First Line Story

Sunflowers in Heaven

The letter was unexpected.

First of all, it was the only handwritten letter Amy had gotten in years. No one handwrote things anymore. It was all text messages - hey, you on your way, bring a sweater, where you at. Even grocery lists were tucked away into virtual notes on phones. Dear blank, how are you? was no longer heard of.

Yet there it was, two skewed stamps in the righthand corner, circle postmarks stamped all over them from across the world. The return address - New Zealand.

Second of all, she thought he was dead.

What else could it have been? After a whirlwind of two years, watching mom and dad pass away right after each other; Dad went first. The cancer spread faster than they’d thought it would. Mom was always a fighter. She didn’t have cancer, but she didn’t have Dad after that either, and Amy thought that’s what really led her in the end to slip peacefully into his arms in heaven. The doctors say heart attack. She said heartache.

But those two hardest years was what really brought them close. Growing up they had always eaten dinner at the family table together and gone to each other’s soccer games, sure. When the two parts of their lives went missing that had been such a certainty, they bridged the missing pieces with phone calls, about how Dad always ate his peas one by one, mom’s favorite pair of dangly earrings and how she would even wear them when she would garden in the early mornings. Her favorite was sunflowers. She liked to think that heaven was full of sunflowers.

So there were long phone calls, short phone calls, visits. But never letters.

The phone calls had stopped. One day they were laughing at Dad’s attempt to lure a bluejay into their backyard by making what he deemed professional bird calls, the next there was absolute silence. And then the next day, and the next. For the last ten years.

Amy -

I guess you are probably wondering where I’ve been.

Soft tears, gentle, running over the wrinkles of her face that had formed while he had not been there to see. The wrinkle that had formed at the place in her forehead when her husband Tom told her he was going on a business trip - two, three, four business trips. The laughter lines when he second, current husband David and her stayed up late watching the cars pass outside their window because they both had a chronic addiction to coffee. The little beginnings of crow’s feet around her eyes that started when Layla would cry in the middle of the night and “your turn” was David’s favorite phrase after the coffee finally wore off.

He had missed her daughter growing up. He wasn’t there for the first time her son blew out the candles on his cake.

I don’t know if there a point in saying sorry. Sorry is an empty word people say when they want to feel better for whatever thing that’s eating their conscience. It’s up to the other person to realize the person saying sorry feels truly sorry about what they’ve done. I’m going to say it anyway though. I’m sorry.

Can a single word cover ten years? Sorry he’d said when both of her front teeth had fallen out at the same time and he made fun of her gappy smile. Sorry when he spilled the hot chocolate on her stuffed seal Sealo Blue. They weren’t even supposed to be up but they wanted to watch funny videos on the internet. They told mom and Dad sorry too. Sorry for taking her bike to the beach without asking, sorry for never washing the car when he said he would, for missing her violin recital because Jessie the pretty new girl at school needed homework help.

Sorry for missing her first marriage, her second marriage, the birth of her daughter, the birth of her son, and all the life that happened in between.

The world had a finite amount of sorries and his might not cover all the pathways of her life.

He went on to say

I’ve never been good at goodbyes so saying bye mom, bye dad, was something I was not very good at. When I got offered the job I just went. I didn’t think I could stand saying goodbye to anything else. I thought, everything will be here when I get back, and that’s enough.

He never did come back, so she spent her life filling in the empty spaces where spaces should not have been.

He went on to say

Every day I told myself I was fine. I was lying to myself. No matter where you are, if something’s missing, something’s missing. It just took me this long to tell myself the truth.

It was three o’ clock in the afternoon and her hands trembled as they held the plain paper. The sun wafted through her pink daisy curtains. The mailman was making his rounds and Mrs. Anderson’s rottweiler was barking at him.

Now I realize that saying hello can be even harder than saying goodbye depending on who you’re saying hello to.

He went on to say some other things about why when what who and how and then said

For now I will just start with hello.

How are you?

-Matthew

She stood up from the kitchen table. Her chair scraped the linoleum floor. There was stationery in the second drawer of the cabinet, mostly for to-do lists that never got done. It had a cat in the bottom right corner of the paper curled into a circle, three letter Z’s rising from its pointed ears.

The only pen she could find was orange. It matched the cat.

Dear Matthew, she began.

From down the hall she heard her son wake up from his nap, knowing the quiet sounds he made before her really started to cry.

“Coming, Matthew,” she said as she stood up to go to his room.

She left the letter lying on the kitchen table.