by Jo Watson
CHAPTER 66
“Wow—how long since these were used?” I asked, as we walked into what were clearly dilapidated stables. They were old and cold, and the walls were made of a cobble stone—the kind you never see anymore.
“I don’t think they’ve been used since my grandmother rode. No one rides horses anymore.”
“Where should we look?” I asked.
Mike pointed at a small copper sign on one of the stable doors. “Darcy,” he read out. “That seems like a good place to look.”
He pushed the sticky door open. It scraped across the old stone, fingernails tearing down an old blackboard, and my skin shivered.
We walked in. The air was cold and damp and smelled of dust and old straw. “God, it’s a bit creepy in here,” I said, wrapping my arms around my body.
Mike pulled a torch out and turned it on.
“And now?” I asked.
“And now, we look.” He started moving along the wall again. I copied him, running my hands over the large cobblestones, like he was—although, I wasn’t sure I would recognize anything, if I actually found it.
What were we looking for?
“Gross! Gross! Aaaahh!” I pulled my hand away and shook it wildly, trying to get the sticky spider web off it. I wiped it on my pants and cringed. “Gggrraaaggghh.” I shook my body, feeling nauseous. “Bleg! Bleg!” I scrunched my face up and flapped my arms some more.
Mike looked at me. “That was . . . a lot,” he teased.
“Hate spiders,” I said.
“Hate bats, too. And rare nesting birds?”
“Oh, by the way, on that note, I bloody googled that bird, and they totally made it up. There is no black-crested night budgie!”
He chuckled again, like smooth liquid gold. “They have applied to have it officially recognized as a separate species.”
At that, I jumped up. “HA! I knew they made that shit up.”
He laughed some more. “They seem to think they have a legitimate claim.”
“They are soooo wrong,” I said, putting my hands back on the wall and tracing over the stones.
“They’re convinced. They even called in a bird expert.”
“Well, I’m no bird expert, but those were bloody pigeons, if I’ve ever seen a flipping pi—” I stopped dead when a stone moved. “What the . . . ?” I gave it a little push and the whole thing moved.
“Wait.” Mike rushed over and placed his hands over mine. I wasn’t so engrossed in the moment that I missed how good that felt. “Careful,” he said, wiggling our hands gently, pulling and sliding the stone out, until . . .
“Shit!” The whole thing came out and revealed, straight away, what I knew we had been looking for.
CHAPTER 67
There, behind the rock, was an opening—a large one—and it was absolutely stuffed with envelopes. I stuck my hands in and touched them, in case I was imagining it all, but, when my fingertips ran over that familiar surface, I knew. I grabbed a bunch and pulled them out. I looked into the hole. There were more letters. I pulled some more out, and there were more behind those.
“How many are there?” I asked.
I reached in again and pulled out another huge wad. Another one, another, another . . . Mike and I looked at each other in total disbelief. I dropped the massive pile of letters down on the floor and looked at them.
“I don’t believe this,” Mike said, reaching into the hole and taking out yet another pile.
“There are . . . are . . .” I couldn’t believe I was about to say this—“hundreds!” I looked at Mike; he was pulling letters out so quickly, now, and just dropping them to the floor as he went. When he’d finished, we both looked at the huge pile in front of us. We must have stared at them for ages before either of us knew what to do. Slowly, I lowered myself on to the cold floor and sat down in front of the letters.
“They all have dates on the front,” I said. “Why would they? Why would you only put the date on the front of the letter, nothing else?” I asked.
Mike crouched next to me and began leafing through the letters. “It’s definitely my grandmother’s writing,” he said.
I nodded. “But why the dates?”
He raised one to his face and looked at it closely, and then looked at me over the letter. “You put the dates on when you want them read in chronological order,” he said.
I looked down at the letters and started moving them around with my hands. “Where do you start?”
“Don’t you always start at the beginning?” he asked.
“Depends on how you want to tell a story.” I picked up one of the letters and read the date out. “The eighteenth of June, 2018.”
“Oh my God.” Mike looked at me. “That’s a week before she died.”
I stared at the letter in my hands. I had no idea what was contained inside it, but I could feel that it was important. I could sense it. I slowly passed it over to Mike and he took it between his fingers. I shivered as a cold breeze rushed in through the open door.
“Here.” Mike pulled his jacket off and wrapped it around my shoulders.
“Thanks.” I smiled at him and held the jacket close. “Read it,” I said, indicating the letter in his hands.
He looked up at me nervously, but started nodding. He opened the letter, and then, slowly, he started to read.
Dearest Abe,
I think this might well be my last letter to you. I’m feeling very tired and, to be honest, I would welcome the rest. But, as I come to the end of this all, it’s given me an opportunity to reflect on my life.
I haven’t had a bad life. I had four wonderful children and more grandchildren than I could ever have hoped for, although I confess that I do have my favorite. My grandson, Michael, who sits by my bedside every night to see if I’m still breathing. He doesn’t know that I know he’s there. I can see he’s exhausted during the day, although he tries to hide it. I feel like I’ve become such a burden, but he will never admit it, and I can’t wait for the moment that he gets a full night’s sleep again.
