Leave a Trail (Signal Bend #7)(133)
So Lilli was missing her first visit with him. The first, apparently, of many.
When Show spoke briefly about those who weren’t able to join them but were with them in their hearts, Lilli dropped her head. Tasha, sitting next to her, grabbed her hand, and Lilli held on tight.
X
The 365th Day
My love,
G. marked the 365th “X” in the calendar book she and I made together. She told me she knew it was the 365th, because it had been a year today since you left, and a year has 365 days. She’s a smart cookie.
Then she asked me how many more days left. I chickened out and told her we didn’t have time before bed to figure that out. I guess I’m going to have to deal with that tomorrow.
But I do know. Every day I know how many days are left, if you come home six years to the day from when you went away. 1,826 days left from today. It hurts my heart to write that number.
Lilli read what she’d written and almost set the page aside, in the drawer in her nightstand that was packed with all the other pages she’d written to Isaac and had then realized would hurt him too much to read. But this time, after a moment’s pause, instead of starting fresh, she kept writing.
All those months ago, when you told me you’d rather exchange paper letters than emails, I was a little hurt. I never told you, because I wouldn’t think of denying you something like this. Or anything, that I could give you. But email felt like a faster way to reach out to you, even if it wasn’t, really. You were right, though. I love the idea of you holding these letters as I hold yours. Close to my heart.
I’ve come to need these letters as much as I love them. Ending every night writing you helps me keep my head straight and do what needs to be done out here so that when you come home, you come to the home you deserve.
It’s become my calming ritual, writing you on scented paper, with a fountain pen. We’re like characters out of a Jane Austen novel—the dirty one she wrote when nobody was looking and hid under her mattress next to her twisted 19th-century porn. Haha.
She could almost hear Isaac’s laugh at her sudden, lamely puckish burst of humor, and her melancholy returned with a vengeance. She had to stop and move the paper away before her tears fell and smeared the ink. When she could, she dried her cheeks.
Okay. I’ll write again tomorrow night and be more newsy. This is all I have tonight.
Ti amo. Ti amo, ti amo.
L—
ISAAC
X
The 720th Day
For most of Isaac’s life, Christmas had never been a thing. Not until Lilli. But she had filled his life with love and light and warmth he hadn’t known was missing, and since Gia’s very first Christmas, when she was only five months old, it had been one of his favorite days of the year. Hell—more than one day. Lilli had made Christmas a month-long affair. Their home smelled of evergreen and cinnamon, and cookies and pie, for weeks. Lights shimmered all over the main rooms of the house. And the kids—f*ck, they loved it.
Sitting in the prison rec room on their second Christmas inside, watching ESPN and playing a halfhearted game of backgammon with Len on a cardboard game board with plastic pieces, Isaac let himself think about sitting up with Lilli until early on Christmas morning, building some confounded contraption or another, swearing under his breath that from now on, he was going to build all of the kids’ gifts his damn self and not fight to assemble plastic bullshit from Taiwan or wherever. She’d laugh at him and bring him another beer.
Then she’d distract him from his temper in the way only she could.
He closed his eyes and tried to remember the feel of her lips on his neck. Her tongue. Her hands on his bare chest. The way her body closed tightly around him when he pushed deep inside her.
Already his memory was fading. Four more years. If they were lucky.
“Boss? You good?”
Isaac shook it off and opened his eyes. “Yeah. One of these days, you gotta stop callin’ me that, brother.”
“Nah. You know my position. Long as we’re here, it applies.” Len sighed and looked at the clock on the wall, adjusting his eyepatch. “I’m not feelin’ this game. Think I’ll do some time in the gym until next count.
You in?”
His back had been acting up like crazy the past few weeks, since he’d had a run-in with an especially and habitually nasty guard. “No. I’m gonna read in my bunk. Got all those new books Lilli ordered me.”
They couldn’t receive packages or gifts from family, but Lilli kept his commissary account full, and, via an online distributor, she’d shipped him about six months’ worth—even by his accelerated pace—of reading material for Christmas.
“Is it me, or is it gettin’ harder, not easier?”
Isaac had turned and sort of half-focused on the television; now, he turned back to his friend. From day one, Len had dealt with their incarceration with a kind of dark, stubborn good humor—in perfect keeping with his personality. On bad days, Isaac got broody and quiet. Len got acerbic. Rarely did he voice any kind of real impatience with their lot.
“I think today’s the wrong day to think about it. Today is hard.”
“Yeah. I keep thinkin’ about the clubhouse party. And then spending the day at yours. Damn, Lilli does it up.”—Isaac swallowed hard at the slash of pain he felt, but he didn’t interrupt his friend’s reverie —“Tasha wanted all that, too. You know, one of the things Tash was most excited about in the house I built her was that big wall of windows up front—she planned for months how she’d light it up like crazy for the holidays. Remember that big f*ckin’ tree she made me wrestle into the house? And she had me doing some kind of circus stunts gettin’ lights across the top of the windows. And we don’t even have kids—f*ck, we didn’t even have Christmas at our house!” He chuckled softly.