This Is How I'd Love You (22 page)

Rogerson grimaces and hands the letter back to Charles. “Sorry, Reid.”

Charles nods. He glances again at Hensley’s writing. He pictures her sitting in the dawn in an empty house, choosing words just for him. His eyes burn and he quickly folds the letter and replaces it in his pocket.

He wipes at his face again with his mucked-up napkin, then watches Rogerson take the remnants of their meal to the trash bin, where he scrapes the bones from the trays.

“Shall we get some air?” Rogerson asks as he takes the handles of the chair and begins pushing him toward the doors.

“Not sure I’m allowed.”

“Since when has that mattered?”

Outside, dusk is just descending, turning the figures outside into black silhouettes. The compound looks quaint, almost like cardboard cutouts from an amateur stage production. There is the wide center of the racetrack, filled with tents and makeshift buildings. Several ambulance trucks wait near the operating tent.

Rogerson offers him a cigarette.

“Paint them black and it looks like evening,” Charles says to nobody, taking the cigarette between his lips.

Rogerson offers him a light and Charles accepts. “It is evening, Reid.”

“Right. The bad evening of a good day.”

“Exactly.”

“But he didn’t die today. There was an evening all those days ago when he died and we didn’t know. Just like this. She’s no idea.”

“You should tell her.”

“He died and we were unaware. We went right on. We went right on and got my leg blown off.”

“Yep. We went right on.”

“She should go right on. She needn’t know about this. What grief she’s already got.”

Rogerson nods. They sit together as the night darkens and their cigarettes burn brighter.

“But if you want another letter. If you want it to reach you sooner rather than later, she’ll need the address of this first-rate racetrack.”

Charles pulls hard against the burn of the cigarette. His chest tightens. He wonders if it was always this hard to breathe.

E
ach night, Hensley has transposed another letter so that now the entire eastern wall of her bedroom is covered in his words. From the living room, through the half-open door, it looks like an act of vandalism or deterioration, as though the bedroom is sure to be condemned. But as she lies in bed, Hensley is transported, conversing with the sentences he has written to her. Existing in the curves of the black letters, she can easily imagine that he is there with her. His unknown face is irrelevant. She knows his syntax, his fear, his logic.

She cannot help wondering, however, if she’s jinxed everything with this vandalism. She has not had a letter since. Each day when the post arrives without an airmail envelope, she aches with unfulfilled desire. Like a hunger that cannot be satiated, this need cuts a hole right through her, rendering her weak and listless. The cats mirror her despondency, lying with her on the bed, their eyes lazy, their tails languid.

Finally, she holds another letter.

As you know, death walks with us here, always bringing up the rear, or shoving its black hood through our ranks so forcefully that we can never escape its threat. Alas, I’ve not escaped unharmed. I am recovering at an American hospital in Rouen. Please note my temporary address. Your letters and those of your father have been my reprieve. A generous shelter into which I’ve retreated over and over again. I now understand that my desperation created a fantasy—believing that the carnage here—the very worst the world has to offer—might be enough. That the rest of the world, the people for whom all of this blood is let, would be safe. I scoff now at my ignorance. But your words, Hensley, shattered me. Eager to be transported by you—to you—the ink was blurred before I even fully understood your meaning. I am not ashamed of my tears but of their uselessness. I can do nothing for you, offer no comfort or consolation, no nourishment or companionship. Even my words can offer no relief, I know. But let the arrival of my letter at least provide you with the knowledge that you may add my name to the long list of others who will forever count themselves lucky to have known your father.

I will treasure the remains of our correspondence and confide to you a truth that my pride prevented me from telling him: he was bound to win.

Another confession, Hensley: Your words have become as necessary to me as my own heartbeat. It is terribly selfish, I know, to request that in your time of grief you would remember me, but I live in fear that I will not receive another of your letters.

This ocean and this war prevent me from taking your hand in mine, placing a warm stone from the earth into your palm and closing our fingers around it. Hold on, I whisper. And I know it is meaningless, these words spoken so confidently into the din of this forsaken place, as if this stone made by or from the earth so many years ago could sustain us. But I know much more than I ever wanted to about the ability to live through the worst circumstances. This, if I could, is how I’d love you. I would see us through to a happier day.

Hensley finds herself smiling, trickles of perspiration rolling from her armpits down her rib cage. Before she’s finished reading the whole letter, she is dipping the pen into the inkwell, eager to write his sentences, to inhabit his pattern of speech, to see the words he’s chosen for her written large across the room. Making it real, inking it onto the wall has become more pressing, even, than reading. But she stops on that sentence and gasps.
This is how I’d love you
.

The ink dries quickly on the smooth plaster. As soon as the fresh sheen has faded, she breathes a sigh of relief. Every word he’s ever written to her is here on this wall. She sits on the bed and reads a sentence from up high, and then another from below the window. The afternoon passes easily this way, with short, dream-filled naps punctuating the hours.

Hensley hears the screen door open and shut. Teresa, just back from the mine, stands in the doorway, her boots caked with dirt and her face stern. Even though she knows it well, Hensley startles at the perfection of her disguise.

Teresa’s face absorbs what Hensley has done to the wall.

“He is the chess partner? Your father’s?”

Hensley nods. A faint, but insistent, tickling begins in her abdomen, as though there is a small stringed instrument, rather than a baby, growing inside of her and it is being plucked—without any rhythm or tune.

“But he is in the war?”

She nods again, touching the place on her stomach where it seems she should be able to detect some movement from the outside. But there is nothing. It’s all inside. Unreachable.

