The Secret Letters (3 page)

“No.”

“Brandon?” Brandon was my ex-husband.

“I can't remember.”

“You married him. You must have felt something.”

“I don't know. I think it was all about the wedding.”

“It
was
a nice wedding.”

“I can't remember it. I guess I hit the open bar a little too hard.”

Actually, I could remember it: me in a dumb white dress that made me look like a fat poodle, Brandon looking miserable in a rented tux, a DJ who kept playing horrible old songs my mother liked, then our one-night honeymoon in Ocean City in a cheap hotel with carpeting on the walls and no AC, where we watched Jay Leno, too drunk, tired, and sweaty to touch, until we passed out. There was something in Brandon's face I had never seen before, something angry, like I had trapped him and now he was just going to have to suffer. But it turned out he was not trapped at all, and he ran away as soon as he could.

Pam and I sat there thinking about our short, stupid marriages.

“It just seems weird that she had so much passion,” Pam said finally. “Like that soap opera she loved, what was that called?”

“
The Secret Storm
.”

“Exactly.”

“Are all the letters like that one?”

She plucked another envelope out of the box and handed it to me.

“‘Beautiful girl,” I read. “I can still feel you touching me, your warm skin next to mine, so smooth and silky'—okay, TMI.”

“Whoever he was, he was very poetic.”

“Wow.” I stared at the envelope. It was addressed to a post office box in town—well played, Mom, I thought. The postmark said Winslow, Arizona. October 1975. There it was again, that weird feeling about the postmarks. As I stared at the letter, the date stamp began to weave in front of me. “Pammy.”

“What?”

“The envelope. The postmark.”

“What about it?”

I could barely talk. My heart was pounding. “I know who this guy is.” The room was starting to spin and I couldn't breathe.

“What are you talking about? Who?”

I pulled my inhaler out of my pocket and took a big whiff, then breathed in and out slowly like the doctor told me to. I really wanted a cigarette, but my mother would never let me smoke in the house, and even though she wasn't there, I was still afraid to. When I could talk, I said, “He's my father.”

“Excuse me?”

“This guy. He's my—he has to be my—” I took another hit of my inhaler.

“What the fuck are you saying?” Pam counted on her fingers. “For Christ's sake, just because she was seeing this guy around the same time that you were—doesn't mean she—that you—”

“I'm just saying it's possible. I'm just saying that there it is, thirty-eight years ago. She's three months away from getting pregnant with me and she's sleeping with this guy. Thirty-eight years, Pam. I'm thirty-seven. I rest my case.”

“That isn't
evidence
.”

“You sound like a lawyer.”

“Ouch.”

“I'm just saying. Look at our father. I don't look anything like him. Neither did Donny.”

“So? Lots of people don't look like their fathers. You look like Mom. Everyone always said so.”

I was never sure how I felt about this. “The point is, I never felt our dad was like a real dad. He didn't act like dads were supposed to.”

“You watched too many episodes of
The Brady Bunch
.”

“The only game he ever played with us was Whac-a-Mole.”

“Plenty of dads hit their kids. It doesn't mean you have a paternity case here.”

I glanced at her to see if she was having a laugh at my expense, but she looked like she felt sorry for me. “Here's the thing,” I said. “I've always had a feeling something was not right. Something that should have been there and wasn't. This would explain everything. He resented Donny and me because we weren't really his kids, and he must have known—maybe he didn't know he knew, but he
knew
.”

“Was Tim not his kid, too?”

“Hey, I don't know about Tim. Tim is not my problem. I'm just saying that suddenly my whole life makes sense. Bill Barlow is not my father. This guy is—this J.” I waved the letter at her.

“Oh, for fuck's sake, Julie.” She was getting the pink spots in her cheeks she always got when she was mad. “I should never have shown these letters to you. I should have known you would do something like this.”

“Like what?”

“Do you see what a mess this could turn into? I mean, what are you going to do? Order Dad to have a DNA test? Are you going to find this J. person and make him play catch with you? What follows from this?”

“I don't know. Maybe nothing follows.” I noticed I was clutching the letter to my chest. “But this changes everything. I never knew who I was before.”

“You still don't know who you are.”

“Maybe not, but I know who I'm not. I'm not Bill Barlow's daughter.” I found myself backing away in case she tried to grab the letter away from me. “Look, I'm sorry. But think about it. All those years, she put up with his bullshit. She let him get away with it. But it turns out she
didn't
let him get away with it, not really. Don't get mad, get even, right?”

“That's your identity now? You're the revenge?”

“Yeah, I like that. Donny and me, we're the revenge.”

