Chapter 10: What She Left For Both of Them
Emily met Ethan on a Saturday morning in the park two blocks from our house.
I had not told her much.
Only that a person who loved her very much had been away for a long time and was coming back.
She had considered this with the same serious expression she used for difficult puzzles and then said, "Is it Uncle Ethan?" I had asked her how she knew and she had said Mama mentioned him sometimes, when she thought Emily was thinking about something else.
She had known for years.
She had never said.
Ethan sat on a bench near the fountain.
He stood up when he saw us coming.
He was wearing a good coat.
He had his hands in his pockets and his shoulders up slightly, like a man trying to look relaxed and not managing it completely.
Emily walked ahead of me.
She stopped a few feet from him and looked up at him.
"You look like my daddy," she said.
"A little," Ethan said.
His voice was very careful.
"I'm his brother."
"I know." She tilted her head.
"You were gone a long time."
"Yes," he said.
"I was."
"Are you coming back now?"
Ethan looked at me once.
Then he looked back down at Emily.
"Yes," he said.
"If that's all right with you."
Emily considered him for a moment with her mother's eyes.
Then she put her hand out.
Ethan looked at her small hand for one second.
He took it.
They walked toward the fountain together.
I followed a few steps behind and watched my daughter show my brother the ducks and tell him their names — she had named all of them over the course of the past year — and I thought about my wife sitting alone at a kitchen table with a digital recorder, choosing her words carefully, trusting that this moment would eventually arrive even if she could not be there to see it.
She had known what she was doing.
She had known exactly what she was doing.
That evening, after Ethan had gone home and Emily was in bed, I sat in the kitchen with the blue bag on the table in front of me.
I had not opened it again after the night at Claire's house.
I had not been ready.
I opened it now.
The photograph was still there.
The notebook was Claire's — I had left it with Martin for the legal process.
But at the very bottom of the bag, beneath where the photograph had been, my fingers found something I had missed the first time.
A small folded piece of paper.
Cream-colored.
Folded three times.
My wife's handwriting on the outside.
*For Daniel.
Not for the case.
Just for you.*
I unfolded it.
*My love,*
*I know this has been hard.
I know finding all of it was not the way either of us imagined things going.
I want you to know that I never stopped trusting you — I only stopped trusting myself to protect you without making it worse.*
*You have always been a good man.
You are a wonderful father.
Emily is going to be extraordinary because of you.*
*Please don't stay sad for too long.*
*Please let Ethan come home.*
*And please — when you're ready — let yourself be happy again.
You are allowed to be happy again.
I want that for you more than I wanted almost anything.*
*All my love, always.*
I sat at the kitchen table for a long time.
Then I folded the letter and held it in both hands and I let myself cry — quietly, completely, the way you cry when something has finally, after a very long time, been released.
When I was done, I went to the cabinet above the refrigerator where I kept the things I wanted to hold onto.
I placed the letter there carefully, beside Emily's first drawing and the photograph from my wife's and my first holiday together and the small shell Emily had pressed into my hand on the beach two summers ago and said, "This one is yours, Daddy.
To keep."
I went to check on Emily.
She was asleep, one arm around a stuffed rabbit, her face entirely peaceful.
I stood in her doorway for a moment.
Then I turned off the hall light and went to bed.
May you like
And for the first time in three years, I did not lie awake waiting for the next difficult thing to arrive.
I simply slept.
