The Encore of Us novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Eighty-Four Envelopes

Rhea hands Anders the shoebox of every letter Linnea wrote, and every one is stamped return to sender in his mother's handwriting.

The lab technician came at eleven with a tray of empty tubes.

Anders rolled up his sleeve without being asked.

Tove watched the needle go in with the flat interest of a girl who had been stuck a thousand times.

"Does it hurt?" she asked him.

"A little."

"You're supposed to look away," she said. "Lin says looking is worse."

"Lin is right about most things."

"She's right about everything," Tove said, and went back to her drawing.

I stood by the door and kept my face still.

When Tove finally slept, with the menu still under her hand, Rhea touched my shoulder and tipped her head toward the hall.

"Family lounge," she said. "Both of you."

The lounge had a broken vending machine and a couch with a cigarette burn nobody could explain.

The window looked out on the parking ramp.

Rhea shut the door.

She was thirty-four, five-foot-six, and she had once thrown a man out of a hospital billing office by his own necktie.

She did not sit down.

"I'm going to say this once," she said to Anders. "Then you can do whatever you want with it."

"Rhea, don't," I said.

"No. He's going to hear it."

She turned back to him.

"Your daughter was born in a prison hospital in Shakopee, on the twenty-fourth of May, at four in the morning."

"My sister was in leg shackles until the second push."

Anders flinched.

"The guards let her hold the baby for three days,"

Rhea said.

"On the fourth day, I signed a paper at a front desk.

Then I carried her out in a car seat I'd bought at Target the night before."

"Rhea." My voice shook.

"She named her Tove, because it was your grandmother's name and you said it in your sleep once."

"And for six years, I've told that child her mother was far away doing hard work."

Anders sat down on the arm of the couch.

"I didn't know," he said.

"No," Rhea said. "You didn't."

"She told me she had been sleeping with my father."

"I know what she told you. She told me, too. I was the only person she told the truth."

Rhea's voice dropped.

"She didn't say what the truth was, and I stopped asking after a month."

I looked at the floor.

I could not look at either of them.

Rhea crossed the room to a canvas bag by the vending machine and pulled out a plain shoebox with a rubber band around it.

It was heavy.

She put it in Anders's lap.

"What is this?"

"Eighty-four months," she said.

"She wrote you every one of them. Three pages, sometimes four."

"She asked me to mail them from my address so you wouldn't throw them out for her handwriting."

His mouth opened.

"I never got a letter."

"I believe that." Rhea's eyes were red-rimmed and steady. "They came back."

He lifted the lid.

Envelopes stood in rows, cream and white and pale blue, stiff with age, each one still sealed with its flap tucked.

Linnea's neat slanting hand was on every front, addressed to him at the lake house.

I remembered writing the first one on a prison laundry table at two in the morning, with a stolen pencil.

He took the top envelope out and turned it over in his hands.

Across the address, in blue felt pen, somebody had written RETURN TO SENDER.

Somebody had added the date under it, in neat, round, careful figures.

He turned over the next envelope, and the next, and the next.

Same pen. Same date format. Same looped capital R.

The color left his face for the second time that night.

"This isn't the post office," he said.

"No," Rhea said.

"It's not a clerk's handwriting."

He pulled out a third envelope, and a fourth, and laid them side by side on his knee.

He wasn't looking at the addresses anymore, only at the R.

"Anders?" I said.

He didn't seem to hear me.

"She wrote my lunch notes in this hand," he said, very quietly. "Every day, from the age of six."

He lifted his head.

"This is my mother's handwriting."

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