White Knight

by CD Reiss

  I picked up the top box to lay it aside, but the bottom gave out and spilled the stuff all over. Well, that was just the kind of day this was. I got on my knees to clean up the mess before they ran over to help. I could do it myself.

  A ceramic lamp base got stuck between the flaps of the box under it. When I pulled it out, the top opened. It was full of paper. Termites had made holes in the envelopes and left dust-sized wood chips all over the surface.

  I put the lamp down.

  The termites had eaten around the ink of the recipient’s name, which was Catherine Barrington. They’d eaten around the postmark ink, which was New York, NY10005. They’d eaten around the return address label, which was a PO box in the same zip code, and of course the sender was Christopher Carmichael.

  I flipped it over. The envelope had been eaten open, but the glue still hung on. It had never been opened.

  Under it, another letter.

  And another.

  One fell apart in my hands.

  Another was so black with mold, the address was unreadable.

  None were opened.

  All were to me, from Chris.

  My hands shook so hard, I couldn’t get my fingers in an envelope. I opened a folded piece of paper that fell out of an envelope. It was almost completely destroyed.

  * * *

  —I spilled coffee all ove—y pants I had but—you and—

  * * *

  I chose another. The ink had run when water hit it.

  * * *

  —Lan—in the dog park th—I hate to think he—nice guy. No guarantees of anything of c—and we can be together sooner rather tha— blooming because the flowers lie. You are the scent of roses—

  * * *

  I dumped the entire box on the porch and kneeled beside the pile. I went through it quickly, separating the readable from the unreadable.

  * * *

  —e getting used to—crowded but if you were with me b—everything—

  * * *

  —your skin and—hacked at the tennis b—pleated skirt wa—one time in reality but in my—Frank Marsh—

  * * *

  Frank Marsh—? Could that be Frank Marshall? The Christmas after Chris left, I’d started dating him. He’d begged me to, as a favor, and I stayed with him for his benefit and my own, until he finally came out of the closet. Mom had been devastated. I was happy for him.

  * * *

  —ny people. You’d li—used to i—re you getting these? Be—ove you, Catherine of the Roses

  * * *

  I stopped sorting them and searched for a whole letter. I couldn’t bear another minute. He’d written me and I’d ignored him. What kind of hurt had he suffered because of me already? I needed to know the exact height and weight of it so I could beat myself to a pulp with his pain.

  I opened one that looked relatively whole. A picture of Chris and Lance fell out. He was kneeling next to the bloodhound, who looked away from the lens at a squirrel or a pigeon or whatever a loved dog looks at when his eyes are off his master.

  The date was ten years before. Three years later, my father died, my mother took most of the money and left. Harper stayed home from MIT forever. I’d already stopped waiting to ever hear from him again.

  He was a cross between the hardworking, carefree, bronzed boy I’d known that summer and the serious man who’d put out a fire in my yard. The sun angled over his face, casting deep shadows over one side and washing the other in white. His hair was cropped and businesslike and his cheeks were smooth. Whatever transition he was making had been halfway over by the time that letter came.

  I sat on the porch rail and unfolded it. Most of the letters were handwritten, some were printed. This one had his pointy scrawl all over it. Had he written it at the dog park, or in the back of a cab? I smelled the paper. Past the mildew from the box, I caught a little bit of cologne, so I imagined him writing it at home, in the morning before he went to work.

  * * *

  Dear Catherine,

  It was as bad as I told you. I got everything out before the bottom dropped, but it was a scare. I was hoping to come back for you soon, but not now. I can’t give you the life we agreed on.

  But—and this is a big but—I have someone interested in a hedge fund that I’ve been pitching around. It’s based in quantitative trading and something we call market inefficiencies (totally legal, I swear). I’ll explain that to you when I see you. It’s so safe and profitable, I’m sure I’m never going to come that close to losing everything again.

  Which brings me to the same thing I end every letter with.

  I hold on to you like I’m alone in the ocean and you’re the last piece of wood from a shipwreck. What we had, I’ve never felt before or since. I belonged. I had purpose. You haven’t answered a single letter, and I have no idea if you hate me or if your parents are hiding the stamps. I don’t know if you’re waiting or if you’ve forgotten me. My mother left Barrington months ago. If I come back, it’s for you, but if you’re finished with me, I don’t want to know. I’m not ready to let go.

  I’ll keep on writing, but I have a bad feeling that one day I’m going to drown.

  All my love,

  Christopher

  * * *

  I folded the letter but didn’t put it back in the envelope. That would be like folding Chris up and putting him away. I couldn’t betray him another time.

  I read it again.

  At some point before Mom left or Dad died, he’d written a last letter. It was in the box, shredded, damaged, or obliterated. He’d made a hundred, maybe two hundred, attempts to reach out to me and been ignored. He’d worked harder to contact me than I’d worked to forget him.

  And my mother, or my father, or both had stopped the letters. Or one had intercepted them and another had fought to keep them from being destroyed.

