Never Coming Back(77)

In a different life this would have been one of those questions I would ask him, in that imaginary future years and years hence, when everything that had gone wrong was long in the past, and we were sitting on a bench somewhere, setting things right between us. He would ask me about college and I would ask him about the army and what it had been like all the years up until his deployment, and from the filling-in of generalities we would narrow down and down and down until there was enough ease between us that we could tell each other that we had truly loved each other, that it had been real, and how sorry we were, sorry how things ended.

But there would be no conversation years hence, because there was no Asa. First enlistment and training and finally deployment and death. The quickness of it still startled me awake sometimes, my heart thudding in the dark, sweat rippling over me in waves.

There was no one to ask now. No one to fill in the blanks. When Asa broke it off with me, I broke it off with Eli, and we had not spoken since.

“Eli tried,” Annabelle said. “He did try.”

“How?”

“Called her. Drove up to Watertown once, when she was up there working on the trucks. Wrote her a letter.”

“Wrote her a letter?”

She frowned. “Yes, he wrote to her. You’re not the only person in the world who can write a letter, Clara. Most people do learn how to write, you know. Usually in first grade.”

Of course they did. Everyone learned how to print and some still learned cursive, and everyone now used a keyboard and a computer and a smartphone and if you were blind you might still learn how to write Braille but knowing how to write and writing a letter to the woman you loved, the woman who broke up with you, were two separate animals. Annabelle was watching me with her eyes narrowed, as if she were daring me to say something else about writing so that she could leap on it and remind me that I was not the only person in the world who could put words to feelings.

“Annabelle.”

She lifted her eyebrows, still waiting, waiting for me to mess up so that she could pounce. It was exhausting. Could she not see that? Could she not see that I was no longer the woman I had been even a few months ago? No longer the girl I had been in high school, oblivious, unable to see my mother as anything but my mother? Could she not see just how hard I was trying?

“I know everyone learns to write,” I said. “But it’s hard to imagine Eli Chamberlain sitting down and writing a letter.”

“Why is it hard?” she said, after a pause. Her voice lacked the Ha, I’ve got you now pounce it had earlier. Maybe she was trying too.

“I guess because in all the time I knew him I never saw him write anything. I never saw him read anything either. He wasn’t a word person, is what I’m trying to say. At least the Eli that I knew.”

“I would say that is accurate.”

“So if he wrote my mother a letter, then he must have??—”

“Loved her,” Annabelle finished. “Yes. He did.”

“What did the letter say?”

“I have no idea.”

“She didn’t show it to you? How do you know he wrote it, then?”

“Because I watched him write it.” She pointed at the kitchen table where I was sitting. “He wrote it right there, on a piece of Twin Churches stationery that I gave him.”

New information. My mind erased the image of Eli Chamberlain sitting at his own kitchen table, the table that he and Asa and I had sat around playing cards many a night, and conjured him up here, in Annabelle Lee’s trailer kitchen, full of the scent of baking and cooking, loud with music.

“Why?”

“Why did he write the letter here? Because, Clara. Because you’re right. Writing is hard for most people. For Eli, especially. Dyslexia, whatever”—she swiped the air with her hand, as if she were banishing the word from the world—“and he was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That she wouldn’t respond. That she wouldn’t write back, wouldn’t call, wouldn’t ever talk to him again.”

“And did she?”

“What do you think?”

She stood by the table, the solid, unmoving bulk of her. Annabelle Lee, a fortress unto herself, a castle surrounded by a moat full of alligators, defender of all things Tamar Winter. For a long time now I had interpreted her simmering anger as anger at me, impatience with me, annoyance with me, but for what? For not being a good enough daughter? For caring too much about words? For leaving Sterns and never coming back? But now she set her hands on the posts of the chair before her and I saw her differently. As my mother was disappearing, so too was Annabelle’s best friend, her one true friend. Keepers of each other’s secrets.

A memory rose up in my mind: my mother and Annabelle, sitting in a booth at the back of Crystal’s Diner, suspending straws full of milkshake above their mouths. Some kind of contest. Both of them laughing so hard that they dropped their straws and spilled milkshake everywhere.

“My mother hardly ever laughed except with you,” I said. Annabelle nodded, even though she couldn’t picture the scene in my head. She was willing to follow me. “She’s a serious person.”

“Yes,” Annabelle said, as if everyone knew that. “So are you. You were a tough kid to raise. The way you were always words, words, words and smart, smart, smart? She didn’t feel like she was a match for you. She didn’t know how to help you. She said that to me once. ‘My daughter is beyond me,’ is what she said.”