The Letter Keeper

by Charles Martin

  It was the perfect solution to a possible problem. Even more, it showed the extent to which Bones thought constantly about the safety of those in our care—and how to maintain it.

  Not long into the return trip, Summer tugged on my arm. “You mind if we walk?” The expression on her face told me she wanted to talk. Which meant I’d missed all the signals leading up to this one. Which was not good.

  Bones let us out and Summer grabbed my hand. Walking alongside and with. She leaned into me when she asked, “You okay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You seem tense.”

  I nodded. “I live tense.”

  “No, I mean with me.”

  “I am?”

  “You’re not talking to me.”

  “Summer . . .” I waved my hand across the landscape.

  She shook her head and raised her left hand. Which was the signal for “Hush, I’m talking.” Her facial expression suggested she’d been thinking about this several days and gotten herself worked into a lather. “Everything comes out of your head and nothing with us is connected to your heart. Is there something wrong with me?”

  I wasn’t following her. My facial expression betrayed this thought. I checked my watch. Our current elevation was almost thirteen thousand feet. Must be the altitude.

  She continued, “You don’t look at me. Don’t touch me tenderly. Don’t . . .”

  Gunner bounced by us. Unfazed by the altitude. “Summer, what are you saying?”

  “What are we doing?” she asked.

  “I’m confused.”

  She cut me off. “What’s the barrier between you and me? Why the distance? I’m standing two feet from you, but my heart . . .” She pointed at a mountain peak some sixty or seventy miles distant. “Might as well be over there.”

  Summer’s female intuition ran laps around my male disguises. The mask I unconsciously wore. And she had just put words to what I felt but could not voice.

  She lifted her hand, displaying the ring. “You gave me this.” With the same hand, she tapped me in the chest. “I’m just not sure you’ve given me this.” A short pause. “If you’ve changed your mind, just tell me. I can handle it.” A tear swelled in the corner of her eye and her lip trembled. “But just tell me.”

  The question of her heart. So beautifully spoken.

  Since I had watched Summer head south down the Intracoastal in a boat she couldn’t steer and in water in which she could not swim, I’d come to love her magnificent and courageous heart. The fact that she faced every confrontation head-on. Afraid of nothing. And these words coming out of her mouth were driven by and bathed in that same love.

  I stopped walking and turned to face her. “For a long time I’ve trained my words to leave my mind and my heart and travel down my arms to my fingers, where they speak onto a page. I did this because the person I was trying to speak to couldn’t hear me. Or I thought she couldn’t. After years of training, that pathway is now hardwired. Sometimes words just don’t make it to my mouth.”

  She blinked and the tear cut loose, spilling down to her chin. “Last week I stood in a room surrounded by my daughter and her friends, and we drank champagne while I got fitted for a beautiful white dress. We’re making plans to spend the rest of forever together, but you seem indifferent. As if ‘it’ll get here when it gets here.’”

  I knew enough to know she had yet to ask me the question that got us out of the Jeep. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really on your mind?”

  She thumbed away a tear. “Why don’t you love me the way I want you to love me? And if you don’t do it now, how are you going to do it then?”

  I stared into her eyes and smiled. “Are you afraid of anything?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “What?”

  She looked away and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Discovering that you don’t.”

  “What?”

  “Love me. That . . .”

  “Go ahead.”

  Another ring display. “You gave me this because you just feel sorry for me.”

  I brushed snow off a boulder and cleared a place for us to sit. With the world stretched out before us, I fumbled with my hands. “Where to begin.”

  Summer sat uncomfortably.

  “Can I be gut-level honest?”

  She spun the ring on her finger. Bracing herself against the cold.

  “I’ve spent the last decade of my life trying to erase my pain by writing about it. And instead of erasing it, I’ve etched it into this stony thing I call a heart. Whenever I look inside, I see Marie. Whenever I look at you with hope or longing or love, Marie walks by the window of my soul. I can’t help that. And as much as I try, I can’t stop it. She alone owns the slideshow in my mind. I love you with all that I am. With all that remains of me. But I’d be lying if I said I was over her. I don’t know how to get over her. And to be honest, I don’t want to. How do I push her aside? How do I erase the memory of her to give you room to make your own memories?” I shook my head. “I don’t know how to honor her and love you. I’m stuck between two women. Unable to let go of the one in order to grab hold of the other. Even now, looking at you, Marie is standing just offstage. One half of my heart is looking at you with longing and all I want to do is dive in, and the other half is asking the memory of her if it’s okay to love you. Because—”

  “What?”

  “Loving you scares me.”

  “Am I that horrible?”

  “You’re perfect.”

  “What then?”

  “I have scars. Holes. My heart is a colander. Leaking. I plug one hole only to turn and find one bigger. It’s a full-time job not bleeding out. I don’t want to . . . promise you me when I’m not able to give you me.”