  The only words they spoke to each other in those last years had probably been about those letters.

  Was it too late to find him? Where was he staying? His mother’s trailer was gone. The only hotel in Barrington, Bedtimey Inn, had closed years earlier. He didn’t have any friends to stay with and Lord knows someone would have told me if he’d made plans to stay on their couch.

  What was the difference anyway? Was I going to knock on his door and say, “Hey thanks for the letters,” after I’d chased him away? And then what? Was I going to let him whisk me away like a knight on a white stallion? I still didn’t know him. He wasn’t the answer to my loneliness.

  I put the photo of Chris and Lance in my pocket and looked through the two boxes underneath it.

  Jesus.

  More letters.

  I owed him an apology, or at least an explanation. But it was too late. I was numb and I’d already sent him away. The letters would go into the trash with the rest of my mistake-filled life.

  My foot landed on something soft and round. It rolled under me and I fell, dropping the box and landing on my wrists.

  “Catherine?” Kyle and Johnny were loading the barbecue onto the truck, and Kyle dropped his end with a metallic clank.

  “I’m fine.” A yellow tennis ball rolled slowly away.

  They were both off the truck. I held up my hands, but they helped me to my feet.

  “You all right?” Johnny asked.

  “Yeah. I stepped on a ball.”

  The culprit rolled to the porch step and Redox appeared, locking the tennis ball in his jaws. He came back and dropped it in front of me, sitting on his haunches expectantly.

  I shook out my wrists, wiped my hands on my jeans, and picked it up.

  “Yuck.” It was slimy, but not everywhere. Still kind of new.

  “Must be his,” Johnny said. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s fine.” I threw it into the grass and he chased it with the slow roll of a king who knows the ball isn’t going anywhere. I fixed my hair and the guys went to strap down the barbecue.

  With the hollowness still haunting me, I looked at my house as if for the firs
t time.

  What had Chris seen? Had he been disgusted by how I lived? The cracks in the paint, the missing shingles, the patchwork of roof tiles. I scanned the porch as Redox dropped the ball right in the letter box, as if he was done with this game. I was about to take it out, but the sad state of my house through a stranger’s eyes was too horrifying to look away from.

  The marks by the second floor window were still there from thirteen years ago, when a tennis ball had been thrown from the ground to get my attention.

  He’d written to me. All of his feelings were lost to the elements, but he’d written to me repeatedly.

  He hadn’t abandoned me.

  I’d abandoned him.

  In a moment of vulnerability falling in a crack of time between breaths, my defenses fell away and the hollowness filled.

  In that moment of opportunity created by a fracture in my armor, that old love I’d shut away saw an opening and took a chance, bursting through the fissure.

  The feeling was like getting too close to a car moving at ninety miles an hour. I almost lost my footing. Emotions flooded me. They hurt like a too-rich bite of food early in the morning. It was urgent, heavy, and hot, an electrical current animating my body. Jacket. Bag. Keys. Box.

  Sixteen.

  I was sixteen. Smarter. More experienced. Twice as tired and half as ashamed, living from moment to moment, risk to risk, decision to decision.

  Sixteen had been terrible, but the love had been real. It saturated my skin and laced my bones. His rightness. The click of the clouds and the sky locking together.

  I ran back up to the porch and snapped a random letter from the nearest box, then I ran to my car.

  “Catherine?” Johnny was strapping down the huge grill. “Are we blocking you in?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I got in and started the car. I had a quarter tank. “Johnny?” I called out the window. “Wild Horse Hill, right?”

  “Yeah, we can go together.”

  Backing the car onto the lawn, taking down a hedge and a ceramic frog to turn, I drove around Johnny’s truck and onto the driveway, avoiding their reactions in the rearview. I was sixteen again, and I only had the will to go forward.

  Chapter 22

  chris

  The orange and yellow leaves up on Wild Horse Hill spun in cones when the wind whipped. Without close family, the holidays always approached with a certain stealth. There were no gifts to buy for kids, just sloshy parties in high rises. Glittering women and serious men returning to their true personalities under the influence of spiced drinks.

  Lance had always been home for me, waiting for me to drop a tray of foil-covered leftovers in his corner of the kitchen. He’d been responsible for some of my best Thanksgiving memories.

  In the front seat of the rental car, I scratched my head. A notepad leaned on the steering wheel, and I’d written only one incomplete line.

  * * *

  Lance, you weren’t just a good boy, you were—

  * * *

  Wild Horse Hill was a disorganized mess of oddly-shaped tombstones from a hundred years ago to the present. The land had never been purchased for a cemetery, but no one in their right mind would buy it and dig up a bunch of bodies. The unofficial pet cemetery was behind a copse of trees. There wasn’t as much of a view, but all the good girls and boys were at their master’s feet.

  * * *

  —you were family.

  * * *

  Such a cliché. Everyone said that, but no one had a Lance. A car pulled up next to mine. Assuming it was the delivery guy with Lance’s body, I got frustrated by the end of my time alone. I wouldn’t finish the eulogy.

