The Secret Letters

by Abby Bardi

  “Good. We need to set up a timeline. I assume the redecorating will be done by July. I recommend that you put the house on the market in August. The market is a little soft right now, but it’s slated to pick up this fall, when school starts. Of course, the house is in the most desirable school district.”

  Our grade school, an old stone building, had been turned into condos, but new schools were popping up on every corner. Our county had appeared on some lists of Most Desirable Places, so now everyone wanted to live in it, which seemed crazy to me. Every time I turned around, a farmer’s field had disappeared and ugly townhouse developments with names like Bright Meadows and Happy Fields were there instead. I started to imagine myself in the woods again, walking toward the pond with the dogs running behind me, but Ralph’s voice cut into my thoughts.

  “You should put an ad for the Pontiac on Craig’s List,” he said to Pam.

  ***

  “Shit!” Pam hissed as we walked down the hill to Main Street.

  “At least she doesn’t know you’ve been driving it.”

  “She knows. Did you see the way Ralph looked right at me when he said it?”

  “Have you gotten your insurance money yet?”

  “No, they’re dragging their feet. I’m going to have to threaten to sue them. You know, they’ve got that whole procedure.”

  “I know.” Living on the blind curve, we had hit-and-run claims down to a science.

  As we reached the Wild Hare, I could see Milo through the window. He looked up, saw me, waved, then spotted Pam, and his face brightened.

  “Gotta go,” I said, trying to get rid of her before Milo came out and started talking to her again. It was for his own good. “Hector’s going to kill me.”

  “What are we going to do, Julie? The more we pack and clean, the worse it gets.” She turned her head and spotted Milo, and I could see her give her hair a little smush to fluff it up, though it was pulled back in the dirty ponytail. I decided not to tell her about the dust bunny on her sleeve.

  “I’ll come over tomorrow. We’ll kick ass,” I promised, opening the door to the Hare and giving her a little shove in the other direction. I bumped right into Milo and tried to steer him toward the kitchen, saying I wanted to talk to him about the special, but he said he’d be right back and shot out the door to say hi to my sister.

  ***

  The attic was hot as hell; no, hotter. Frank had installed a big window fan but it hadn’t worked in years. I could remember him explaining why it was important to ventilate your attic, how the best thing to do was close all the windows in the house, open the front door, and turn on the fan so it pulled hot summer air up out of the house and puked it back onto Main Street. I always thought this was silly and also, boring, but thinking about it now made me sad. He was constantly building things in the garage, trimming hedges so they looked like boxes, and carving turkeys with an electric carving knife and talking on and on the whole time about the proper way to carve, how you had to hold the knife perpendicular to the plate to get those paper-thin slices. When he wasn’t bustling around making home improvements, he was kissing my mother, fussing over her, flattering her, making googly eyes at her, and when he was around she seemed to let go of her grudge against the world for a moment. The rest of the time, she put up a good front, but I wouldn’t call her a contented person, especially not after he died. He had a heart attack while shoveling snow off the neighbors’ driveway during a blizzard, and it was two years before my mother spoke to those neighbors again. She said they should have shoveled their own fucking snow.

  Pam had ordered me to go the attic and carry down some boxes. She decided that to avoid having to pay for a dumpster, we were going to have to start leaving loads of trash out every week, and we needed to step up our game. I had already carried down seventeen boxes full of old canceled checks. Norma wanted us to have any papers professionally shredded for security reasons, but Pam said that was bullshit and ignored her. I’d never thought about what happened to things like bank accounts when a person died. I knew my mother was gone and not coming back, but there were parts of my brain that hadn’t quite figured it out yet, so every time I ran into something that made me think she was still around, those parts woke up to her loss all over again and felt surprise and pain so dumb it embarrassed me. One time in her closet I was going through clothes that still smelled like her and said to Pam, “Do you ever get the feeling she’s still around somewhere?”

  “Of course,” she said. There was no need to discuss it further.

  I was just about to haul another box of ancient garbage down the pull-down ladder Frank had installed, one of his many home improvements when he moved in, when I noticed something. On the side of the box was something that looked like a fishhook, but from a different angle, a J. I tore into the box, tossing aside a pile of crumbling Woman’s Day magazines and some recipe cards in Mom’s handwriting. I was beginning to wonder if maybe the symbol on the side of the box really was just a fishhook when I noticed a tiny black address book. I grabbed it and flipped through it. Each page was crammed with addresses of relatives in West Virginia and North Carolina, and a lot of names I didn’t recognize. There was a John Babcock in Pennsylvania, and at first I got really excited, but then I remembered he was Cousin Velma’s ex-husband. There was another J. in the D’s, but when I looked at it more carefully, I realized it was Joelle Duckworth, one of my mother’s friends from high school.

  But when I got to the F’s, there it was. The minute I saw it, I knew it was my J. There was an address in Flagstaff, Arizona, and there in Mom’s handwriting, the name “J. Fallingwater.”

  ***

  Even Pam was more or less convinced. “It does stand to reason,” she said slowly, looking at the address. “I don’t know who else she knew in Arizona. I don’t remember her ever mentioning anyone. I wonder if that address is still good. Probably not, but you never know when she wrote it in there. You should write him a letter.”

