’t stand thinking like that. I had to find her and figure out the real story. That was the simplest route to answering the nagging questions in my head. And it was time, after all, just as I’d told Della. So I kept reading. Five years after that first letter from Crestwood Home, Caroline wrote Della that she had left Connecticut and moved to Portland.

  I’m crazy about this city. I have no money, but I don’t care. I’m going to school at some crappy community college to get an accounting degree. On the weekends, I head to Mount Hood or Tillamook where I can hike or swim or just sit outside by myself. I finally feel like I’ve gotten past my problems. I feel like I can move on with my life.

  A year later, Caroline wrote that she had gotten a job at an accounting firm. They’re paying for part of my school, can you believe it? And they’ll hire me full-time when I graduate!

  In November, a few years after that, she wrote that she was still at the accounting firm, that she liked it very much, and best of all she’d met someone special.

  His name is Matt Ramsey, and Della, you would adore him as much as I do. He’s the kindest, most gentle soul you’ve ever met, and you know what? He loves me, too. He loves me like crazy. Sometimes I can’t believe it, and sometimes I think it will all fall apart the way everything else did, but I’ve learned how to get myself past those thoughts, and so most of the time I’m just content. That’s a word I’d never think to apply to myself. But there it is.

  The next letter on the stack wasn’t actually a letter, but a wedding announcement that appeared to have been printed on a home computer.

  Caroline and Matt Ramsey are pleased to announce that they made it official on August 12.

  Below that, a new address was listed, and Caroline had handwritten:

  Dear Della,

  Sorry I didn’t tell you about this ahead of time, but it was just us and a few friends on the mountain. I’m sending you a picture.

  Miss you, Caroline.

  No mention of any parents, I noticed. I wondered if my father had received one of these, if he had studied it, silently, while I was in the other room.

  I flipped the announcement over. Fixed to the back with a pink paper clip was a photo. I unclipped it and raised it to my face, and there was Caroline, a little older but not much different than I’d remembered. She was standing, holding a bouquet of wildflowers, wearing a loose ivory cotton dress. The hair around her face was streaked blond from the sun, the same way mine got in the summer. She was tilting her head to one side, and the man behind her, who must have been Matt Ramsey, had leaned in and put his face next to hers. They were both smiling broadly, with smiles in their eyes, as well. Matt had longish, thick brown hair and brown eyes under bronze wire glasses. One of his hands was squeezing Caroline’s bare arm, his new gold wedding band glinting in the sun.

  Matt looked kind, I thought, and very much in love with my sister. I felt a rush of happiness for both of them, for the sister who had gone off to boarding school alone and then on to some clinic. I continued looking at the picture, at Caroline in particular, silently asking, “Do you know what happened? Did you have anything to do with it?” But now, faced with the picture of Caroline’s adult face, rather than the vague image of her teenage self, I found it harder to place on Caroline the suspicion I’d been so quick to adopt.

  I read the last of Caroline’s letters. There were only a few more, and they were usually brief, telling Della about her job at the accounting firm or how she and Matt had gone rafting or skiing or camping over the weekend. The return addresses on the last letters were all the same, on Northeast Jarrett in Portland.

  Caroline could be at her home in Portland right now. The last letter had been written over a year and a half ago, but she could easily still live there. She might be sitting in the sun, too. She might be in her backyard, her husband at her side, and she might be pleased, excited even, to hear from the little sister she hadn’t seen in over twenty years. Or she might not.

  I went back and forth, reminding myself how miserable Caroline had seemed in her letters until she’d moved to Portland and married Matt, until she’d gotten past her problems, as she put it. And so maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of any part of her old life. Maybe it would cause some kind of setback in her mental condition, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that. Yet at the same time, I found it harder and harder to be still, knowing a phone sat only twenty feet away. If I couldn’t find the number from Portland Information, I could search the Web, or I could get databases of addresses and phone numbers from my Internet clients and search those, as well.

  I took the letters and photograph inside and sat down at the small desk. I picked up the phone, the plastic of the receiver cool against my hand. The line seemed to ring interminably. I stared at the pile of letters on the desk, Caroline’s tiny handwriting blending into a series of small loops and slashes as I gazed unblinkingly. Finally, the pleasant voice of a woman answered, and I gave her the names of Caroline and Matt Ramsey in Portland, Oregon, on Northeast Jarrett Street.

  “Checking,” the woman said.

  There was a long pause, during which I heard the clicking of a keyboard through the phone.

  “Yes,” the woman said at last. “I have an M. Ramsey on Northeast Jarrett.”

  In the middle of the first ring, the phone was answered, snatched up it seemed, and a gruff male voice said, “Hello?”

  I was startled by the quick answer. “Um…is this Matt Ramsey?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?” Again, the man was abrupt, and this surprised me. I glanced at the picture of Matt and Caroline that I held in my hand. I had expected someone kind, someone gentle like the man my sister had written about.

