the wrong end of a telescope. The traffic was bad that morning. D.C. traffic is always bad. We drove in a silence that seemed intensified by the chilly air. Several times, I saw Aunt Kim reach automatically for the radio. It was the rule of law in her car that NPR must always be blaring. Each time, however, her fingers drew back as though burned.
Her cell phone rang again. Once more, she pulled to the curb, earning herself a barrage of honking from the cab behind us. My uncle’s voice sounded down the line, though I still couldn’t catch any words.
“Nearly there,” Aunt Kim said.
But then her face went blank. All the expression was erased, like a wet cloth on a chalkboard. There were just two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, slightly open. In that moment, she looked so much like you.
My uncle was speaking, a muffled stream.
“I understand,” she said.
Once more, she turned the car around. I saw my school approaching in the distance. Apparently we were going to spend all day passing back and forth in front of it. I cleared my throat, but Aunt Kim did not look at me. Beside her, Aunt Janine folded up one hand and pressed it unsteadily to her mouth. They still had not exchanged a word. They did not need to.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
It was Aunt Janine who answered.
“We’re taking you home,” she said.
FOR A FEW days afterward, my memory is empty. Somebody else dressed in black and attended the funeral. Somebody else handled the cloying embraces. All I have are brief, watery flashes. The icy air of winter pervading the house. My father’s red, swollen eyes. The wake was a blur of soft carpeting and muted lights. Every adult in the known universe seemed compelled to approach me and say something about God working in mysterious ways. “I’m sorry for your loss,” each of them said, as though they had all received the same script. A single moment does stand out plainly for me: one of my little cousins tugging at Aunt Kim’s sleeve. I was standing nearby, awkward in my somber dress. In her bell-clear voice, my cousin asked about you. She wanted to know whether you would be there soon, whether you would sit by her.
I was fourteen years old. At the front of the room, there was a gleaming mound, half-obscured by flowers—your coffin. I knew what was in that coffin. I knew the answer to my little cousin’s question. But I still found myself pausing, heart in my throat, waiting for Aunt Kim’s reply.
“Don’t be silly,” she snapped. “Get yourself a cookie and be quiet.”
I blinked. Time passed. I was standing outside, on the pavement, in the clean wind. This kind of thing happened often, for a while. Blink, and an hour would elapse. Blink again, and a whole afternoon might go by. It was as though someone were slicing at my internal calendar with a pair of scissors, removing time.
A few nights later, I came to myself again. I was sitting in my bedroom. My father was downstairs; he too had gone into a kind of walking coma, subsisting on televised football and cups of black coffee. He would have been glad of my company, no doubt, but I was avoiding him. I was avoiding everyone. Aunt Kim had urged me to call her anytime. Aunt Janine had independently said the exact same thing in the exact same tone. One of my classmates had dropped off that week’s homework, which was piled on my desk, awaiting my attention. There were a thousand things I could have been doing. But the world had turned upside down, and no one else seemed to have noticed. It was astonishing that my school continued to function, that I would be back there on Monday. It was incredible that cars still rolled down the street outside. Curled on my mattress, I practiced saying the word dead. Dead to rights. Dead sure. Drop-dead gorgeous. Now that I thought about it, the word was everywhere. It cropped up in everyday conversations, in moments where it had no right to be, like a warning note, something I had been foolish enough not to pay attention to before.
Then I remembered the Dead Letter Office. A few weeks ago—or a decade, it seemed—my class had gone on a field trip to the local post office. It had been dull, in the particular way that forced visits to government institutions are always dull. Rooms filled with filing cabinets. A sweaty tour guide in a blue uniform, armed with cue cards and a litany of groan-worthy puns. Long hallways. No break for snacks. The Dead Letter Office was where the mail ended up if it could not be delivered. Our tour guide had shown us around proudly. The place was special, he said. The large, grand Dead Letter Office in New York City had even been featured in a Christmas movie once, since all the wish lists that were addressed to Santa, North Pole amassed there during the holidays, heaped like an indoor snowdrift.
Alone in my bedroom, I hurried to my desk. I grabbed up a pen—with a spray of feathers in place of an eraser, as I recall—and a sheaf of paper. Then I wrote for ten pages, front and back, without stopping. Aunt Kim’s necklace at the funeral would have made you laugh—she has no taste—Aunt Janine wore flats because of her bunions—it was so strange to see them there without you—two instead of three—everyone was chatting and having coffee, the whole family wandering all over and giving each other hugs—but the twins kept stopping and looking around—like they were waiting for you— I was barely conscious. My hand moved across the page, and words followed. They made you wear an awful dress at the funeral—I thought you should have your jeans on, but Aunt Kim said No Way—I put a package of gum in the coffin—I don’t believe in heaven, but you sure do—maybe the gum will help your ears pop on the way up—
Finally it was over. The letter was done, folded into an envelope. I crept downstairs. Moving quietly so as not to rouse my father, I collected a stamp. On the envelope, I wrote just one word: mom. Then I threw on a coat and hurried down the street to the mailbox.
THERE ARE ENVELOPES for you in every state I have ever visited. For nearly two decades, I have written to you. Perhaps it is strange that I still have so much to say. I often find myself turning to you, reflexively, a question on my lips; I still engage in imaginary quarrels with you. I store up the memories I have left—the ones that have not fallen by the wayside—and run them through my hands, examining them. The raucous cackle of your laugh. The honey-and-lavender odor of your hair. Your habit of humming on long car trips. Your penchant for linen skirts. I still experience that surge of bottomless sorrow. Even now, this can only be alleviated by a few minutes spent at my desk, scribbling away, head bent over the page.
The whole matter has been complicated, of course, by my continuous traveling. For my work, I have circumnavigated the globe. As a rule, a nature photographer never stays anywhere too long. Straight out of college, I took a job capturing images of desert animals, rambling across the horn of Africa over a period of weeks. In my father’s words, I “caught the travel bug.” Since then, I have hiked up mountainsides and gone spelunking through caves. I have broiled red in tropical climates and slept in makeshift igloos. I have set foot on every continent. I have swum in nearly every ocean.
I once spent a grueling month in Kenya—always breathless from the altitude, always hot, right down to my bones. I once spent a week photographing the blind dolphins of the Indus River. (Centuries of living in such murky water had rendered their eyes moot.) I once flew to Australia for a three-week photographic bonanza, snapping every inch and angle of the baobab trees, their improbable silhouettes, as fat and waxy as candles.
In many of these places, there has been no Dead Letter Office. There has sometimes been no postal system at all. I could not turn to the guide who had steered me out into the glimmering stream of the Indus River, pass him an envelope—addressed simply mom—and tell him, “Take care of this for me, would you?” I could not toss my letters into the recycling bin or the gutter, either. I would never degrade them to that extent.
Instead, I have tucked