  “You think?” I breathed in and out carefully so my lungs wouldn’t decide it would be fun to go into spasms.

  “Sure, why not.”

  “What would I say?”

  “Don’t tell him you’re his long-lost daughter and you want to run a DNA test.”

  “Okay, I won’t lead with that.”

  “Tell him you know he was a friend of Mom’s and you want to let him know she passed away. If he answers, you can try to find out more about him and figure out if he’s the guy who wrote the letters.”

  “But I don’t want to be the one to break it to him. You know who’s really good at that kind of thing?”

  “Who?” Pam said. She knew who. She tried to hand me the address book.

  I shoved it back at her.

  “Julie, I’m way too busy right now.”

  “But you’re such a good letter-writer.”

  “Sorry, no. Really. I can’t.” She stuck the address book in my hand and hurried out of the room. I ran after her.

  It took another fifteen minutes of begging, but same as with everyone else in my family, there was no part of “no” I understood. She drove a hard bargain, and I had to promise to mow the lawn, repaint the porch, and scrub the rubber strip on the fridge door with a toothbrush. I was ready to pick up the dog shit in the yard (there was plenty of it) with tweezers if I could get her to write to J. Fallingwater.

  “I just don’t want to get sucked into any craziness,” she said a while later as we carried garbage out to the street.

  “Craziness?” I said as if I could not imagine such a thing.

  “You’ve jumped to a conclusion based on nothing, and I don’t want to encourage you.” She set a box of burnt-out light bulbs at the curb.

  “Don’t be so strident.” This was a word the state’s attorney had used to describe her, so we always threw it in her face if we could. “You’re just writing a letter to your mother’s old friend. It’s the polite thing to do.”

  “Sure. And we’re so fucking polite.” Sh
e scratched herself like an ape. “I think you used to be able to return these things for money.” She pointed to the old light bulbs, obviously trying to change the subject.

  “I just recycled three big bags of S&H Green Stamps, whatever those were.”

  “I think they belonged to Mammaw. We should be selling that shit on eBay. People will buy anything.”

  As we opened the screen door to the house, the dogs started barking like we hadn’t just been there a second ago. I thought of taking them for a walk, but as far as I knew, there was nowhere to go any more. I could put them in the car and take them down the street for a latte, but that was about it.

  “You just have to drop him a line. I’ll take it from there.”

  “Where will you take it?”

  “I don’t know.” I really had no idea what I should do at this point. I thought for a second about adopting Fallingwater as my last name, but that seemed awkward. “It’s a weird, name, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Where do you think it’s from?”

  “Maybe it’s one of those Ellis Island names that got translated weird. Pfallingwasser.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” I was getting an idea—and it was a big one. It was so powerful that I started to actually hear a buzzing in my ears, like a swarm of ideas had suddenly flown into the empty hive of my brain. “Think about it. Arizona. The southwest.”

  “And?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “What?”

  “Arizona. The southwest. Who lives there?”

  “I don’t know, who?”

  As I stood in our familiar living room, I felt myself growing taller. All the furniture seemed to be shrinking. The dogs dashed over and bowed down at my feet as if they sensed something important was going on. “Pam, it all suddenly makes sense. You know how I’ve never felt—” I couldn’t think of how to say it.

  “What?”

  “Like in high school. I never fit in.”

  “Everyone feels that way in high school.”

  “No, you don’t get it.” She was starting to annoy me. I tried again. “It’s like I was really someone else, but no one knew. No one could see who I really was. But now I figured it out. Jeez.” I stopped. I could hardly breathe.

  “What did you figure out?”

  “I’m an Indian, Pam.”

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m an Indian.”

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m an Indian. A Native American.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Julie,” she said in the stern voice she used on the dogs.

  “Fallingwater. It’s an Indian name. My father is an Indian. That makes me an Indian, too.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “He’s my father. He’s Indian. Fallingwater is an Indian name.” I couldn’t stop myself: I let out a loud whoop and hopped on one foot, then the other. When I looked back at her, she was getting the pink spots in her cheeks. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m still your sister.”

  “Don’t you see that this is just the latest in a series of conclusions you’ve jumped to?” Her voice was rising.

  “You’ve got to admit it makes sense.”

  “You think it makes sense? I’m not getting that.” She looked ready to take a swing at me.

  I thought for a minute. “Like, how I walk really quietly.”

  “You walk like a drunken moose.”

  “Yeah, but I’m sneaky. Mom always used to say how sneaky I was. I could sneak from my room to the kitchen and back without anyone hearing me, and then in the morning she’d find the leftovers were gone.”

  “Well, that’s just proof positive, isn’t it. You can up and take that right to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.” She smiled a mean smile.

  “The who?”

  “It’s a government agency. Unless it was abolished by Congress.” Pam hated Congress. I could care less.

  “We have our own agency?”

  “That’s right. It’s to keep you from killing too many buffalos.”

  “I’d have trouble with killing a buffalo,” I said, really thinking about it, like I was going to have to do it. “I’ve always had a connection with them.”

