Almost every page was about Richard. Or our children. Or my students.
Dear Richard, the Henderson boy finally learned to read.
Dear Richard, Daniel’s boys are both playing T-ball now.
Dear Richard, Emma’s worried about her job.
Dear Richard, I miss you.
Dear Richard.
Dear Richard.
I went through every page.
There was hardly anything about me.
There were no pages where I wrote what I wanted. No pages where I wrote what made me happy, just me. No pages where I was the main character in my own life.
I’d been writing a story for thirty-two years, and I wasn’t in it.
I called Emma.
“Mom? Are you okay? I’ve been waiting all day. I didn’t want to call and bother you.”
“Dad had an affair,” I said. “For four years.”
There was a sharp breath on the other end of the line.
“What? With whom?”
“The woman living in that apartment. Her name is Claire.”
“Oh my God. Oh, Mom.”
“He met her on his business trips. In a bookshop.”
“Oh, Mom,” she said again. And then her voice broke completely. “This is my fault. I sent you there. If I hadn’t found that stupid letter… if I’d just glued the lining back down and left it alone…”
“No, sweetheart,” I said. “No. Listen to me.”
She was crying.
“You helped me learn the truth,” I said. “That’s not a bad thing. It hurts. It hurts more than anything. But it’s the truth. And I’d rather die knowing it than die believing in someone who wasn’t real.”
“But you loved him.”
“I did,” I said. “I really did. I spent thirty-two years writing letters to him instead of making new memories.”
She was quiet for a while. I could hear her blowing her nose.
“And the apartment?” she said finally. “What will you do about it? Can we… can we get it back? Should I call a lawyer?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t want it. It’s legally hers. And even if it weren’t, I wouldn’t want to sit on a balcony where he sat with her.”
“Do you… forgive her?”
I thought about Claire’s face when she said I waited at the café on the corner for six hours.
I thought about her saying He showed me pictures of his children.
“No,” I said. “I haven’t forgiven Claire. She knew he was married. She knew about you and Daniel. She knew from the second time he walked into that bookshop. That’s something she’ll have to live with.” I paused. “But I don’t hate her, either. I don’t have time to hate anyone, Emma. I’m not going to spend my last months on that.”
“Then what about you, Mom?”
I looked at the bedside table. My pill bottles were lined up in a little row. The anti-nausea ones. The pain ones. The ones for sleep.
“I spent my whole life putting everyone else first, Emma,” I said. “Your father. You and Daniel. Thirty-nine years of other people’s children. I’m not spending my last months doing the same.”
“So what will you do?”
I looked out the window. The sun was going down over the rooftops. Everything was turning gold.
“Enjoy Paris, sweetheart,” I said. “Finally. Just for me.”
After I hung up with Emma, I called Daniel.
He listened to the whole thing without saying a word. I could hear his boys yelling in the background, and Rachel telling them to quiet down because Grandma was calling from France.
When I finished, he was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped.
“Daniel?”
“I’m here,” he said. His voice was rough. “I’m just… Mom, I had that Eiffel Tower keychain until I was in college. I used to hold it at night after he died. I used to think about him in Paris, working so hard for us.”
“I know, honey.”
“Was any of it real?”
I thought about that for a long time.
“Some of it,” I said. “The phrase book was real. The popcorn on the floor was real. The way he held you when you had the croup was real. He loved you two, Daniel. Claire said he talked about you constantly. He showed her pictures. Whatever else he was, he was your father, and he loved you.”
“And you?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I think he loved me in the way he knew how. I just don’t think it was the way I deserved.”
He took a breath.
“Do you want me to fly out?” he said. “I can be there tomorrow.”
“No,” I said. “Thank you, honey. But no. I want to finish this myself.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Mom.” Then, after a moment: “I’m proud of you. I don’t think I ever said that before. I’m really proud of you.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
I just held the phone against my ear and cried quietly, and he let me.
Over the next few days, I explored Paris.
I took a river cruise on a long glass boat. A guide with a microphone explained every bridge in three languages. I sat by the window with a cup of hot chocolate and watched the city slide past, the stone walls and the willow trees and the people sitting on the riverbank with their legs dangling over the water.
I visited museums. I stood in front of paintings I’d only seen in textbooks, paintings I used to show my third graders on a projector. Water lilies. Starry skies. A woman with a mysterious little smile. I stood there until my legs hurt and then sat on a bench and kept looking.
I ate pastries. Expensive ones, from a shop with gold letters on the window. Little round cookies in colors I’d never seen cookies come in. A cream puff the size of my fist. A chocolate tart so rich I had to stop halfway and rest.
On the third day, I walked into a restaurant by myself.
The waiter asked, “Pour combien?” and held up fingers. How many?
I held up one finger.
“Just me,” I said.
He nodded like it was the most normal thing in the world and showed me to a little table by the window.
I ordered a glass of red wine and a bowl of onion soup with cheese melted on top. I sat there for two hours. I watched people walk by. I didn’t read a book or look at my phone. I just sat there and ate my soup and drank my wine and watched Paris.