“Okay, fine.” She stood up and paced back and forth like she did in the courtroom. I had snuck into the courthouse a few times to watch her when she was “litigatin'.” “So now what? What's your plan here?”

“I'm going to read them all. There must be some whatchamacallit.” I was getting tired.

“
Evidence
. There's nothing. He only ever signs the letters ‘J.'”

“You weren't looking for clues. I'll bet there's something.” I pulled an envelope out of the box and opened it.

“I have to be in court at nine.”

“Go home, I'll be fine.”

She shook her head, sighed, and sat on the bed next to me. “I'll help you.”

“Really?”

“What are sisters for?” She sounded sad, like she wished she was still my real sister instead of only a half. I felt bad for her, but my heart was beating hard. All my life, I had been one of those people in the background, like when we were looking at old photographs and I'd ask my mother, “Who's that?”, and she couldn't remember. Now for the first time, I felt like there might be something important about me. I opened up the letter. Pam took another letter from the box, and we began to read.

***

The sun was coming up. My eyes burned, and I was wheezing. Pam had finally keeled over onto a pile of dresses, and I covered her with a huge Hawaiian muumuu. She kept making little oinking sounds, and I reminded myself to make fun of her when she woke up. I almost laughed out loud at the pocket of drool in the corner of her mouth, but I was too close to crying.

She was right. There was no evidence. The envelopes stared silently up at me
from the metal box. The only piece of information we'd pounded out of them was that every time J. referred to the time they'd spent in the “Forest,” he meant the Forest Motel up on Route 40. It had recently been torn down, and some yuppie chain restaurant was there now. Apart from that, the letters were—well, let's just say they were not like anything I'd ever read before. They were steamy, but Pam was right, they were more poetry than porno. It was weird how J. could just go on and on about my mother, her smile, her eyes, her warmth, her beauty. Reading them, I felt like I was looking through a keyhole and finding a hidden room in a house I thought I knew. Every so often, Pam or I would fan ourselves with the page we were reading, and I know she found it as intense and weird as I did.

But as creepy as I felt for doing it, I couldn't stop reading, and I couldn't help envying my mother, and also J., whoever he was, for being able to feel that way about someone. I didn't get it, myself. I couldn't imagine anyone thinking that my mother, who on a good day took up two airplane seats, was “a beautiful willow tree,” or that the voice I remembered as unpleasantly shrill sounded “like the wind in the pines.” I couldn't imagine writing pages and pages of smut, or poetry, whatever. It seemed like too much of a hassle, and I guess my mother was right when she used to say I was as lazy as an old dog.

When light started coming in the windows, I was still no closer to figuring out who J. was—our father, Donny's and mine. I needed to go home and sleep for a few hours before work, but first I decided to arrange the envelopes in order before I put them back in the box. It was hard to make out some of the postmarks, but most of the letters had dates. It was strange to read something from before I was born. Had the world really existed without me? (I was going a little nuts by this time.) When the letters were written, where was I? Was I in heaven, waiting in line, while God chose some parents for me? If this was how it had worked, I thought, He had screwed things
up pretty good. Not that God and I had much of a relationship. In my family, Sundays were when you went fishing or washed the car, and no one gave a rat's ass about church except for Norma, who always wanted to be a nun, though we weren't even Catholic. I used to think my mother was mad at God and I never understood why, but now I wondered if maybe J. had something to do with it.

It was time to get the hell out of my mother's bedroom and shut my brain off. I started to put the letters back in the box, but then I noticed something. The letters began in February 1975, and continued all the way until August 1976, two months before I was born. The last letter didn't say much, just that he missed her and hoped she was well, but it wasn't a break-up letter. On the other hand, I had to admit it didn't sound like the letter of a concerned father to his pregnant lover. Maybe he didn't know, I thought. Maybe she never told him about Donny and me. That would explain why he had never contacted us, why he hadn't showed up at our house and made my mother run away with him and his twins, plus her other kids, and move to Winslow, Arizona, or wherever the hell he was from.

I was chewing on this when I noticed a gap. From December 1975 to February, 1976, there were no letters. This was roughly when I figured we had been conceived—I thought January of 1976, but there could be some play, like maybe we were premature but no one realized it because we were small, being twins. This gap could only mean one thing: my mother and J. had been together during that time. And that meant I could have been conceived while they were together. And that meant—

“Hey! Wake up!”

Pam stopped oinking.

I shook her by the shoulder. “I found something!”

She lifted her head and squinted at me.

“The letters. I found some
evidence
.” I explained the whole thing to her.