Mike couldn’t hold it back. He put the letter down and covered his face as his shoulders began to shake. I could hear the muffled sounds of soft crying and I reached over to him and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. He didn’t resist my comfort. Instead, his head fell on to my shoulder and he buried his face in the crook of my neck. I lifted my hand and placed it softly on the side of his face, cradling it, like I had a few nights ago. We stayed like that for a while, until he finally pulled away. He wiped his face with the back of his hands.
“It wasn’t a burden,” he said quietly.
“I know,” I replied.
“I can’t read this.” He passed the letter over to me and I felt my breath catch in my solar plexus.
“Are you . . . sure?” I asked. This letter was so personal, intimate, and letting me read it out loud, well, it seemed like a gesture I wouldn’t ever know how to repay. It was such an honest gesture. He simply nodded and I raised the letter up to my face and started reading.
Of course, I’ll miss them. I’ll miss them all. But there is one person who I’ll miss the most, when I am gone. I have prayed every morning that I will see you again, but, of course, when I look at all these letters I’ve written over the years, I know that will never happen.
I knew, many, many years ago, that you would never find these letters, but I kept writing them. Over the years, they became more for me than for you. I write them for you, knowing that you will never receive them, but it makes me feel better. I feel that, in some small way, I am still communicating with you. And I need to feel like that, like I need air to breathe.
Of course, I hope you find these one day, but I’ve long given up hope you will. What sustained me through these years was your letters to me. I read them so many times that I memorized them, and then I sewed them into that bag you gave me. I didn’t need them anymore, because, when I closed my eyes every night, I imagined that you were reading them to me. I would try to imagine yo
ur voice. But, I confess, it has gotten harder and harder to hear your voice in my head. I can almost still hear it, but it’s fading fast and I don’t want to live for one single day on this earth without being able to hear your voice in my head anymore.
My husband was a good, kind man, and he loved me very much. But I was never able to give him what he deserved, and, for that, I will always feel guilty. I think I was able to give him a part of my heart, the part that grew to love him in some way. Waking up next to him every morning wasn’t a chore; it was something I came to enjoy. He was a companion, and I respected him and cared for him, but he never got my full heart. That has always been for you.
The day you left was the day that part of my heart was locked away. I closed it up behind a door, waiting for you to return with the key that opened it, only you never did.
I don’t know where you are, or where you went. I can only imagine that you left after you read the letter that my father forced me to write. I wish I’d never written it. I wish I had been stronger and had been able to stand up to him. I have tried to forgive him over the years for what he did, but it is hard, and, I confess, I now believe I never will.
I feel tired, now. Even as I write this, my hands seem like they won’t be able to do this for much longer, and, if I don’t get to write this regular letter to you anymore, it will become impossible to live. So, I guess that this letter is a goodbye to you . . .
Abe, I have loved you since the first moment I saw you. I have loved you with the kind of love that I know now is rare, and almost impossible to find. I consider myself lucky to have ever loved like that, even if it was too brief. To love with such abandon and passion. To love with all my heart, mind, body, soul. To love so deeply that sometimes, when I looked at you, my heart felt like it was going to explode. To love so blindly, right from the first moment I saw you. By the time you walked me home and said goodbye to me, that day we first met, I was completely in love, and, only having known you for such a short amount of time, I didn’t know how I was going to live without you.
You were my everything. You still are.
You are the last person I will think of when I close my eyes for the final time. I will close them and I will imagine your face, not the way it was, but how it would be today. I bet you’ve gone grey, like me. I bet your face is lined with wrinkles. I bet your hair has migrated off your head to places you never thought you would have hair . . .
At that, I laughed a little, tears streaming down my cheeks. Mike gave a small chuckle, too.
I bet you walk bent over and your knees feel as bad as mine. I bet you have aches and pains all over that you never knew you would have. I bet all those things. I bet you look nothing like the boy I fell in love with . . . but I bet your eyes are still the same.
If I close my eyes, I can still see them. See them looking at me. See them as I painted them, so many times that I got to know each little corner of them. You always had a spark inside them, and I bet you still have that spark—well, I hope you do. I hope you never lost it and I hope that you had a good life, one filled with love and laughter, like I had . . . even though there was something always missing from it.
I love you. I always have. But now it’s time to say goodbye. Please know that I will love you until my last breath, and, who knows, maybe we will meet again in the place beyond this.
I hope we do. But, if we don’t, if those short moments I had with you in this life are all I will ever get, it’s enough for me. Because my memories of you and my love for you will sustain me for eternity, and for whatever comes after this.
You, me, forever.
We sat there quietly, staring at the letters. As if someone had pressed the mute button, there seemed to be no sound around us at all. The words contained within that letter had silenced us, they had silenced the entire world. They had stopped the breeze from blowing, the crickets from chirping. They had stopped everything. We slowly looked up at each other, eyes shining with tears. We didn’t need to communicate our feelings, because I knew I felt exactly like he did. There was no other way to feel. Finally, Mike broke the enduring silence.
“These are all the letters she wrote him, for seventy years.” He started picking them up and placing them into one single pile. I watched in amazement as the pile got higher and higher, until it tumbled back down.