  “This is…” I faltered for a second, wishing I’d taken more time to plan what I would say. It seemed ludicrous to say, Hello, this is your wife’s sister who she hasn’t talked to in at least twenty years. But there was no easy way, so I just said my name.

  “Excuse me?” It was Matt who sounded startled now.

  “I’m Hailey Sutter. Are you married to Caroline?”

  “Yes.”

  I ran my finger over the photo of Caroline as if I could smooth the fold of my sister’s dress where it creased at her shoulder. “I’m her sister. Is she there? Could I talk to her?”

  Matt let out a laugh that sounded bitter. “She was making you a quilt.”

  “What?” I couldn’t be sure I had heard him right.

  “She was making you a quilt. She’s been going to these lessons for years. It takes her forever to get a square right, the way she wants it.” He laughed again, and it came out softer, more genuine this time. “I didn’t know if she would ever finish it, but she always said she’d like to give it to you someday.”

  “Oh.” I was struck by an image of Caroline, the grown-up Caroline from the picture, sitting on a couch, legs curled under her, stitching a quilt square by lamplight. For me. That was the truly striking part.

  “Can I speak with her?” I said.

  Matt cleared his throat. “She’s not here.”

  “Well, can you have her call me? I live in New York, but I’m out of town right now. I could give you my numbers.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to reach her.”

  “Excuse me?” I had the sensation of falling backward, zooming far away from that dream of Caroline on her couch.

  “Look, I can’t say much else. I don’t even know if you really are her sister, and even if that’s true, I…” He trailed off.

  “Has something happened?”

  “You could say that.” The gruff tone had returned. “You haven’t heard from her, have you?” He said this last bit as if the thought had just occurred to him.

  “No, I haven’t talked to Caroline since I was a kid. If you could just tell me where she is. I don’t mean to bother her. I just want to talk.”

  There was a pause, as if Matt was thinking. “Look. I’ll be honest with you. Caroline is missing. And I have no idea when, or
if, she’ll be back.”

  9

  They’d been in Charleston, Matt said, at his cousin’s wedding. Caroline was quiet, but she got that way sometimes. She’d gone to the bathroom inside the mansion, and she never came back. He went looking for her. At the hotel, he found a note from Caroline saying she was fine, but she needed a break and she would be in touch. But she hadn’t called. It had been two weeks.

  If only, I thought, if only I’d looked for her a few weeks ago. I could have talked to her. Maybe she wouldn’t have taken off.

  “Why would she have left like that?” I asked.

  “I thought maybe you could tell me,” Matt said.

  “Me? What could I tell you when I haven’t seen Caroline since I was seven?”

  “You’re in contact with your father, aren’t you?”

  I felt defensiveness and apprehension roll up my spine. “Yes,” I said cautiously.

  “Well, maybe you should see if he knows something.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” But of course, I had an idea. Caroline’s letters implied that she’d had some contact with our father, but I had chosen to believe that such contact had drifted off after a while, that what my father told me was true—Caroline and Dan didn’t want to be part of the family anymore.

  I heard Matt breathing on the other end.

  I pushed my chair back and stood up. The sunlight was slanting through the open French doors now, right into the room. It was too bright.

  “Look, I can’t talk about this,” Matt said, “I want to leave the line open. I mean we’ve got call waiting and all that, but I can’t take any chances. So unless you can help me out, I’ve got to go.” He paused. “It’s just that I miss her so much.”

  It was the tenderness in that last sentence that made me sit down again. Caroline was missing. I couldn’t simply turn my back and head out for lunch as if I hadn’t learned anything, as if I hadn’t done all this to learn everything.

  “What if I come there?” It was out of my mouth as soon as I had the thought.

  “You’d do that?” He sounded hopeful.

  I calculated the beginning of my week in my head. If the arbitrators had their decision tomorrow, I might be able to leave for Portland in the afternoon, and if the decision wasn’t ready until Tuesday, maybe I could leave that day.

  “I have some work to take care of,” I said. “I’m near Chicago right now, but I’ll get a flight out in the next day or two. I’ll be there.”

  Ty knocked on my door at 5:00 p.m., just as he said he would. He wore khaki shorts and a navy-blue sweater with a white T-shirt peeking out at the neck. He seemed to have even more freckles around his eyes, as if he had been in the sun.

  “Hi,” he said. He stood in the doorway, seeming like he didn’t own the place and he needed to be invited in. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Better than this morning. I’m really, really sorry I was such an ass.”

  He grinned as though he might make fun of me for my drunken state, but he only said, “You weren’t. Ready for dinner?”

  “One second. I just need to throw some things in my purse.”

  I walked to the desk and began collecting my wallet, my compact, my cell phone.

  “What did you do today?” Ty asked.

  “Oh, not much.” I would tell him eventually. I would tell him what I’d learned, but right now, my siblings’ letters were too vivid and raw.

  I hadn’t stopped thinking about Caroline all afternoon. Had she run away? Or had she disappeared against her will? And what did my father know about it?