By the time I'd finished, she was awake, sort of, but her voice was sleepy. “That's not evidence. That's completely circumstantial.”

“Look at this. He
has
to be my father. This proves it.”

“It doesn't prove shit.”

“Yes, it does.”

She closed her eyes again, obviously too tired to say, “No it doesn't,” and go a few rounds with me. With a yawn like a sigh, she said, “Oh, Julie. Okay, fine, have it your way. So J. is your father. Now what?”

I didn't have an answer for that.

For the next few weeks, I couldn't think about anything but the letters. In the kitchen of the Wild Hare, sautéing porcini mushrooms or whisking a roux, my mind kept replaying the romantic crap J. had said to my mother. Over and over, I heard his words in my mind. Hector had to keep jabbing me in the ribs with a long metal spoon to keep me from burning things. “Earth to Julie, hello?” he kept saying.

He must have mentioned something about me to our boss because one night at the bar after my shift, Milo sat down next to me and said in a casual way, “So, how's everything?”

“Fine and dandy,” I said. “How're things with you?”

“Oh, fine, fine. Listen, Julie, how are you doing? Is everything okay with you?”

“Sure. Everything's great.”

“Good. Good.” He took a breath and let it out, like he wanted to say something but couldn't figure out how.

“Did Hector mention something about me?”

“He said you seem—preoccupied.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“He said you don't seem like your mind is on your work.”

“Hector said that?” That
bastard
, I thought.

“I know how it is.” Milo looked sad. He had a big, sharp face that was always sunburned. When he wasn't in his restaurant, he was sailing on Chesapeake Bay. “When you lose someone—” His wife had died of cancer nine years ago, just before I started working for him. “—you feel like life will never go back to normal. The world is so strange and frightening you can't imagine how you'll function.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “I just want you to know that it gets better. It takes time, but eventually
you learn to live with it.”

I looked at his tan, sad face and felt so sorry for him I wanted to cry. I found myself wanting to tell him the whole story about the letters, and my shitty childhood, and my asshole father, and J., my real father, but I just nodded and said, “Thanks.”

***

The next morning, I woke up to a hangover and the sound of Pam's hip-hop ringtone. I crawled around on the floor until I found my phone. “What now?” I was wheezing and could barely get the words out. I was going to have to find my inhaler.

“You sound terrible.”

“I'm fine. Just spent too long at the bar after my shift. What's up?”

“I found some postcards in another box.”

“And?”

“No big deal, they're just interesting. Come on over.” She didn't have to tell me where she was. Suddenly, I felt wide awake. I threw on some clothes, jumped into my car, and sped up the hill. The front door was unlocked, and I had that weird feeling again going into the house, like I might run into my mother or Donny or my younger self, but instead, in the living room I saw a girl with a spiderweb tattoo on her back, straightening up the shelf of Hummel figurines. She had dreadlocks like Ricky's, and when she turned around, I saw a silver bead on the side of her nose and a streak of green in her black hair. It made me feel old to look at her.

“Oh, hey, you must be Julie,” she said. “I'm Star.” She put down her feather duster and gave me a hug.

I dimly recalled that Pam had told me Ricky had a new girlfriend, though knowing him, the one Pam mentioned the other day was already history and this was a new one. I told her it was nice to meet her and went off to look for Pam. I found her combing through a pile of yellowed papers that looked like bank statements from the
eighteenth century. “Well?” I tried not to sound too excited.

“These were in a box of old bills.” She handed me a stack of postcards. I grabbed them and started reading. They were in the same handwriting as the letters, addressed to the same P.O. Box, but unlike the letters, they were full of polite stuff you could say to anyone. “‘Having a wonderful time, wish you were here,'” one actually said. “‘The Grand Canyon is beautiful at this time of year.'” Nothing about love, sex, or paternity.

When I finished, I said, “Nothing earth-shattering there. No true confessions.” I felt disappointment rippling through me.

“I know. I just thought you'd like to see them, since they're from your
father
and all.”

“You're just jealous.” I tried not to sound as sad as I suddenly felt. I don't know what I expected, but the postcards hadn't told me anything new. I flipped through the stack, looking at the pictures. They were of places in the southwest, mostly Arizona. “I've always wanted to visit the southwest.”

“Funny, I've never heard you say that. Isn't it just a bunch of rocks?”

“I don't know. It sounds interesting.”

“Sure.”

“I mean, like, the Alamo,” I added, to make it look like I knew what I was talking about.

“Do you even know where that is?”

I took my best shot. “New Mexico?”

“Nope.”

“Whatever.”

