a moment, I actually wondered if I might be dreaming. It did seem a bit like an anxiety nightmare: the dreadful boat ride, the massive waves, a horrible mesh cage, a soupy ocean, distant dorsal fins, mysterious figures on the landscape, no greeting, no assistance with my suitcases, no surety, no safety.
Both men trotted off down the path. I watched their figures receding. They had almost reached the crest of the hill when Forest finally turned.
“Oh, of course. You must be Melissa,” he yelled. “Welcome! We’d stay and chat, but—”
Galen took over the sentence, finishing the other man’s thought.
“—there’s a feeding frenzy in the West End Cove,” he shouted. “Get into the house. Don’t go outside. This place is tricky.”
I could not bring myself to bellow back that they had my name wrong. They were already out of sight, dashing away like kids after the ice cream truck.
THIS LETTER, LIKE all the others, will never be mailed. In the past, I have found all kinds of creative solutions for the letters I write to you. I’ve burned them. I have buried them in the ground. I have shredded them into confetti. While hiking in the mountains, I have folded my messages into origami flowers, hanging them in the trees. When I took a rafting trip down the Mississippi during a long summer, I would fashion the pages into boats, which I set on the current, watching them drift like water lilies, darkening slowly, sinking when my back was turned.
I have been writing to you for almost twenty years. But none of these missives have ever reached you. None of them have ever been read. After all, I wrote my first letter to you the week you died.
THIS IS WHAT I remember:
Your exit from the world was sudden. You kissed Dad on the cheek, went to work, never came home. I was at school when the accident happened. I heard the sirens. An ambulance went haring past the windows of my eighth-grade history class, drowning out a lecture on trade routes in Europe. A little while later, the intercom buzzed into life, a crackling hiss that filled every classroom in the building with the aural equivalent of sand. There were a few thumps as the principal grappled with the microphone. I remember the look of annoyance on my teacher’s face. Then my name was spoken. My name was spoken again. I got to my feet, feeling all eyes on me, and began shoving books into my bag. I was not apprehensive. At the time, I did not connect those two things—the ambulance and my name.
It turned out that your car had stalled. The morning was cold, as only D.C. winters can be cold, the air so damp and heavy that it lay over the world like cheesecloth. You had no knowledge of mechanics—that was my father’s job—but you went through the motions anyway: cursing, opening the hood, staring in bafflement at the labyrinth of cogs. Finally you abandoned the vehicle where it was, at the corner of 13th and G, and strode up the hill toward the nearest garage. The sidewalks were wet and slick. Handfuls of blue salt, strewn over the pavement by landlords and store owners, coped imperfectly with the pockets of ice. I imagine you, a slim figure in brown, your face muffled up to the eyes by one of your own hand-knitted scarves. You paused at a crosswalk. You waited for the green. In the middle of the street, you observed too late that a dump truck had begun to skid on a patch of black ice.
The police would later refer to this as a No Fault Accident. You were correct to be in the crosswalk just then. The driver had seen the light changing and attempted to stop, but the slippery pavement, combined with the inertia of his cargo—thirteen tons of gravel—had prevented him. Everybody had followed the law. Somehow this bothered me. I would have preferred an accident in which somebody was at fault. It was difficult to grasp that there was no one to blame for the loss of my mother—not even you yourself.
What I recall most clearly about that day is sitting outside the principal’s office kicking my feet on the carpet and wondering whether I’d brushed my teeth earlier. The only reason I could come up with for having been dragged out of class was that you, in your well-intentioned but over-scheduled way, had once again forgotten to pick me up for a dentist appointment. You were notorious among the staff at Dr. Greenberg’s. I imagined that someone had called with a friendly reminder, and you had gone flying out of work, coffee on your sleeve, your purse dispensing bits of Kleenex down the road from an unzipped pocket. That was the drill. Any minute now, I was sure that you would appear in the hallway, breathless and bewildered.
When the door opened, however, it was not you at all. Aunt Kim stood there, her face ghastly. Her demeanor was enough to bring me to my feet. Aunt Kim was usually as imperturbable as a slab of granite. Even now, she was not exactly in tears. She was just pale, and her coat was buttoned wrong. At the sight of me, she flinched. Then she approached the receptionist. The two of them held a whispered conversation, glancing my way. I was alarmed to see the receptionist’s expression change, her habitual bored glaze giving way to a sympathetic grimace.
There were three sisters in your family. You were the oldest and best. Kim and Janine, the twins, were as identical as peas. They enhanced this quality by dressing in gray, keeping their hair short, favoring wispy scarves, and sporting brown lipstick. Each twin, on her own, was conservative and unremarkable. But whenever I saw them together, they were downright eerie, like walking mirror images, like an optical illusion. Same gestures, same sidelong glance, same vocal tone. When the three of you were in company, this impression grew stronger. You shared their build: slim, small, and birdlike. You were a little taller, a little bolder. Your laugh rang out a little louder. But there was so much you three shared—that swing of the hips, that tilt of the head, that rough, throaty murmur. Echoes and parallels and mystery.
When it came to temperament, however, you were unique. You lived on your nerves, exhaling emotion like breath. A beautiful sunset could stop you in your tracks. A friendly debate at a dinner party could whip you into a table-pounding frenzy. Kim and Janine lacked your sparkle. They were stoic and calm—women who viewed any display of emotion as a sign of weakness.
Now Aunt Kim took my arm and led me outside. Her mouth was a thin line.
In the car, Aunt Janine was waiting. At the sight of her, the alarm bells in my mind began to jangle. The twins were serious about their respective jobs. They never took sick days. Their holidays were always constrained. The sight of them in the mid-afternoon, away from their desks, still dressed in their work clothes, their mouths tight, their hands trembling—I did not understand it. I did not like it one bit. Aunt Janine offered no explanations. She motioned me into the back seat.
Aunt Kim drove. Her hands were so tight on the wheel that her knuckles blanched. I was still hoping that all this had something to do with my teeth. The windshield was decorated with coils of frost. Through the glass, I saw the sleepy gleam of the Potomac River between the buildings. Aunt Kim’s cell phone rang. She did not answer it while driving; she was not that sort. She pulled to the side of the road first. I recognized my uncle’s voice on the line, though his words were indistinguishable.
“Oh yes,” Aunt Kim said brightly. “Right here. Mm-hm.”
I rolled my eyes. Clearly I was being discussed.
“Which?” she asked. “The one in Bethesda? Oh, I see.”
I kept my gaze on the river.
“Be right there,” Aunt Kim said, still in the same brittle, cheery tone.
Without a word to me, she turned the car around. She and Aunt Janine exchanged a glance, communicating through twin telepathy. One narrowed her eyes, the other nodded, and they both looked away. We passed my school again. In the intervening minutes, that stone building
