Chapter 64: Subtraction
The next problem was the envelope. It took me four days and it taught me something about him I had not gone looking for.
The six letters have return addresses. Not all the same.
Letters one through four: 41 Gilman Court, Apt 3B.
Letters five and six: 208 Kell Avenue, Apt 2.
The handwriting on the envelopes changes across six years the way handwriting does, from a boy's forward slant to something upright and small.
The last one is typed, including the envelope.
He learned to type somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one. I know because letters five and six are typed and the first four are not.
He moved between the fourth letter and the fifth, which is between the ages of nineteen and twenty, which is when people move.
The sixth letter is two years old.
A two-year-old address on a twenty-two-year-old man is a coin toss, and I only had one coin.
I went to the library on the second of April and asked Owen whether there was a directory of addresses.
He said there used to be a reverse city directory in reference, and that they stopped buying it in 2016 because of the internet.
Then he said the internet does not have it either, which is a thing librarians say with a particular satisfaction.
There are people-search sites.
They want nineteen ninety-five a month, they are wrong about half the time, and they keep a record of who searched.
I did not use one. I did not want a record anywhere, on any server, of me looking for that man's address.
So I did the thing that costs nothing.
I addressed it to 208 Kell Avenue, Apt 2.
I put my own return address in the corner, complete, including the apartment number.
If he has moved, it comes back to me and I know.
If he has not, it reaches him.
A letter with no return address is a letter that says I do not want to be found, and I have no business saying that to him.
Then I went back to the four lines, which were still three lines and a hole.
Here is what came out, and I am putting the deletions in because the deletions are the work.
Deleted: “I think about your mother every day.” True, and it is a claim about my interior, and my interior is not evidence and it is not his problem.
Deleted: “I was twenty-four.” True, irrelevant, and the first sentence of a defense.
Deleted: “There are things about my case that I have recently learned.” That sentence is a hand reaching out of the page.
Deleted: “You have every right to be angry.”
Nobody needs me to certify his rights.
Deleted: “Please.”
Deleted: “If you want.”
Deleted: “I hope.”
Deleted: “I would understand if.”
That last family of sentences is the worst.
If you want, I hope, I would understand. Every one of them is a small hand on a sleeve.
Deleted: the word sorry, in all four positions I had tried it.
I want to be careful here, because a person could read this and think I decided not to be sorry.
I am sorry. I have been sorry for six years and eleven months and I will be sorry when I am eighty.
But I had six years of his letters in a shoe box and not one of them asked for it.
A man who has told you six times what he wants has earned not being handed the other thing.
What survived was four lines, and one of the four is nothing but an address and an hour.
I counted the words twice. Sixty-eight, not counting my name.
That is fewer words than the shortest of his six letters, which is a hundred and four.
Sixty-eight words out of eleven sheets of a fifty-sheet pad, which is the best rate of return I have ever had on anything.
Marisol saw me at it on the Thursday, at the desk, under the lamp, at 7:15 at night.
She said, “That the petition?”
I said, “No. It's a letter.”
She said, “To who.”
I said, “The son.”
She stood there with her coat over her arm for about four seconds.
Then she said, “Show me the envelope.”
I showed her. She looked at the return address in the corner for a second and put it down without saying anything about it.
She said, “Good. Don't send it certified.”
I said I had not decided.
She said, “Certified mail is a receipt. You'd be asking him to sign for it.”
Then she said, “Don't ever make that kid sign anything.”
She went out and the door took its four seconds.
I sat there and understood that I had been about to do exactly that, at the counter, with a green card, for four dollars and eighty-five cents.