Chapter 61: Six Letters
The box is a shoe box.
It says a brand of running shoe on the end and it has never had shoes in it.
I have had it since I got out. Before that my mother's neighbor had it.
The letters came to me inside. I carried them out in a mesh bag with a bar of soap and a comb.
Six envelopes. Same handwriting on all six, changing.
Postmarks: the thirtieth of March the first year.
Then the eleventh of March, five times running.
Nothing after that. Two years of nothing.
I did not open them for six years and eleven months.
I want to give the reasons in the order they are true, not in the order that flatters me.
One. I believed I was guilty.
A guilty person reading hate mail is looking for something.
She is looking for the sentence that goes too far, so she can hold it up and say, see, he does not even have it right.
I knew I would do that. I know what I am like.
Two. I thought not reading them was a kind of respect.
It was not. It was hygiene.
Three. If I opened them I would have to answer them, and I had nothing to say that was not a request.
Every sentence I could write ended in something I wanted from him.
Four. I did not throw them away, because throwing them away would have been a second thing I did to him.
So they sat in a shoe box for eighty-three months.
On the fourteenth of March, after page 207, I took the box down.
I cut all six open with the kitchen knife before I read any of them, so I could not stop after the first.
Here is the first one. He was sixteen. I have kept the spelling.
“You dont know me. I am Nadines son. Theo. I am 16.
They told us today you signed a paper saying you did it and that means there is no trial. THERE IS NO TRIAL. I was going to sit in a room and look at you and now there is no room.
I dont understand what a plea is. My auntie says it means you admitted it. Then why do you get to say it on a piece of paper and not to my face.
She was riding home. She worked 11 to 7. She had 3 exams left. THREE.
You got in a car drunk and you drove it into my mother and then you signed a piece of paper and everybody says thats the end.
I hope you never sleep. I hope every time you close your eyes you see that road.
I am going to write to you every year so you dont get to forget what day it is.
Theo Okoro”
The second through fifth get shorter each year. I am not going to put them here.
Here is the sixth. He was twenty-one. It is typed.
“Ms. Mercer.
This is the sixth letter. I am 21. I work Monday to Friday at a produce warehouse on Kell Avenue and I take two classes at night.
I am not writing to make you feel anything. I stopped wanting that around the third letter, when I understood that whatever you feel is yours and has nothing to do with me.
I am writing because I keep a record. Here is this year's.
She was 41. She had 3 exams left on her RN. She had paid for two of them, 219 dollars each, out of a coffee tin.
Her bicycle was green. A Raleigh. She paid 140 dollars for it used and she was proud of it and she cleaned the chain on the back step.
I still have her shift card. It is laminated. It says 2300-0700 and on the back is her handwriting, working out bus times for the nights she didn't ride.
Next year she will have been dead longer than I knew her as a person instead of as my mother.
You will be released a little over a year from now. I looked it up. It is public.
I want you to know that I know the date.
Theo Okoro”
I read the sixth one four times.
The first one is a boy screaming in a room.
The sixth one is a man with a ledger.
It is worse, and anybody who tells you otherwise has never received both.
I put all six back in the box in order and put the lid on.
Then I sat on the floor with my back against the bed.
I did the arithmetic I had been avoiding since I cut them open.
Six letters.
He wrote every year for six years, on the day, without missing.
There was no seventh and no eighth.
He stopped the year before I got out.