Finding It

30

AFTER MONTHS OF wandering and wanting with no direction, it was good to finally have a tangible thing at which to direct my energies.

A job. Money. A place to stay.

I could handle that.

As it turned out, there was a high demand in Madrid for English-speakers to teach or assist in classrooms in bilingual programs. I’d never been a teacher, but I had a degree. And Hunt’s mention of the career had stuck with me. After growing up in Texas, I had enough basic Spanish skills to get around. When I saw the ad in an English-language newspaper in my hostel, and it said no teaching experience was necessary, I knew it was perfect. Like when you find the perfect dress that somehow makes you feel better for having slipped it on.

I applied for a work visa and contacted the Ministry of Education. By the end of the month, I had a job as a Language and Culture Assistant. Well … two jobs, technically: one working part-time with teenagers and the other working with younger kids. Plus about four private lessons a week to help make ends meet.

New Life Realization #1:

Being an adult is hard work. I know people tell you this growing up, but it doesn’t really sink in until you’re living it, waist deep in the swamps of no-free-time and not-enough-money.

New Life Realization #2:

It’s worth it.

It was a new kind of satisfaction, being on my own and being okay. More than okay, I was good.

I had a job. Okay, lots of them. I had an apartment, too. And I’d sent a letter to my parents.

I’d poured out every bitter hurt and vulnerable thought I’d ever suppressed and sealed a slice of my heart inside an envelope. It wasn’t the bravest way to face them, but the words were brave, and that was enough for now.

Predictably, I didn’t hear back. I hadn’t expected to either. Answering would acknowledge that there was a problem, and they much preferred to pretend those didn’t exist. Even now they were probably telling some atrocious lie about why I wasn’t around.

I was surprised by how little that bothered me. I wondered if everyone experienced a moment like this—a moment where you realize you’ve outgrown your own parents. Not just because I didn’t need them anymore, but because I’d finally realized that they were as stuck as I had been. I saw them with a kind of clarity that it’s impossible to see when you’re a kid, and when you’re parents are the end all and be all of your life.

A reply did come eventually, but not from my parents.

“Carlos? What is this?”

Carlos was nine, and had the biggest attitude in class by far. That’s probably why I adored him.

“My homework, Miss Summers.”

“Not that, I mean this.” I held up the sealed envelope he’d turned in with his work.

He smiled, a heartbreaker smirk in the making. “That’s for you, Miss.”

“And what is it?”

He shrugged in that way that kids do when they don’t know or care about the answer.

“Where did you get it?”

“A man.”

“What man?”

“I don’t know. Americano.”

Señora Alvez, the lead teacher, shushed him. “English only, Carlos.”

I didn’t ask any more questions because I didn’t want to get him in trouble. But when Señora Alvez began her lesson, I slipped my finger under the lip of the envelope and pried it open as quietly as possible.

I’d never really seen Hunt’s handwriting, but I recognized it anyway. It just … looked like him. Strong. Meticulous. Aggravating.

I couldn’t read the words. I wouldn’t. But I counted one, two, three pages, and a sketch. The playground. The one from Prague.

My heart seized up, ice cold, frost spreading over the prison of my rib cage and piercing my lungs. My hands trembling, I shoved the papers back in the envelope and stood. Señora Alvez stared at me, and my blood roared in my ears.

“I have to—I need to—” God. All I wanted to do was scream obscenities, but I was in a classroom full of children. “I have to go.”

I didn’t give an explanation as I bolted for the door. Let them think I was sick. Because I was. To my very bones.

I signed out in the office, this time lying about not feeling well. Then I left for home. I had the strangest instinct to run as I walked the blocks to my apartment. I wasn’t ready for this. I’d pieced together the other parts of my life, but this … this was still so raw. And the body’s instinct when wounded was to jerk away when touched, to run to prevent more injury.

Running wouldn’t have done any good, though, because there was another letter waiting at my apartment. I picked it up from where it had been dropped outside my door. I didn’t know whether to crush it or tear it or hold it tight.

I settled for ignoring it.

But they kept coming. There was another slid under the classroom door when I arrived on Wednesday morning. They came through the mail. My landlord brought me another.

I threw them on my desk unopened, but every time I entered my apartment, they called to me.

