Sunflowers
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.
Second of all, she thought he was dead.
Yet there it was. Two skewed stamps in the righthand corner, circle postmarks plastered all over it from across the world. The return address - New Zealand.
What else could it have been? After a whirlwind of two years, watching mom and dad pass away, one after the 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 always 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.
Growing up she and her brother had always eaten dinner at the worn-out family table together, sure. They teased each other about the way their hair looked on bleary eyed early days before school, or watched Saturday morning cartoons while eating bowls of forbidden cookie crisp while mom wasn’t watching because that was basically the same thing as eating cookies for breakfast.
So they had done all the normal sibling things together, normal for a brother and sister who could actually stand to be in the same room as another. But when the two parts of their lives went missing that had been such a certainty, they bridged the missing pieces with phone calls and memories. 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 favorites were sunflowers. She liked to think that heaven was full of sunflowers.
“Cathedral Rock. Remember it?”
“You mean in the Grand Canyon when you nearly killed me? No, totally don’t recall,” Amy had said. They had been sitting over two cups of coffee in her kitchen that had grown cold from neglect, the two not wasting time to stop and drink when there were stories to be told.
“If that’s your definition of nearly killing, I wouldn’t want to go against you in a court case.” He needed a haircut, his brown hair spilling into his eyes.
“A fall from thirty feet could definitely fit the definition, in my opinion.” Amy laughed and finally took a sip of her coffee, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. David would be home soon and they had both vowed to stick to only one cup a day.
“You have to admit the look on your face was priceless. And Dad was there to catch you.”
“Yeah, he was. He always was.”
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. There had been no signs of him drifting away, nothing that could have prepared her, not even a far off look in his eyes, phone calls that he had to step outside the room to take.
She got up and opened the blinds, trying to stop the pounding in her temples. When the sun streamed from the window in panels, she shied away from it like it might singe her toes, then sat back down on the kitchen chair. There were only so many emotions in the world. Happy sad angry furious depressed confused. She remembered telling her mother that she was pregnant, announcing the news while her mom beamed at her from the hospital bed, her hand frail in her grasp. Amy had been elated, but sad, dissapointed and regretful with her stomach churning in a knot. There was no specific emotion that could describe that moment, her mom smiling at her from her pale skin, smiling about something she’d never get to see. Emotions were no good at all at describing how someone was feeling. Each situation had its own unique set. She didn’t know how she felt now, but that churning knot was there.
Amy -
I guess you are probably wondering where I’ve been.
Soft tears, gentle, running over the wrinkles of her face that had formed that he had not been there to see. The wrinkle that 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. When those business trips finally led to the question, Whose perfume is that on your coat? Amy only liked to use Chanel, but this smelled of chintzy pear and ethanol.
The laughter lines when her second, current husband David and her stayed up late watching the cars pass outside their bedroom window because they both had a chronic addiction to coffee and kept drinking it into the wee hours of the morning. Those coffee addled nights where they got to that point of laughter where you don’t know what you’re laughing at anymore, but if just feels good. 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.
Her brother 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 affectionately referred to him as Sealo Stained after that. Sorry when they’d wanted to watch funny videos of cats on the internet late at night. When they were discovered up past midnight under the cover of the red scratchy picnic blanket, 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 in it 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, cream colored paper. The sun wafted through her pink daisy curtains. The mailman was making his rounds and Mrs. Anderson’s rottweiler was barking at him. David would come home soon in the family Volvo, which would leak on the driveway and she’d probably go outside to try to soak it up with kitty litter. Bending down to put the litter on the driveway scraped her knees. She almost looked forward to it. It was a type of pain she could bear to feel.
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. Her hands were still wet with the teardrops she had wiped away.
From down the hall she heard her son wake up from his nap, knowing the quiet sounds he made before he 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.
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