Sixty-eight years old. My first meal in a restaurant alone.
It was wonderful.
On the fifth day, I passed a little shop near the river with scarves in the window.
There was a blue one. Not navy, not sky blue. Something in between. The color of the water just after the sun goes down. It was silk, and it moved in the breeze from the open door like it was breathing.
I went in. I touched it.
The woman in the shop told me the price.
It was more than I’d ever spent on anything for myself that wasn’t a car or a winter coat.
For thirty-two years, I’d have put it back. I’d have thought about Emma’s braces or Daniel’s college or the roof or the furnace. I’d have thought, What do I need that for?
I bought it.
I didn’t check the price twice. I didn’t do the math in my head. I just handed the woman my credit card and smiled while she wrapped it in tissue paper.
I wore it out of the shop. I wore it every day after that.
There were bad moments too. I won’t pretend there weren’t.
One afternoon, on the fourth day, the pain under my ribs got so bad that I had to sit down on the curb outside a church. A young couple stopped and asked if I needed an ambulance. I said no. I took one of my pills and drank half a bottle of water and sat there for forty minutes until it eased.
That night, I threw up twice and didn’t sleep at all.
The next morning, I called Dr. Patel’s office back in Dayton, the way I’d promised Daniel. His nurse talked to me for twenty minutes and told me to rest for a day and adjusted one of my medications.
So I rested. I sat on my little hotel balcony with the red flowers, wrapped in a blanket and my blue scarf, and read a paperback mystery I’d bought at the airport. I ate bread and cheese from the shop downstairs. I watched the pigeons on the rooftop across the street.
It was one of the best days of the whole trip.
On my second-to-last day, there was a note waiting for me at the hotel front desk.
The young man behind the desk handed it to me. “A lady left this for you, madame. This morning.”
It was written on thick white paper, in careful, slanted handwriting.
Margaret,
I don’t expect anything from you. I only wanted to say that I put your roses on the balcony, in the sun, and they are still alive. I took down the photograph. I have kept it for thirty-two years, and I think now that I was keeping a man who did not really exist either.
I hope Paris is kind to you. You deserve that it is.
Claire.
I read it twice standing at the front desk.
Then I folded it and put it in my purse with Richard’s two letters.
I didn’t write back. I didn’t go to see her again.
But I didn’t throw it away, either.
On my last evening in Paris, I sat on the little balcony of my hotel room.
The sky was turning from orange to purple. Somewhere down the street, someone was playing an accordion, badly, the same four songs over and over. The city lights were coming on, one window at a time.
I’d bought a new notebook that afternoon. Not a spiral one from the drugstore. A real one, from a stationery shop near the river, with a soft leather cover and creamy pages. I’d also bought a pen. A nice one. Dark blue ink.
I opened the notebook to the first page.
For thirty-two years, every letter I’d written had started the same way.
Dear Richard.
I held the pen over the page.
I thought about Richard on the floor of our first apartment, saying, Obviously. I thought about him in a bookshop, holding our phrase book, asking a pretty Frenchwoman for help with the one sentence he knew. I thought about him sitting on our stairs, telling me it was nothing, just getting old, while his heart was failing inside him and he didn’t trust me enough to say so.
I thought about all twenty-six notebooks sitting in a box in my closet in Ohio.
And I thought about all the pages that weren’t in them.
Then I wrote:
Dear Me,
I’m sorry I kept you waiting so long.
Whatever time I have left, I promise to live it for us.
I put the pen down.
I sat there on the balcony in my blue scarf and watched the lights of Paris come on, and for the first time in thirty-two years, I was glad I’d come to Paris without Richard.
Emma and Daniel were both waiting at the airport in Dayton when I got home.
They weren’t supposed to be. I’d told them I’d take a cab. They came anyway. Daniel had driven two hours from Columbus. Emma had left work early.
They were standing together at the bottom of the escalator. Emma was holding a bunch of grocery-store daisies. Daniel had his hands in his pockets and was rubbing the back of his neck.
When Emma saw me, she burst into tears.
“Mom,” she said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I sent you there.”
“Stop it,” I said, and I hugged her right there at the bottom of the escalator, with people stepping around us. “Stop it. You gave me the best gift anyone’s ever given me.”
“Being lied to?”
“The truth,” I said. “And a reason to go.”
Daniel put his arms around both of us.
“Nice scarf, Mom,” he said into my hair.
“It was very expensive,” I said. “I didn’t even check the price twice.”
He laughed. It sounded exactly like his father’s laugh. For the first time, that didn’t hurt.
A week after I got home, I took down the cardboard box from my closet. The one that said RICHARD in black marker.
Twenty-six notebooks.
Emma came over that afternoon. I’d asked her to. We sat on the floor of my bedroom with the box between us.
“What are you going to do with them?” she said. “Are you going to… burn them?”
I’d thought about it. I’d thought about it a lot on the plane. Some grand gesture in the backyard fire pit, watching thirty-two years go up in smoke.