A week after the first letter appeared, I came home from work to find the tenth letter on my doorstep. Rather than adding it to a pile, I fished a marker out of my purse. (My God, I kept markers in my purse. I was such a teacher.)

Across the back I wrote, “Still following me? Still not okay.”

Then I left it on my porch where he would presumably find it the next day.

The next letter came from Carlos. He dropped it off at my desk the one day without the pretext of homework this time.

“The American man said to read them, and he’ll stop following you.”

“Carlos, I don’t want you to talk to that man again, okay? If he comes up to you, just walk away. Don’t take any more letters from him.”

I thought maybe that had worked, that he’d finally taken the hint because I didn’t see another letter for a week.

I was relieved for the first day or two. But then I started to look for them. I started to wonder why they were missing, why he’d stopped now. And more than anything … I wondered what they said.

But I couldn’t read them. I wanted to stay mad. It was safer to stay mad. But considering the way the absence of the letters made me feel, there was no way I could actually read their contents and stay strong.

The following week, though, I realized he hadn’t stopped writing the letters—he’d just been waiting. I walked through the school courtyard on Monday, and saw a group of my kids gathered outside the doors, Carlos in the middle.

He was handing something out, and when I got closer, they all switched to whispers and not-so-subtly stared at me as I passed. When the students took their seats that morning, every desk in the room had an envelope, all for me.

I was angry and relieved, and a giant mess of wants.

I trekked home that day with my arms full of envelopes and a head full of frustration.

I thought about doing something to prove a point. I could throw all the letters out where he would find them. I could burn them. I could tear them up.

Or I could open them.

Maybe if I showed that I had opened them, he would stop.

So, I plucked one out of the pile, my skin suddenly buzzing. I tried to swallow, but something knotted in my throat.

It’s just a letter. Just words. Probably words that you’ve already heard.

The shaking spread from my fingers to the rest of my body as I tore open the letter.

A sketch tumbled out first.

Even without having been there, I knew it was Venice. There was a gondola passing by a home that seemed to sit directly on the water. There were balconies with roses, and it looked so impossible and beautiful that I felt myself tearing up.

The letter with this one was short.

I can’t go anywhere beautiful without thinking of you. Hell, who am I kidding, I can’t go anywhere period without thinking of you. I wanted to take you here. I know there’s no excuse for what I did. I could explain the ways I reasoned with myself. I could explain that I needed the money, the job. I could explain that I waited because I was worried about you. But the real truth is that I just didn’t want it to end. I knew you’d leave when you found out. And I just kept telling myself … one more day. But if there’s anything I learned with you, it’s that one more day was never enough.

I sunk down to the floor at the edge of my bed, a noise pulling from my chest that I couldn’t even put a word to. It wasn’t crying. It was something deeper. It unraveled from my lungs, low and keening and hollow. If I had to guess … I’d say it was what it sounds like to miss someone. To feel their absence like a second skin.

I picked up another letter.

This time, the sketch wasn’t of a beautiful sight or a grand city. It was four men in military fatigues. Their faces were detailed, realistic, alive. So either he sketched them from a picture or they were burned into his memory.

I remembered what he’d told me about his unit, and how he’d lost them, and I gave up trying to wipe away the tears that rolled down my cheeks.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you more about me. That I didn’t open up. It’s just … I thought I lost all the parts of me that meant something when I lost these guys. They were family. That’s why I liked to jump off bridges and climb cliffs and do whatever other crazy stunt that could make me feel something. But even that had stopped working … until I met you. You made me feel more with a look than I felt jumping out of a plane. I felt more adrenaline from your touch than when I was moving into enemy territory or taking fire. I know how crazy I sound. I know how crazy this all is. And I’m probably doing it all wrong. But my only excuse is that I’m crazy about you. And life is not living unless I’m with you. You’re my adventure. The only one I want to have. So, if this doesn’t work, I’ll try something else. If the military taught me anything, it was to be persistent. To weather the storms. So, that’s what I’ll do.

I opened every letter.

My bedroom was a sea of paper, words with the depth of an ocean and sketches with all the power of the tide. When I had read them all, when the words had filled the empty spaces he’d left behind, I wrote a letter of my own and put it outside my door.