“I’m sorry,” she explains. “I know you must have been freaked when I left you up there.”
“I was fine,” I say, lying.
The first thing we take out of the box are a stack of letters, some opened and most not. Every single envelope looks like it’s been through a flood. In some cases, the ink has washed off entirely. In others, it’s just been smudged beyond recognition.
On one, I can just about make out a postmark with the date October 19, 1988. The place it comes from, however, I can’t decipher — only what appears to be an S or an E as the first letter. On another, the month and day are unreadable, but the year appears to be 1985. The stamp is Duke Ellington, and it’s twenty-two cents.
There seem to be about twenty of these letters. A few have opened from the moisture, but I can tell that the letters inside have never been removed or read. I take one out of an open envelope, and the ink has bled over the entire piece of stationery and dried.
“Do you think these are from your grandfather to your dad?” Aisha asks.
I don’t even have to answer, because I lift away an old, empty photo frame, and underneath, in a plastic baggie, is another opened letter. I grab it and just about tear the baggie open. Aisha takes the box and keeps digging.
The letter is short, and it’s in the same handwriting as the letter my grandfather sent to the pastor. Unlike most of the other letters, this one has no water damage. I read it out loud.
I look up at Aisha in amazement. She returns the look.
“You think my dad ever saw this?” I ask.
“He said he never heard from him again. And yet this is open,” Aisha says. Her eyes are wide. Wider than I’d expect, like she’s even more shocked by all this than I am. “You ready to get your mind blown?”
“Um,” I say. “Try me?”
Tentatively, she hands me another opened letter. It isn’t waterlogged, and it is very readable.
“It was stuck on the side, like it was hidden away on purpose,” she tells me.
It is postmarked December 21 of last year, no return address. I look at Aisha. “Holy —”
“I know,” she says, blinking. “I know.”
She watches as I open the letter.
The handwriting is a little different now — maybe older, more shaky, the letters less controlled, perhaps. Like my grandfather grew up over the course of thirty-two years.
I feel my head go numb, and I struggle for air. “My grandfather is alive! And the pastor knows it. Holy …”
“I know,” Aisha says. “This is crazy.”
“You want to be there when I show it to my dad?”
She shakes her head hard. “Not my drama. I’ll stay down here.”
My heart pounds as I climb the stairs. My dad. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who takes things well, at least not without alcohol. But this is good news. Shocking news, maybe, but also good. His dad is alive.
He answers his door bleary-eyed, and I quickly sniff. I don’t smell any alcohol on him, but I’m not sure which is better — him drunk or him not drunk — for something like this. “Hey, kiddo,” he says.
“Hey.” Suddenly I’m at a loss for words.
“Your lesbian friend wanted to talk to the pastor. I don’t know about that girl,” he says.
I laugh. “She’s something, all right.”
“Pretty, and nice,” my dad says, and I wonder if he knows just how pretty I think she is.
“She’s cool. So I have to ask you something. Did you ever see this?”
I hand him the letter from 1982 first. I don’t want to freak him out all at once.
He brings the letter close to his face and squints, and then he holds it as far away from his face as he can and strains his eyes.
Something registers. He looks up at me, shocked. “Where the fuck did you get this?” He thrusts the letter back at me, and I take it.
“I … We found it in a box.”
“How the …? What the …?” He stumbles backward a couple of steps.
“Dad,” I say, walking toward him.
He puts his arms out to stop me from following him. His face is a mask of pain. Agony.
“Don’t you ever,” he yells, his voice thin. “Don’t you … Did I ask you to — fucking …”
He grabs his chest and he starts to cough, and then he keeps coughing and coughing. I stand there, paralyzed. My mother comes running. By the time she gets to him, his face is turning slightly blue and I’m still standing there like a helpless moron.
“What happened?” she asks, sitting him down on the bed.
“I was telling him about something I found. It’s from his dad,” I say. “There’s more —”
She doesn’t look up at me. “This isn’t a good time to upset him,” she says. “Go downstairs.”
“But —”
“DOWNSTAIRS,” she barks. It’s as angry as she’s ever been with me.
My blood freezes. I walk, numb, through the kitchen to the basement stairs. I descend. I count to 255 by fifteens. It does nothing for me.
When I see Aisha, I try to breathe normally. I feel underwater. I sit back down next to her.
“What’d he say?” she asks.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I go to pull it out, but the case gets stuck against the fabric. I pull harder, and it won’t come out, and then I’m tugging with all my might, and it just won’t budge. When I give up and remove my hand, the phone slips out of my pocket and onto the floor. I stomp on it. I slam my foot down, again and again, and I keep slamming my foot down until my phone is in pieces, strewn across the basement carpet.
Aisha is expressionless. Just sort of there. This is a dealbreaker. She thinks I’m totally messed up, and she’s going to walk away, out of my life, and I’ll never see her again. Which is perfect, because finally I have a friend. Someone who kind of gets me. It’s been a long time, as in forever, and now she’s here, and soon she’ll be gone, because that’s what happens when people get close to you. And I’m so frustrated that I walk into the bathroom and slam the door behind me.
The tub is still a little wet from this morning’s showers, but I don’t care. I sit down in the cold puddle, lean back, and close my eyes.
I just kind of disappear into my brain for a while and allow the world to go away. It’s what I do sometimes back home in New York. Sometimes it’s better to be nowhere than somewhere. So that’s where I go. Not mad, not sad. Just nowhere, nothing. I go there for a while.
WHEN I OPEN my eyes, Aisha is sitting cross-legged on the bathroom floor, looking at me. I have no idea how long I’ve been out. More importantly, a hot girl has been watching me sleep. I check my breath to make sure it’s not terrible, then I rub my eyes and sit up.
“Sorry,” I say, about nothing in particular. Or maybe everything.
She shrugs it off, digs into her pocket, and pulls out my phone. She has Scotch-taped the pieces together. It’s clearly never going to work again, but it feels like the kindest possible thing for her to have done while I slept.
“Thank you,” I say, taking it from her. “It’s perfect.” I pretend to make a call on it. “Hey, Dad? Great to hear from you! I miss you too. I always love our conversations. You aren’t the shittiest father on the planet at all!”
“Hey, at least he didn’t kick you out,” she says.
I nod a few times. “Yep, he’s a gem.” I pick up the phone again. “Hi Mom! Thanks for making me feel like it was my fault that my dad turned blue!”