  She placed her palm on my cheek with a laugh of release. “Is that all?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “So . . . you really do want to marry me?”

  “Of course.”

  “No second thoughts?”

  “None.”

  “Bishop . . .” She let the name sink in. “You may be Superman without a cape, but . . .” A sly smile. “I’m a woman.”

  “I’m well aware of that.”

  “Marie isn’t the only woman on the planet who can imprint your impressionable little mind with images.” She tapped my temple. “There’s room in there for both of us.”

  Gunner looked at me and tilted his head sideways.

  She placed her arms around my neck. “I’m serious. That’s all that’s bothering you?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Well, it’s a thing, but we can overcome it.” She stood and twirled in that beautiful dancer’s way. “You just have to give me a chance.” Another twirl. “All is not lost.”

  “I just want to be honest about me and want you to know who you’re getting in the deal.”

  “Am I?”

  “What?”

  “Getting you . . . in the deal.”

  I laughed. “Well . . .”

  She pulled me to my feet, kissed the corner of my mouth, and slid her hand up my shirt, placing her palm flat across my heart. “I’m all in. You’re getting all of me. Stretch marks. Bunions. And I want all of you. Nothing held back. Scars. Holes. Limp. I want it all. Not half. Not ninety-nine percent. I want you. Broken or unbroken doesn’t matter. Just trust me with all the pieces.”

  How I love this woman. “Your hand is freezing.”

  She was swaying now. Dancing slightly. “Yes, but I am not. You’re unlike any man I’ve ever met. You pour yourself out without ever considering the cost. Who does that?” She studied me. “I am willing to share you with the . . .” Her fingers slipped inside my collar and traced the letters of the single word tattooed at the top of my back. She kissed my cheek and pressed her forehead to mine. “Just come in out of the cold and let me throw my blanket over you.”

  I turned, she sank her arm inside mine, and we began following Gunner through the snow. With
Freetown in view, I whispered to myself, “I need a manual.”

  Summer laughed. “For?”

  “The female race.”

  Chapter 29

  Summer said she wanted a short engagement and she got one. Given that I’m not a public person, Bones got on the phone and alerted the people he knew would want to know about my engagement. Meaning those who’d graduated from Freetown. The final two weeks were spent attending party after party—one scarcely ending before another had started. Everybody wanted to celebrate us. People and their families I’d not seen in years came out of the woodwork to meet Summer, wish us well, and thank me for Freetown and what it had meant in their life.

  I didn’t know what to do with it all. Had no place in my mind to process all of that. Literally, when they heard what was happening, the names etched in ink across my back came out of history, walked back into Freetown, and placed young babies in my arms or introduced me to their adolescent kids for whom, years before, they’d dared not hope. But here they were. Hope breathing. Hope walking. Hope talking. Hope running down Main Street.

  Summer and I had a lot of questions yet to be answered—starting with how to be us in the life I’d carved—but Bones told us not to worry. We had time. We could figure it out. Besides, his experience hanging out with Ellie convinced him he wanted more grandkids.

  I told him, “You’re getting soft.”

  He gritted out between his teeth, “Race you to the top.”

  In the days leading up to our wedding, I spent a lot of time at the Eagle’s Nest. Trying to make sense of a life that didn’t make sense. I’d stand at the railing, Gunner lying alongside, and I’d hold Bones’s unopened letter.

  One afternoon Bones found me turning it over in my hands. “Read it?”

  I shook my head.

  He leaned on the railing. “You should.”

  Problem was, I could not. I was afraid of what he might say. If the letter said what I thought it said, then more than just my friendship with Bones was over.

  On the day of our wedding, daylight cracked over the peaks of the Collegiates as I stood on the balcony of the Eagle’s Nest. The three of us—Bones, Gunner, and I—had climbed up in the dark. I’d found my strength. Bounding up. I was me again.

  Bones turned to me. “You read my letter?”

  “No.”

  He wiped the sweat off his face with a towel.

  I leaned against the railing, watching the steam rise off my coffee. “A lot there?”

  He nodded. “Understatement of the decade.”

  “I will.”

  He spoke knowingly. “If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for Summer.”

  A few hours later, Clay found me in the back of the church fumbling with my hands. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded and ironed handkerchief on which he’d written the date and then both my and Summer’s names. “At some point, probably tomorrow, your wife will need this.”

  I smiled. “You think of everything.”

  “It’s the little things.”

  “It’s thoughtful.”

  “Actually, it’s a memento. It marks the moment. And Summer will mark moments in the next couple days that you miss entirely, but the fact that you have this in your pocket and can offer it to her during one of those moments when she might need it will tell her that you’re at least aware of that fact and trying.” He laughed at himself. “A good first step.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No.” He placed both hands on my shoulders. “Thank you.”

  Standing at the altar, I felt an inexplicable wave wash over me. I stared at the huge logs, the stained glass, the hand-hewn pews, the stone, the views of western Colorado some seventy miles out the windows, and then the memories of the dozens of women and their men who had preceded me in this place. To be standing here among so many dreams realized was overwhelming.