  I had picked up the phone at least five times, wanting to call my dad. I knew that on a Sunday afternoon, the one day he didn’t work, he would be in his home in Manhasset, reading his three Sunday papers and drinking coffee from a pot in the middle of the kitchen table. He would spend hours like that, absorbing everything he read, making notes on a small yellow legal pad by his side whenever he came across something that could affect one of his cases. I knew he would be happy to hear from me, that he would ask me about the arbitration, and he would hear in my voice that something was wrong. I would have to ask him then what he knew about Caroline, about my mother’s death.

  And so I’d put the phone gently back on the cradle, wanting to pretend I hadn’t picked it up, because I couldn’t confront him yet. I couldn’t risk being wrong. If I lost him, I lost my whole family.

  “Damn,” I heard Ty say from the doorway. “I just remembered I have to call a guest who’s checking in this week. I’ll meet you at the front desk, okay?”

  I glanced at him over my shoulder. “No problem.”

  I turned around again, and my eyes fell on the pile of Dan’s letters I had arranged after reading them this afternoon. I picked them up and flipped through them once more, turning over the envelopes to look for some writing on the back, some scribble of a phrase that might tell me more than the letters had. There were only four of them, and although Dan chatted about his surroundings and his activities, he didn’t let his emotions seep out the way Caroline had. The letters seemed to have been written out of a sense of duty, as if Dan was writing to a distant grandmother who sent money occasionally.

  The oldest letter had been postmarked from East Lansing, Michigan, where Dan was attending Michigan State University. He talked about football games and late nights and the crisp fall campus, but not much else.

  The next letter was written a few years later, postmarked from Detroit:

  Dear Della,

  I graduated a few months ago, and I’ve landed a sales job. I’m sharing an apartment with a few friends from school.

  He wrote a few anecdotes about people at work and the slovenliness of his roommates. He closed with,

  I don’t like Detroit that much. How’s everything with you?

  The letter was devoid of real details. Nothing there that I could follow up on.

  The next two letters were similar in their descriptions, as well as their lack of emotional substance. The first was postmarked from Santa Fe, a place I’d never been. Dan reported that his company had transferred him, that he was finding he liked the open brown plains of the Southwest. The last letter was also postmarked from Santa Fe and had been written over six years ago. I figured that Dan would have been thirty-two at that time.

  I tried to imagine my brother, who was permanently seventeen in my mind, in his late thirties now. I imagined that his sandy blond hair, which he had worn long during high school, was now clipped short. Maybe he was even balding. Maybe he wore glasses over his light blue eyes. I tried to envision him in a distinguished suit, but I couldn’t seem to get him out of the faded jeans and black T-shirts that had been his teenage uniform. I wondered if he still wrote stories, if he carried around small notebooks that he filled with his stocky scribble. I hoped so because it was something he had in common with my mom.

  I could remember Dan, so often in the parlor room that no one else used, sitting at the octagonal table. He would hunch over his notebooks, his hand pushing across the page. I used to try to spy on him. I’d sneak in from the kitchen, crawling stealthily, I always thought, until I reached the far couch or the big leather chair, something I could hide behind. I would peek my head out and watch him, trying to figure him out, this brother who was part man, part boy. But almost immediately, and without looking up from his notebook, Dan would say something like, “Hey, kid. I know you’re there.” Usually, I wouldn’t respond. I would hold my breath, hoping he was just guessing, that he had an inkling but maybe didn’t really know I was in the room. But he always knew. He would tiptoe over to me, and although I couldn’t see him, I could sense the shift in the room, and the anticipation made me shake. Then he would scream to scare me, and I would scream back, and he would tickle my stomach until I begged him to stop.

  I knew I should go downstairs to meet Ty, but I kept looking at the envelopes from Dan, turning them over and over. I took out the letters, then returned them to their places, hoping I would see some
thing different, something that might make it simpler to find him.

  I had called the Santa Fe directory today, just as I had Portland, and I’d gone through the same process, but there was no Dan Sutter or D. Sutter listed anywhere in that city. He might have left by now. Who knew what had happened to him over the last six years? It struck me that he could have died. People got cancer. People got hit by cars. Why not my brother? But I couldn’t believe that. Somehow I would have known, I told myself. I would have been able to tell if my brother had died. There was no logical basis for that conclusion, just something I felt in my gut.

  As I studied the envelopes from Santa Fe, I noticed something different from the first two envelopes Dan had sent to Della. The addresses were different, but that wasn’t it. It was the way he’d written his name that was off somehow.

  I put the letters side by side on the desk and looked at the top left corners where Dan had written his return addresses—East Lansing, Detroit, Santa Fe, and Santa Fe again. I studied the first two. Dan had scratchy, short handwriting, and he didn’t make an effort to be legible, but I could tell that he’d written, “D. Sutter” in the corners. On the last two, the ones from Santa Fe, again there was the initial D, but the last name looked odd. I could tell it started with an S, ended with an R, and had roughly six letters, so maybe Dan’s handwriting had simply changed a little. That wasn’t it, though. It was definitely different.