Spoiler! :
I had a letter addressed to me three months after Callum died. My address had been typed and there was no return address. There was no way of knowing who it was from.
I didn’t often receive letters. More like it would be an email or a text from a friend, asking me about this or that. Letters were rare – and more often than not they would simply be a bank statement.
But this letter I instinctively knew was different. Bank statements had a return address and a little plastic window on the front. This envelope was cream and windowless.
I took it to the kitchen, whacking on the radio. Mum wasn’t home and she wouldn’t be until five. The silence of the empty house was the only thing that frightened me. I would always have to have some sort of noise to fill it.
I still remember the song that was playing when I read the letter. Cable car by The Fray. Normally I would have sung along; I knew all the words. But not so soon. Not while I was reading that letter.
The pain was too deep, the wound still too fresh to be torn open again. I almost threw up, the pain was so overwhelming.
The letter was from him.
I recognised the writing immediately and the familiarity, which I thought I’d pushed out of my mind, hit me like a punch in the stomach. I doubled over the table, my head crashed down onto the hard wood and the tears came automatically, uncontrollably like a torrent. I cried out, half-screaming and I pushed the letter away. It slid off the table, onto the floor and I half-lay on the table until my cries subsided into gentle racking sobs.
I sobbed pathetically for a bit, trying to put off reading the letter. I knew I had to, I just had to.
So I forced myself, as someone might force a toothbrush down their throat to trigger the gag reflex. I picked up the letter, felt it’s slightly rough texture in my hands for a moment, before reading through my own address in the right hand corner. Only to start with. To prepare myself. Even the sight of his handwriting was painful.
I read the date – twenty-third of the fourth. Three days before. Three days! I forced myself to read on.
Fay,
You know why you’re reading this, don’t you?
‘Yes,’ I whispered to myself, my voice husky and broken, reading the inky words through a kaleidoscope of muted tears.
I’m sorry.
I’ve written several of these letters, but this one will be the hardest.
Would it have been easier if you’d said it to my face then, Cal?
You must understand one thing before I go on. You were never the reason. Never, never. It was nothing to do with you. Just the repercussions of my own actions. I dug myself a hole. You had no part in it.
That’s not to say you weren’t an important part of my life, because you were. I watched you grow, watched you blossom, until I couldn’t bear your beauty anymore.
Well, that’s convenient isn’t it?
I began to get angry. Why couldn’t he have told me this in person, before he….well…died.
It’s the coward’s way out, writing letters. We could have talked, he could have told me, I could have saved me the way he saved me. We could have held each other above the waves.
I’m stubborn. I’m selfish. I didn’t want help, you knew that. I let myself drown and we both know that.
Don’t I just.
I only let myself drown because I knew you needed something better, someone more stable, more worth your while.
How can you say that? After everything.
But it’s over now. You can go back to normal. Everyone can go back to normal, just as I was never there. As if you never stared at me two years ago and as if I never grinned stupidly back.
He remembered, I sighed inwardly.
I’m not saying we were a mistake. Never. I don’t regret a single moment I shared with you.
Then why did you end it?
I don’t really know what I’m trying to say. My mind is caught up and for once, I don’t know why.
But do for me, this one thing, because a dead man’s wish is one most to be respected.
It’s only small, a favour to my carers at Lakeview. Please get all my things out of my locker and give them back to them. They deserve it. They gave me a home, food, shelter, education, all that jazz and that’s the least they deserve.
There’s something for you in there too.
You’ll know what it is.
I was silent. Brooding. Numb.
I couldn’t feel anything. The tears had stopped, dried in the corners of my eyes.
The letter slipped out of my hands. I didn’t move for a while. Just concentrated on breathing properly. Even so, my breath snagged in my throat too many times and I found myself gasping for air, struggling to stay afloat.
Lakeview.
The care centre where he’d been housed since he was eleven, since his dad left and his mum died. When he turned fifteen, he moved into a halfway house. It was just a mobile home, parked at the end of a local orchard, the land rent paid monthly by the centre.
I relayed these facts around in my mind, trying to keep my thoughts away from the letter, from the task.
I glanced quickly at the clock. The second hand seemed to jerk impossibly slowly around its origin.
A quarter to five. Fifteen minutes until my mother would arrive, promptly and with a gust of cold air and smoky scent.
I launched myself into action, grabbing the note and scrunching it up. Upstairs, I threw it on my bed and went along to the bathroom, where I splashed freezing water on my face. I dried and watched myself in the mirror. My face was a little blotchy, but the redness was calming, as were the bulging veins in my eyes. I certainly looked as though I had been crying. Damn.
I heard the front door swing open, but I didn’t move. Just stared into the depths of my eyes, watching my pupils dilate.
‘Fay, I’m home.’ I heard her sweet voice rattle up the stairs to where I was. I steeled myself and nodded slightly at my reflection, before joining her downstairs.
Her hair was slightly frizzy, having escaped out of the band that pulled her hair into a tail at the back of her head. She poured herself a glass of water.
‘Hi mum,’ I greeted her.
‘Hi honey,’ she pulled me to her and kissed my forehead. ‘Good day?’
I almost choked. ‘Yes,’ I croaked. She looked at me strangely before turning back to her briefcase on the kitchen table.
‘What are you doing tonight?’ she asked conversationally. I caught her falsely bright tone instantly, recognising it from thousands of identical conversations we’d had.
‘Just homework and stuff,’ I answered my nondescript, usual answer.
‘Good,’ she said gently, sitting down at the table with her glass of water. ‘I’ve got a ton of work that needs doing. Katy wants it in by Friday and Leila’s dumped another report on my desk that needs retyping.’
I left her to it. She carried on mumbling away, complaining about the work that needed doing, the various work colleagues who were apparently under-qualified for the job.
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