Teresa crosses her arms across her chest.

“Are you angry?” Hensley asks. The thought reminds her how quickly she has adjusted to being beholden to no one.

“Thomas Wright has given up on his wife. He’s returning to look after the mine himself for a while.”

The bed seems to recede beneath her. She pushes her hands against the mattress. “What do you mean?”

“I’m driving to El Paso on Saturday. His train arrives at noon.”

“Well, our mothers were cousins. Surely this is good news. He will let me stay and perhaps . . .” Hensley locks her eyes on the wall, on Mr. Reid’s words.

Teresa furrows her brow. “Hensley. This is
not
good news.
He
will be living here, but you will not. His mood will be blacker than ever now. Cousin or not, he is not a kind man.”

There is a long silence. Teresa does not remove her eyes from Hensley. Hensley wishes she would look away; cast her eyes down to her brother’s boots on her feet, her own cuticles, the pale floorboards. But she watches as Hensley clutches her jaw tight, bracing against the ache that has begun in her throat and travels a direct path down the center of her body.

The words on the wall—the very same ones that have reassured her for weeks—are suddenly useless. She cannot bring a single one into focus. The black just hangs like a curtain, blurry and far away.

Teresa stands there, waiting for an answer. Finally, fiddling with a suspender, she says, “You have no place to live. That’s what I’m telling you.”

Hensley stands and walks to the desk, fingering the stack of envelopes. “I understand, Teresa. You have been very clear.” Hensley thinks of the pile of mending she’s just finished for Amador. The fresh buttons and perfectly tied threads that her own fingers placed will remain here. She will not.

“The eastbound to New York leaves at two o’clock on Saturday. I can drive you in when I go.”

Hensley cannot move her jaw. Even if she could, though, there would be nothing to say. Her gums ache beneath the pressure of her clenched teeth. She blinks her eyes slowly.

Dear Nobody, I have nothing left. Not even words. There is just a deep, hollow hum, like the reverberation of an oversized metal bell that has long since tolled.

When Teresa leaves her alone, Hensley sits at the desk and scribbles some lines on a scrap of paper from her father’s desk. Just to see how they look. It is not something she’s accepted yet. It is a terrible answer to a worse question.

Dear Mr. Teagan. I received your proposal. A friend here has offered to teach me to pan for gold. It involves staring at a filthy pool of mud until a single fleck glints in the bottom of the pan. Perhaps that will serve us well. I will arrive at Grand Central Station on Wednesday the 21st.

It is only as she stands in the post office, the flies buzzing against the front window, and dictates the telegram just as she’s written it, that it becomes clear to Hensley that she will, in fact, be returning to New York and marrying Mr. Lowell Teagan. Her hands seem disconnected from her body as she counts out the correct change. She forces a smile across her lips as she hands the clerk her payment.

Walking slowly back to the house, her shoes knock against the wooden sidewalk and she counts off her steps. She passes the grocery and the saloon. She passes Mr. Lin’s restaurant and the hotel, the foundry and the bank. Within a hundred steps exist all the businesses of Hillsboro except the mine. Hensley wonders how it can be that this small town is the place that killed her father. He’d covered strikes, fires, and murders in New York City. He’d interviewed gangsters, exposed crooked politicians, and opposed the war. He’d made a difference—his one slight body had meant something in that big city. But here, he’d done nothing, meant nothing. He’d become a gruesome tale set in a gruesome landscape. Returning to New York will mean reclaiming the place where both of her parents lived the best of their lives. It will mean remembering each of them in the places they loved: Central Park, the coffee shop on Varick, the theater, dinner at Polly’s. She walks with surer steps.

It will also mean becoming a proper mother to this child. Walking without shame, loving the baby without reservation. For the slight swelling above her groin will soon be an actual baby. Then a child. And they will be a family. Maybe she will find solace there. In the chubby fingers and sticky mouth of her own little one.

She is buoyed by this logic—Mr. Teagan’s presence in the equation receding—until she reaches the gate and sees the stack of stones. One for each of her letters. Then, in her bedroom the black words still adorn the wall, words that have become like an entire gospel, committed to memory. Rife with meaning, sentiment, and history. Read and reread when she has been most desolate; consoling her through doubt-filled days and nights. Though she doesn’t need to see them to know them, the appearance of their sloping lines and circles strike a fear in her. She realizes that although she can take the letters with her, they will have to be hidden. They will become her past, her history. Nothing more. Any comfort she takes in them will amount to a betrayal. This word—
betrayal
—nestles itself beneath her breast.

When that train departs for New York, what will become of Mr. Reid? What will she tell him about her sudden silence? Because she mustn’t write to him anymore if she’s to be a married woman, a mother. And more painful, even, is the question of what she will do without him. Without his letters.

She knows then, in the very same moment that she knows she must live without him, that she loves him.

 • • • 

S
he is not sleeping when the light shines into her window. A handful of pebbles are thrown across the glass with the elegance of a percussionist. Her heart races beneath her nightclothes as she pushes open the back door.

The night is so dark here it sometimes feels as though her eyes are not open at all. She blinks twice, looking at the glow of the lantern. It is Teresa, dressed in her own skirts and a loose T-shirt of Berto’s. Her dark skin appears deep and sturdy beneath the yellow light. In contrast, Hensley feels barely there—a pale wisp in the dark.

“Sorry. I need some help.”

“What is it? Is it Berto?”

She nods.

Hensley returns inside, grabs one of her father’s cardigan sweaters, and slides into her flat shoes. She closes the door behind her and pulls the sweater tight.