Twenty-three

Charlie’s letter arrives two days after Ben and Suzanne return home. The sense of strangeness is immediate because the envelope is addressed to Suzanne and because Charlie never sent letters. He’d call occasionally and talk to whomever answered. Sometimes he would forward an email with a surfing joke—once even a viola joke that not even Petra knew—but he never mailed paper.

Suzanne sits on the porch stairs. She waves at the neighbor across the street, who tends her yard guarded by her dogs, and watches a couple of cars pass. She hears them slow briefly at the stop sign at the end of the street, then turn onto the 206. Finally she opens the envelope, conscious that it is one of the last things that Charlie may have handled: folding the sheet, licking the seal and the stamp, writing her name and address in blue ballpoint.

The letter begins with a sweet salutation, followed by an apology for pain inflicted on her and on Ben. It is a suicide note, because it was written by a suicide, but it lacks the explanation for the act that such letters are supposed to provide. “I’m going to blow off my head so there can be no revision of the cause of death. I am sending you this so that my mother cannot destroy it and make everyone pretend it was not suicide, which is what she did when my father killed himself. She denied us his last words. Now you have mine. I have lived. I have loved saltwater. Warm or cold, sunny or overcast or raining, I love surfing. In the ocean I feel at home. On land I do not. Soon I will be in the ocean forever.”

Suzanne inhales and exhales to slow her speeding heartbeat. She hears light footsteps coming from the kitchen and folds the letter, flipping the envelope to make it anonymous.

“What are you looking at?” Adele signs.

For maybe the first time Suzanne feels compassion for Ben’s mother, a woman who tried to protect her children from an ugly truth. “More junk mail,” she signs, forcing a smile with the lie. “Will you help me make dinner if your mom doesn’t need you? I missed you while we were gone. Meet me in the kitchen. I’ll be right there.”

In her room Suzanne hides Charlie’s letter in her box of secrets, setting it on top, next to the shell he gave her at Folly Beach. She feels shame because she is both hiding the letter and making sure it’s the first thing Ben will see should he open the box. She winces at what this tells her about herself, wonders how she became a person she does not even like.

The kitchen is noticeably bright with the lengthening days of midsummer. Dust motes are visible in the streams of light that slink through the blinds over the sink. Suzanne soaks in the warmth, trying to fix the simple pleasure in her mind.

Under her direction, Adele washes and spins the lettuce, peels the shrimp, measures and mixes the dressing ingredients. Because Adele cannot easily sign while she cooks, their work is mostly wordless.

Once Adele pauses to say, “Next summer I’ll be able to hear.”

Suzanne smiles at her, and the worry must be evident on her face because Adele adds, “Not really hear, I understand, but I like to say that.”

Suzanne returns to slicing the red onion, then looks at Adele straight on. “Are you scared?”

Adele shrugs, makes the signs for yes and no. She opens a can of mandarin oranges and drains the syrup into the sink. Due to the cut of her tank top, her wing-like shoulder blades are visible, and Suzanne can think only of a bird—delicate but strong enough to survive—though she knows it is wrong to reduce Adele to anything other than who she is.

“That seems right,” she says. “It’s normal to be scared before an operation, but you’re right there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s something you have to go through once to get where you want to be.”

An hour later they are eating the supper with Ben and Petra. Petra opens a bottle of white wine and grows chatty with her second glass.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “A violist was crying and screaming at the oboe player sitting behind him. I’m making it a him, Suzanne, just for you. Okay, so this violist was crying and screaming at the oboe player. Finally the conductor asked him why he was so upset, and the violist said, ‘The oboist reached over and turned one of my pegs, and now my viola is out of tune.’ The conductor nods and asks him doesn’t he think he’s overreacting, and the violist screams, ‘I am not overreacting! He won’t tell me which peg he turned!’”

Suzanne smiles and nods her recognition; of course she has heard it before.

“Absolutely hilarious,” Ben says softly, staring stonily at Petra.

“Here’s one,” Suzanne says. “A viola player is finally tired of being so unappreciated, and she’s tired of all the stupid viola jokes, so she decides it’s time for a change and walks into a shop and says, ‘I’d like to buy a violin.’ And the shopkeeper says, ‘You must be a violist.’ So the viola player says, ‘How can you tell?’”

“Because it’s an ice-cream shop!” Petra exclaims.

Adele looks around to gauge everyone’s reactions, to see if she is supposed to laugh now. Her expectant face collapses when she sees Ben push away his plate and stand. “Excuse me.”

A minute later Suzanne hears the front door fall shut. She continues to eat, encouraging Adele to do the same.

“What’s with him?” Petra asks.

Suzanne looks at her while Adele is looking at her plate and whispers, “His brother just died, in case you forgot.”

Petra’s voice has no tone that Suzanne can interpret as sarcasm, but it’s hard to accept at face value when she says, “I’m sorry. I did forget.”

Suzanne watches Petra drain her glass and refill. “I’ll clear the table.”

Ben is gone for hours. After Petra and Adele go to bed, Suzanne waits for him out front, the porch light off but the living room behind her still lit. When he returns, she waits for him to go inside and come back out before she asks him about his father. The humidity slows their already careful words.

It is as Suzanne suspected: Ben has always known his father’s death was a suicide.

“I knew but I didn’t always know, if that makes sense.” He looks at her when he talks, and this, in its unfamiliarity, is as disarming as anything. “Sometimes I let myself believe my mother’s version of events, though of course I always really knew.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She cannot stop herself from asking.

He shrugs, then holds his head in his hands, elbows propped on his knees as they sit side by side on the porch steps. “I didn’t want you to think I was genetically predisposed to be weak or crazy. I thought you’d be afraid of the Schumann biography and run from me. I thought you might be afraid to have children with me.”

“You’re the one who stopped that.”

He sits quiet for a moment. “Maybe my wanting to wait did have something to do with my father. I don’t know.”

Suzanne pauses, biting into her lip, crying now. “I’m really sorry about your father. And Charlie. I loved Charlie. And I know I should be better than this, but I don’t understand why you let me believe I wasn’t good enough for your family. And why you didn’t tell me.”

This is, she thinks, the most honest conversation they’ve ever had.

“Suzanne,” he says, disbelief shading his voice, “I have never thought I was better than you, ever. I’ve admired you from the beginning. I’ve always felt like you saved me by marrying me. I would be lost without you; don’t you know that?”

She shakes her head, her mind yelling, No, no, no. She has no idea whether he is lying now or misinterpreting the week’s emotion, or whether she’s misunderstood all along.

Finally they lean into each other, shoulder to shoulder, still in the thick summer air, in a neighborhood quiet with night except for the orchestra of insect life, the occasional car sweeping down the 206, the electric buzz of the streetlight as it struggles to life.

After a long time Ben puts his arm around her shoulders, pulls her weight into him. “I always wanted to tell you about my father. It was never that I didn’t trust you. I just—I just could never say it.”

Suzanne has been supporting some of her own weight; now she lets the tension holding her spine drain and collapses into Ben, breathing in his smell.

They can start over, she thinks. They can still have everything, get everything right, even if they cannot undo what they’ve already done. In this moment she wants to wind back all the world’s clocks, send its calendars fluttering in reverse. Where she would stop them, she isn’t sure, but it might be that first day she saw Ben, who was wrapped over his cello and looked at her with mournful eyes, all his sadness there for her to see if only she’d really looked.