When You Reach Me

Things That Get Tangled

Lucky for Mom, some of the old people at the nursing home where Louisa works like to watch The $20,000 Pyramid at lunchtime. Louisa takes notes on every show and brings them over after work. She gets off at four, so I have time to write out the day’s words on stolen index cards before Mom gets home.

Tonight, Mom and Richard are practicing in the living room. I’m supposed to be doing homework in my room, but instead I’m tying knots and I’m thinking.

It was Richard who taught me how to tie knots. He learned back when he sailed boats as a kid, and he still carries pieces of rope in his briefcase. He says that when he’s trying to solve a problem at work, he takes out the ropes, ties them into knots, unties them, and then ties them again. It gets him in the right frame of mind.

Two Christmases ago, which was his first Christmas with us, Richard gave me my own set of ropes and started showing me knots. Now I can make every knot he knows, even the clove hitch, which I did backward for a few months before I got it right. So I am tying and untying knots, and seeing if it helps me solve my problem, which is you. I have no idea what you expect from me.

If you just wanted to know what happened that day this past winter, it would be easy. Not fun, but easy. But that’s not what your note says. It says to write down the story of what happened and everything that led up to it. And, as Mom likes to say, that’s a whole different bucket of poop. Except she doesn’t use the word “poop.”

Because even if you were still here, even if I did decide to write the letter, I wouldn’t know where to start. The day the laughing man showed up on our corner? The day Mom and Louisa met in the lobby? The day I found your first note?

There is no answer. But if someone sat on my legs and forced me to name the day the whole true story began, I’d say it was the day Sal got punched.