“And he never got to read any of them,” I said, as my heart broke.
Mike looked at the fallen letters. I could see he was thinking, and then, as if propelled by something unseen, he jumped up. “We have to get these letters to him.”
I looked at him, and something exploded inside me. Recognition. “Yes!” I jumped up, too. “We need to find out who he is, where he is, if he’s still alive, and we need to get these to him. He needs to know how she felt about him, right to the very end. But how?” I asked.
Mike didn’t hesitate. “The town census and all the other old town records. They’re kept in our jail cell. We can go and look through them.”
I nodded. “We don’t have his surname.”
“It started with the letter E. We’ll just have to look through everything. Let’s wake Ash and Emelia up—this is a four-person job.” He grabbed as many letters as he could, and pushed even more into my arms, but there were still too many for us to take, so the rest we put back inside the cavity in the wall. We hurried back to the house, imbued with a sense of purpose.
A purpose . . . I wasn’t sure that was the word for this. Because this felt like the single most important task of my entire life. Finding Abe and taking these letters back to him felt like the most meaningful thing I’d ever done with my life. And, in that moment, it all kind of made sense. It all clicked in my head, like a key into a lock. The strange string of events that had led me here—the elevator, the letters, coming here, meeting Mike—it all made sense now. It was as if all of that had been the journey I needed to go on to get here. To be holding these letters in my hands and to be trying to take them back to the one person in the world that they had been meant for.
CHAPTER 68
“So, what are we looking for, exactly?” Ash asked, sliding into one of the old seats behind the desk—the very one I had sat in, the other night, during my short time as an incarcerated person.
“His name was Abe—either short for something, or just Abe. And his surname began with an E,” Mike said.
Ash and Emelia nodded. “Where do we start?”
Mike walked over to one of the massive shelves and started pulling down files. “Well, this is from 1940 to 1950, so let’s start looking here first.”
“All of them?” I asked, looking at the massive files and boxes that were now in front of us on the desk.
Mike nodded. The gravity and enormity of our mission suddenly hit me. There was just so much to go through, this was a name in a haystack, and our chances of finding it were stacked against us.
Emelia groaned and looked at her watch. “It’s eight in the morning. I can’t start doing this without coffee.”
“Me, neither!” I moaned back.
Ash nodded. “Pleeeaaasse. I would kill for a coffee right now.”
Mike gave Emelia a small nod. “Would be great.”
“Okay.” Emelia jumped up. “I’ll go get everyone caffeine.” She rushed towards the door and then stopped herself. “Wait—how do you take it, again?” She turned around and looked at me. “Black with sweetener, right?” she asked.
I smiled and nodded at her quickly. And then something strange hit me. A feeling. Small and almost invisible, at first. It was such a seemingly insignificant gesture, fetching me a cup of coffee, but suddenly I felt included. I felt like I was part of some special group, and I hadn’t felt that in such a long time—maybe even ever. I looked at Ash and Mike, who were already flipping through dusty pages, and smiled at myself, wondering if this was my group. Had I found my tribe? I gave a tiny smile and then looked back down at the first book, opened it and started running my eyes over the names.
We mu
st have been looking through the files for hours when Mike’s phone rang. We all jumped in fright; it was the loudest noise any of us had heard all morning. He answered it straight away, and I immediately knew, from the look on his face and the tone in his voice, who he was speaking to and what the call was about.
“What do you mean, she’s gone?” he asked into the phone. He listened and his eyes widened. “And you’re sure everything is locked?” I could hear the nurse’s frantic voice on the other end. “Then she has to be inside. I’ll come over and help you search.” Mike hung up and looked at me. “Petra has disappeared again.” He stood up, reached for his car keys and started moving towards the door.
I jumped up. “I’ll come help you,” I said, following him.
“Don’t you want to stay and continue looking?” he asked.
“We’ve got this, don’t worry,” Ash said from behind us.
“Great. Thanks.” Mike nodded at me and we both ran out and climbed into his car.
“Do you think she’s looking for her son again?” I asked, as we drove off in the direction of the old-age home.
“Probably. The whole place is locked, though, so she has to be inside somewhere.” We drove for three minutes before we got there. This town was quite literally only a few streets big. We jumped out of the car and rushed inside. A group of concerned staff and some of the residents were waiting for us when we arrived.
“I swear, everything is locked.” Cynthia, the nurse, looked devastated and frantic. “We’ve all been so careful since the last time.”
“It’s okay,” Mike soothed her. “We’ll find her. Where have you looked?” he asked.
“We’ve searched all of the rooms on the first floor, and the front garden. We were going to head up to the second floor, now, and then out to the back garden.”
“Okay,” Mike said. “We’ll take the second floor and you take the back garden.”
Everyone nodded and dispersed.
Mike and I headed straight up the stairs to the second floor. This floor wasn’t in use anymore and was nothing more than a creepy corridor of empty rooms, used for storage. We rushed from room to room, careful not to overlook any nooks or crannies, but, after about thirty minutes of combing the entire place, there was still no sign of her. We rushed back downstairs and were just about to head outside when we heard a shout from the bottom of the garden. We rushed over as fast as we could.