  “Oh, you have not!” She was yelling now. “This is ridiculous. Get a grip.”

  “I have a grip. This is the first real grip I’ve ever had.”

  “Julie, this is not a grip. This is total insanity.”

  “No, really, I can honestly say I have never felt less insane.”

  “People don’t feel insane when they’re insane.”

  “You can call it what you want, but I know what I know.”

  “Okay, fine.” She rubbed her hands together and then flicked her fingers like our mother always did when she was washing her hands of us. “You go ahead and think this if you want to. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  “Well, I have you to thank for finding the letters in the first place.”

  She sat down on the couch and slung her feet onto the coffee table. Our mother would have screamed at her for it. “Just leave me out of it.”

  “You’ll still write to him for me, though, right?”

  “Yeah, sure, I’ll write a letter. Why the hell not. But when it all goes south, I don’t want to hear, oh Pammy, why the fuck didn’t you stop me?”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Yes, you would.”

  “No, really, I wouldn’t.” I walked over to the couch and boldly put one foot on the coffee table, though I couldn’t help looking around to make sure my mother wasn’t watching. “Whatever happens, it’s on me.” In my mind, I was climbing a steep, wooded trail, walking proudly in leather moccasins with a headdress of feathers, though I wasn’t sure women could wear those. At the top of the mountain I could see a patch of clear blue sky, and I was just about to reach it and maybe fly up in the air when I heard a sound below me. I looked down at the couch and saw Pam sitting there with her face in her hands, crying. My vision of the mountain collapsed.

  I sat next to her and patted her shoulder. When she looked up, her face was spotty and her eyelashes were wet. “I’m sorry, Julie. It’s not your fault. Really, I’m happy for you. It’s nice that you think you’ve found your—your people.” She managed to say this without sounding too sarcastic. “But I have to go on with real life here.”

  “Your real life is great.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “It’s not great?”

  “No. It fucking sucks.”

  “Come on, what about your job? You like your job.”

  “It’s a load of bullshit. I’m just filing papers and arguing about a bunch of stupid shit I don’t care about.”

  “What about your townhouse? You like your townhouse.”

  “I hate my townhouse.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yeah, I totally hate it. You know, to tell you the truth,” she said, sniffling, “I really like living here.”

  “Here?”

  “I don’t think I like living alone. Here, I can talk to Ricky and Star about all sorts of dumb shit, and she cooks some weird-ass dinner for us every night. It’s nice. I kind of wish we didn’t have to sell this place.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  “Don’t let Norma hear you say that.”

  “I know.” She looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. “It turns out I miss her.”

  I knew she didn’t mean Norma. “Yeah. I do, too.”

  “I mean I really miss her.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I did know.

  “I didn’t know how I’d feel—I mean, most of the time I wanted to strangle her.”

  “Yeah.” I thought about how the two of them used to go at it like pit bulls. It was probably good training for being a lawyer, but it couldn’t have been fun.

  “She was always so fucking wound up about everything. I mean, I get that she had a hard life with Dad, and then the divorce, and then Frank dying. I get how it can
make a person kind of—what’s the right word?”

  “I don’t know. Intense?”

  “To say the least. I always tried to cut her some slack, but you know how she was. She drove me fucking nuts. But it turns out,” her voice cracked, “she was the glue that held everything together.”

  “I know. And now there’s no glue.”

  “And I never thought I liked glue, but I miss it. Her. And now you’ve found this thing that makes you happy. And whether it’s true or not, I have no idea, but at least you have something—something gluey. And I’m happy for you. Really.”

  “Thanks.” I patted her on the shoulder again. The dogs were sniffing at her knees. She pulled Max up onto her lap, though he was the size of a pony. He smelled like grass and dog sweat, the best smells in the world.

  “Just be careful, okay?” She and Max looked at me with big, serious eyes. “I’ve seen you get all excited about things before, and then they turn to shit.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No, I mean it. You do this. It’s this thing you do. You get really excited and you don’t see the downside.”

  “When did I do that?” I made the mistake of saying.

  “Do I have to say the B-word?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “I just don’t want it to happen again.”

  “It won’t. I promise. I’ll be careful. But Pam, this is just so huge, so awesome. I can’t think of how anything could possibly ruin it.”

  “No.” She laughed a little, and wiped her eyes. “You really can’t, can you?”

  VII

  Then suddenly, everything fell into place. I had just worked the day shift for Hector, who was always having to go over to the high school to talk to the principal. Hector Junior was a nice kid, but he was always in trouble. Hector Senior was such a goody-goody that he couldn’t understand this, but I understood it. I was perfectly happy to trade shifts, though it was weird getting off work when it was light out. I thought about driving over to help Pam with the house, but she had gone to work for a change and wouldn’t be home for a few more hours. There was plenty to do here on Main Street. I could go have my fortune told by Madame Rosa, whose weird little storefront was next door to the Wild Hare. I could go into an antique shop and pay $200 for something an old lady had thrown in a dumpster. I could buy a fairy wand, or stained glass, or glitter, or incense, or a crystal.