But it wasn’t the notebooks’ fault.
“No,” I said. “They’re not really about him, Emma. Not really. Read some of them.”
She opened one. She read a page. Then another.
“Daniel lost his first tooth at school today,” she read out loud. “He showed it to the mailman.” She looked up. “I remember that. He was so proud.”
“They’re about you two,” I said. “They’re about my students. They’re about the furnace breaking and you backing into the mailbox. They were just addressed to the wrong person.” I pushed the box toward her. “They’re yours. Yours and Daniel’s. Your whole childhood is in there. Every little thing. I want you to have it.”
Emma held the notebook in her lap.
“What about the letters he wrote? The two from Paris?”
I’d thought about that, too.
“Those I’m keeping,” I said. “For a while. Then you can decide.”
She nodded slowly.
Then she put the notebook down and took my hand.
“Mom,” she said. “What do you want to do now? With… with whatever time there is?”
I smiled.
“I made a list,” I said.
I took the leather notebook out of my nightstand and showed her.
It started on the second page, right after Dear Me.
Learn to swim.
Go to the Grand Canyon.
Take a dance class.
Eat at the fancy Italian place downtown that I’ve driven past for thirty years. Alone. Order dessert first.
Plant tulips. Even if I don’t see them come up.
Tell the truth when people ask how I am.
Teach Daniel’s boys to play gin rummy so they can beat their father.
Watch the sunrise on purpose.
Emma read the whole list. She laughed at some of it. She cried at some of it.
“The Grand Canyon?” she said.
“The other teachers went every summer for fifteen years,” I said. “They always asked me. I always said next year.”
Emma wiped her eyes.
“Okay,” she said. “Then next month.”
I didn’t get to everything on that list.
I’m telling you that honestly, because I promised myself in that leather notebook that I’d tell the truth when people asked how I was.
But I got to a lot of it.
I learned to swim, sort of. At the YMCA, in the shallow end, with a twenty-two-year-old instructor named Tasha who was very patient and called me “Miss Margaret.” I can float on my back now for almost a whole minute. I’m told this counts.
I went to the Grand Canyon. Emma drove. Daniel and Rachel and the boys came too, in a rented van that smelled like French fries. I couldn’t do much walking. They pushed me to the edge of the South Rim in a wheelchair, and I sat there in my blue scarf and looked out at all that open space, all those layers of red and orange and purple going down and down, millions of years of it.
Daniel’s younger boy, Sam, who’s seven, stood next to my chair and said, “Grandma, it’s so big.”
“It is,” I said.
“Are you scared of it?”
“No,” I said. “I used to be scared of a lot of things. I’m not scared of this.”
I went to the fancy Italian place downtown. Alone. I ordered tiramisu before my pasta. The waiter raised one eyebrow at me. I raised one right back. He laughed and brought it out with a candle in it, even though it wasn’t my birthday.
I planted tulips along the front walk. Forty bulbs. Emma helped me because I couldn’t kneel very long. We did it on a cold, bright Saturday in November, and our fingers got so numb we had to go inside and hold mugs of tea until they stopped hurting.
“You’ll see them,” Emma said, looking at the dirt.
“Maybe,” I said. “And if I don’t, you will.”
I taught Daniel’s boys to play gin rummy. They beat their father three times in a row at Thanksgiving. He pretended to be furious. They’ve never been happier.
I still write in the leather notebook. Not every day. My hands shake more now, and some days I’m too tired to hold the pen.
But on the good days, I write.
Dear Me, you floated for fifty-eight seconds today. Tasha clapped.
Dear Me, Sam said the Grand Canyon looked like a giant birthday cake somebody dropped. He’s right.
Dear Me, Emma brought over the first notebook from the RICHARD box and read it out loud to you. You laughed so hard about the dentist with the boat that you had to take a pain pill.
Dear Me, you told Mrs. Kowalski next door that you weren’t fine today. You told her you were tired and scared. She sat with you on the porch for an hour. She brought soup.
Dear Me, you wore the blue scarf to church, and three people asked where you got it. You told them Paris.
It’s the end of winter now as I write this.
The doctors were right. Months, not years. I can feel it. I sleep a lot. Emma comes every afternoon. Daniel comes on weekends. Some days I’m clear and some days I’m foggy.
But this morning, I woke up early. Before anybody. Before the sun.
I wrapped myself in a blanket and my blue scarf, and I took the leather notebook, and I went out on the front porch and sat in the old wicker chair.
And I watched the sunrise. On purpose.
It came up pink and gold over the rooftops across the street. It was nothing like Paris. It was just Dayton, Ohio, with its power lines and its gutters and its gray March snow.
It was beautiful anyway.
When the light reached the front walk, I looked down.
There, in the frozen dirt along the path, where Emma and I had knelt in November with our fingers going numb, the first green tips of the tulips were pushing up through the ground.
I opened the notebook on my lap.
Dear Me, I wrote.
Look.
THE END..!
