I recognised the writing before I got the envelope open. You know your mother’s handwriting the way you know her voice.
Seven letters, over twenty-two years. He had kept them in order like everything else.
The first was dated July 1995.
It was one page and it was not cruel. I need to say that, because for about two hours in that storage unit I badly wanted it to be cruel, and it wasn’t, and that turned out to be much harder to deal with.
It said that the letters had to stop. It said that Nora was settling, that she had stopped asking after about six weeks, that she was sleeping through again, and that every time something arrived it started over. It said: I am not doing this to punish you. I am doing it because she is seven and she cannot keep being reminded that she is waiting for someone.
And then, at the bottom: If you want to fight me on this, fight me. But you have to actually fight me, Gene. You cannot send a letter a month for a year and call that fighting.
The second letter was 1997 and it was much shorter and much colder and it was about money.
The third, 1999, told him she had remarried.
The fourth is the one I have read the most times. It’s from 2003, when I was fifteen, and it is four pages, and it is the only one where she sounds like she’s having a conversation rather than issuing a position. Most of it is about how badly things were going with me at fifteen — and they were; I was awful, I have apologised for it since — and about halfway down the third page she writes:
I don’t know any more whether I was right in 1995. I thought I was. I was twenty-nine and I was terrified and you had gone, and everything I did I did to make her stop hurting, and it worked, and now I have a fifteen year old who is angry at everyone and I cannot tell whether that is you or me or just fifteen.
And then, further down: Don’t come now. Not at fifteen. I am asking you. If you come now she will have to choose, and she will choose me, and then you will have lost her twice and I will have made her do it.
The fifth letter is 2009, after her second marriage ended, and it is two lines long and I will not repeat it because it is hers.
The sixth is 2014.
The sixth letter says: She’s twenty-six. She’s fine. She’s getting married in October. I think if you wrote to her now it would land. I’m not going to tell you to. But I’m not asking you not to any more, and I should have said that a long time ago.
He didn’t write to me in 2014.
I checked the folder three times, standing up, in the bad bulb light. 2013 has four letters. 2015 has six. 2014 has none.
I have thought about that gap for a year and a half and I have come to a conclusion that I cannot prove, which is that he could not do it.
Nineteen years of writing into a silence. Two hundred-odd letters coming back with stickers on them. And then the door opens, and there is nothing between him and the thing he wanted except the actual doing of it — and he had built, by then, an entire life around a woman who did not answer, and he did not know how to be a man whose daughter might.
So he didn’t write in 2014. And in 2015 he went back to writing letters he knew would come back, which is a thing you can only understand if you accept that by then the letters were not for me.
The seventh and last letter from my mother is from 2017 and it is one sentence.
Tom died in April, and she’s not doing well, and I’m telling you because I think you’d want to know.
That is the year of the book about grief. Wrapped in paper with balloons on it, because he’d bought a roll of paper with balloons on it at some point and was never in his life going to buy another one until it ran out.