She put her hand on my arm. “Try not to make too big a deal out of this, okay?”

“Sure. Of course. I mean, it's not like I have any proof, right?” When she wasn't
looking, I palmed one of my father's postcards and slipped it into my back pocket.

***

I ran into Ricky in the living room. “Dude,” I said.

“Hey, Jools!” He bounded over and hugged me like he was five years old. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to help Pam clean.” This was about as likely as me coming over to experiment with nuclear fission, but he didn't notice anything weird about it. “I met your girlfriend. Flavor of the month?”

He whispered in my ear, “She's
awesome
.”

“Oh, yeah? In what way?”

“In every way. Jools, I never felt like this before. It's like—she's like a—she's
magic
.”

Some choice phrases J. had written to our mother popped into my mind, but I made them go away. I was going to ask for details, though I didn't really want to hear them, when Star came into the living room, stood next to him, and rubbed his back. He had always liked that when he was little, and I wondered how she already knew this. “We were just going to eat something. Do you want a sandwich?” she asked. I was about to tell her no, thanks, I had to be going, but accidentally said, “Sure, that would be great.”

***

We were talking about space travel. As far as I could tell, Ricky and Star had only been together a few weeks, but a serious problem had already come up in their relationship. Star was ready to go colonize the moon as soon as an opportunity was available, but Ricky made it clear there was no way he was going to live anywhere but good old Mother Earth. I was eating a sandwich, or rather, trying to eat it—it was some kind of fake meat on woody bread with a handful of alfalfa sprouts tossed in like a hairball.

“What about you, Pam?” I said. “You going to the moon?”

“There's no oxygen on the moon,” Ricky said, in case we didn't know that.

“Maybe I will,” Pam said. “Why not. Not much going on here.”

“Think of the possibilities for lawsuits,” I said. “All those spaceships crashing into each other.”

“Territorial disputes. Torts. No laws. You're right, I'm going.”

“No,” Ricky howled, “not you, too! I'll be here all alone.”

“Yeah, who's going to pay the bills?” I said. Pam was taking care of the household finances. It went without saying that Ricky couldn't handle stuff like that. He had a job in town he could walk to that Pam got for him at a law firm next door to hers, but he wasn't good with money, or for that matter, at the job. “You better stay here, Pammy.”

“Oh, great, thanks a lot. I get to stay here while you're all gallivanting around outer space.”

“You'll be with me.” Ricky flashed his cute-little-boy grin at her.

“I'll send you postcards,” I said. There was no one on Earth I would be willing to give up living on the moon for, or anything else, for that matter. Ricky seemed about to object, but I added, “Yeah, no postcards on the moon, I know.”

When I finished picking at my sandwich, I got up, thanked Star, and said I had to get moving. She and Ricky both gave me big goodbye hugs, then immediately flung themselves at each other.

“She seems nice,” I said to Pam as she walked me to the door.

“I guess. He can't keep his hands off her, or vice-versa. They're like weasels. It's exhausting to be around them. I hear them laughing all night long.”

“That must be fun for you.”

“Yeah, it's so fucking fun.” She was starting to get lines around her eyes, and I
thought I saw some gray roots beneath the blond. “I think he really likes her.”

“He seemed to really mind that she wanted to go live on the moon.”

“For someone in our family, that's a pretty impressive degree of commitment.”

“Hey, I was married.”

“For five minutes.”

“It was still a commitment. At least for me.” I had met Brandon back when I was working for Tim fifteen years ago, before he moved out west. When a guy whose car we were trying to repossess broke our windows and I cut myself trying to clean it up, Brandon bandaged my hand with a gentleness I had never experienced before. I thought this meant he was sensitive and caring, but it just meant he was a good nurse. I hated to think how naive I'd been back then. When I said that dumb shit to him about “till death do us part,” I meant it, but I would never make a mistake like that again. Sure, I had been at the Wild Hare for almost a decade, but I was prepared to leave at a moment's notice, and my apartment barely looked lived in. I just went there to sleep. I stopped short of keeping a bag packed at all times, but apart from my shot glass collection, I didn't own anything I cared about.

“I know, I know.” She obviously didn't want to argue about Brandon, since we'd pretty much forgotten him, though sometimes I still dreamed about him, dumb dreams where we were still married and had kids and were happy.

I looked at my watch. I was going to be late to work again. Hector was probably talking to Milo about me right now. I told Pam I had to run, and to let me know if she found anything interesting. She promised she would.

As I drove away, I could see Ricky and Star in the side yard, pressed together like Siamese twins as the dogs leaped around them.