  Following construction of the Eagle’s Nest higher up, the chapel was the first building we started in the town itself. Bones’s orders. “We can help their bodies, but it’s their spirits that will need piecing back together.” He nodded. “And love, the real kind, the kind that walks into hell and says me-for-you, is the only thing in this universe or any other that does that.”

  Gunner stood alongside me, tail wagging. Ellie had dressed him with a bow tie, making him look regal. Bones stood to my right. My heart was about to jump out of my chest. Just outside the door, standing among the aspens, waited Summer. Dressed in white, she was resplendent. Above her, given the breeze, the leaves were clapping. One of my favorite sounds. Because both her parents were gone, Clay had agreed to walk her in and give her away. Although, he argued, she might pick someone more respectable. Angel, Ellie, and Casey stood giggling opposite Gunner and me. It was a perfectly normal and totally dysfunctional wedding, and we wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  With increased vulnerability, all being in one place at one time, we had increased the rolling patrols through Freetown, but not in such a way as to scare the girls. Our guys were pretty good at being invisible. Most only let you see them when they wanted you to see them. We also doubled video security, and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a square inch of the city we couldn’t or didn’t capture on live feed—day or night.

  I’m told Summer processed to Canon in D, but I couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of my own heart and the voice inside my head. I don’t remember those in attendance, though it was standing room only. All of Freetown had far exceeded the occupancy. I only remember Summer and the contrast of her white dress and the snowcapped peaks against Clay’s dark skin.

  When they reached the altar, Bones asked, “Who gives this woman?”

  Clay cleared his throat. “I do.” Then he turned toward her, lifted her veil, kissed her forehead, and placed her hand inside mine. As he did, he said, “Albeit reluctantly.”

  The audience laughed. It was one of the more beautiful things I’d ever seen. And it broke the ice, which I needed. We turned to Bones.

  He whispered, “You ready?”

  Her hand was shaking. I don’t remember the words Bones spoke. I wanted to. Even tried to. But I couldn’t take my eyes off Summer. At one point he tapped my shoulder. “Murph?”

  “Yeah?”

  More laughter.

  “You with us?”

  I stammered, “I am.”

  Loud laughter. Bones set a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “The correct response is ‘I will.’”

  I never took my eyes off Summer. “Always.”

  I stood there unable to get beyond the surreal fact that my life had brought me here. To this moment. I stood somewhere between the reality of the moment I was in and the impossibilities of my past. I thought of all the foreign lands into which I’d ventured where the possibility of not returning was greater than returning. Of the horrors I’d seen, endured, and—truth be told—inflicted on those responsible. The act of standing where I stood surprised me. Not that I felt guilty. I did not. You cannot walk through hell and avoid smelling like smoke when you exit. It permeates your clothes, even your skin, and doesn’t wash out easily.

  I stood there wondering if the smell would come out. If it was as strong to everyone around me. A week ago, when I’d mentioned this to Summer, she flipped my hand over and sniffed it, then placed my hand behind her on the small of her back—one dancer with another. “That’s why they make soap.” She twirled away, then spun back, making it appear as though I knew what I was doing, and then she wrapped herself tighter in my arm, her face inches from mine. “And water.”

  In Summer’s world, life was a dance. And every time she did that little twirl thing, I felt my heart flutter and follow.

  For the second time in my life, Bones declared, “Man and wife.” Then smiled. “You may now kiss your bride.”

  Stripped bare, the human soul has one real desire: to know and be known. And in that moment, I was.

  I will admit that given the experience of my last wedding reception, fol
lowed by a subsequent lifetime of training to prepare for and expect the worst, I was a little gun shy about what might come next. This was not a conscious response on my part. It was more reflexive. And whatever I was feeling did not come out of some distrust of Summer. I trusted her completely. Yet I’d spent most of my life trusting few people, and the choice to do so had often kept me alive.

  If my life experience had taught me anything, it’s this: the wounds of the past carry a lot of weight when it comes to walking into one’s future, and if anything can rob you of now, it’s yesterday. We are really good at taking the pain of our past and projecting it into our future because it’s what we know, and yet our past has almost nothing to do with our future other than being connected by seconds. That’s it. So we face a choice. Either shine a light on yesterday and expose it, or forfeit the joy of now and the hope of tomorrow. I realize this is easier said than done, but left untreated, experiential pain becomes a fortress in our gut that houses a lie spoken by fear. And behind that fear is an idol of our own making. One we carve by hand when we, as self-made people, worship our own creator: us. As if we can do anything to protect ourselves. Maybe it’s articulated in the statement, “I’ll let you in, but only so far. And under no circumstances will I let you down there. That’s the basement. That’s off limits. We don’t go there.” We raise a finger. “Touch that doorknob and I’m gone.”