  My irritation flipped to relief when the car’s engine cut and I looked across the windows to the driver.

  Catherine.

  Jesus. Catherine. The girl in the roses. Not sixteen anymore, but filled out with experience and maturity. Knowledge made her even more beautiful.

  Hold it together, Chris.

  She got out, clutching her shoulder bag to her side, and stood at the front of her car with an envelope in her hand.

  I got out. “Hi. I’m glad you—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For?”

  She handed me the envelope. It was desiccated and crumbling. The pale blue envelope I’d used to send resumes in had yellowed and browned at the edges. The envelope flap hung on by the last bits of glue. I looked at the front. Her address. My handwriting. We were at least joined in that.

  “This was the last one I sent,” I said, handing it back. I knew what was inside it.

  “I didn’t know,” she said, clutching her bag’s straps to replace her grip on the envelope. “My mother. Or my dad too. I don’t know. She knew she was leaving as soon as she could, and she wanted me to be taken care of. She didn’t want… me to make a bad choice. She hid them. All of them.”

  I looked at it again and flipped it open.

  The night I met Lucia and she looked over my shoulder at my checking account, I’d been so broken about this letter.

  “Did you read it?” I asked.

  “No, I just pulled out one. There were boxes of them. All of them. I’m so sorry.”

  I handed her back the envelope. “Open it.”

  She took it and opened the folded paper. I hadn’t forgotten what I’d written.

  “Oh, Chris.” She took out the check. “Seven hundred forty-nine.”

  I leaned over her to see my words.

  We’re even.

  Just those two words in the center of a page. No more words of love. No more promises of one rose to the dollar or anything else. Simply an accounting.

  “It was never about money,” she said. “Not for me.”

  “I couldn’t figure out what else. I couldn’t believe you’d miss every single one.”

  “They must have hoarded them.”

  Catherine Barrington always saw the good in people. Thirteen years later, she was still defending her mother’s paranoid psychosis. All I’d do by arguing was disabuse her of the illusions that kept her sane. I leaned on my car and she leaned on hers, the letter and the check fluttering in the wind as if they wanted to finally be free.

  “If you’d read them, what would you have done?”

  She looked into the wind, letting her hair blow away from her face. Her ear was perfectly shaped in a delicate swirl. The hole in her lobe was an empty comma.

  “I want to say I would have run to you,” she said, still looking over the cemetery. “I want to say nothing could have stopped me.” When she turned back to me, her hair flew across her face like lines on a ledger. “But I don’t know if I can say it. I never wanted to leave. Sometimes I thought I used you as an excuse to stay here. Then you were gone and I missed you, but would I have gone to you if I saw the letters? I don’t know.”

  She pushed a pebble with her toe and I knew it was because she couldn’t look at me. She was ashamed, and despite that, she was honest to her own detriment. With every word, she gave everything she had no matter how much it hurt her.

  The distance between us wasn’t more than two feet, but it was made of cold air and wind. Hard, black asphalt and the density of the years. I couldn’t keep my hands away from her. I had to bridge time and the arm’s length of miles between us.

  When I laid my hands on her arms, she stiffened and looked at me.

  “Do you want me to go away?”

  “No,” she whispered and relaxed into me.

  I put my arms around her, and though coats and scarves and layers of fabric were between us, I could feel her heartbeat, the press of her fingertips on my back, and the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed.

  “I wish I’d come,” I said into her hair. “I was afraid it had been too long. But when Lance died…” I shook my head, struggling to put into words what he meant. “He was my last connection to Barrington.”

  “I wish I could have seen him.” She pulled away enough to look at me. “Was he happy in New York?”


  Was he? Had I ever asked myself that?

  He was the harness that held me together. A bloodhound mutt with floppy ears and a child’s love was my connection to the boy I had been and the man I’d become. He was the reminder that I’d been a different man with a different future. He was the fork in the road. The opportunity to go back. The signpost away from loneliness and cold realities. Then time blew him away and I was left on a dark road disappearing into a point on the horizon. No more forks. No signposts.

  But had he been happy?

  He’d needed me and I’d needed him. That was all there was to it.

  “He was a good boy.” I barely had the sentence out before I choked back a sob.

  Catherine said nothing. I held her tight and rested my head on her shoulder, crying for my lost friend and everything he represented.

  Chapter 23

  CATHERINE

  I’d held men as they cried. They’d cried for lost babies and broken dreams. They’d cried for their self-image when their wives had to work. I’d held children with boo-boos and deeper hurts that would never heal.

  All of that was practice for holding Chris in the cemetery parking lot. I took in his pain and made it my own. I was strong for him for just a moment. And I did something for him I couldn’t do with anyone else.

  I gave him hope.

  I didn’t mean to, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted from him, but I became his last connection and his last hope. Hope for what? I didn’t know. Nor did I know if I could shoulder the responsibility of it. He felt so good in my arms, and when I thought of him weeping without me, my jaw tightened with no.