Letter From America

Cara looked at herself in the mirror as she twisted her hair into a tight bun. She wore a black shift dress and matching jacket, with a small jeweled broach pinned to her lapel and her mother’s pearls around her neck. She had carefully applied dark grey make up to her eyes, and painted her lips a bright red. She looked like she was going to a business meeting, not a funeral.

Widow. Cara turned the word slowly in her head, tried saying it out loud. Such a strange word. It made her think of spiders and stooped old ladies with black shawls. Widows were like her grandmother, who lived in sheltered housing, used her free bus pass with pride and played bridge twice a week. Widows were not thirty three years old, with long blond hair and a convertible car.

She glanced at her watch. It was 10.15. Half an hour until the cars would be here. Cara felt claustrophobic at the thought of sitting in the car with John’s relatives, then arriving at the church to face yet more of his friends and family. People looked at her like they might look at a burns victim, disgusting pity, wrapped loosely around macabre fascination. She had received streams of calls and messages in the last ten days, people seeking grisly details behind a thin veil of concern. Genuine sorrow came from only a small group of her close friends. For everyone else, the funeral was a chance to witness someone else’s grief from a safe distance, gleefully rejoicing that it wasn’t theirs.

In many ways, she didn’t feel like the grief was even hers. She felt numb, unable to absorb the reality of his death into her body. One by one her emotions had crashed as the shock had attacked her body like a computer virus. Her network of feelings had glitched, malfunctioned, leaving only a robotic shell. She knew logically he was gone, but her heart was anesthetized, unable to feel the magnitude of her loss. She watched, dry-eyed, as John’s mother and sisters sobbed endless tears. They stared at her accusingly and, when she left the room, whispered words like “cold” and “heartless”.

Cara finished fixing her hair and sat down on the bed, determined to wait until the last minute before heading downstairs. Her eyes fell on the bedside table and she saw the edge of the letter, carefully folded and tucked under a book. She had found it a couple of days ago when going through John’s things. Everyone had told her to wait until after the funeral, but she was desperate to do something which kept her away from John’s wailing relatives. She had been sifting through bank statements and pay slips, when she had found the letter. Intrigued, she had opened it and quickly scanned the page, her heart escalating as her eyes leapt from paragraph to paragraph, collecting disjointed words and tossing them chaotically around her mind. She started again at the beginning, forcing herself to carefully read every word.

It read like a stream of consciousness, the writer’s uncensored thoughts cascading on to the paper. The letter was crammed with turbulent emotions, overlapping and bumping into each other. Some sentences began angrily and then mellowed to bittersweet nostalgia. Others started mournfully and accelerated to bitter frustration. The sentences twisted and turned, peaked and troughed through a rugged landscape of emotions, culminating in the final paragraph:

“I am the only one who knows your secret. Never forget that.”

There was a date at the top, 15 July 2003, and an address in Boston, Massachusetts. The signature was a scrawl, but Cara thought it said “Lisa.”

Cara and John had been together for four years, married for two, and in that time they had merged in the way that two people do when they fall in love, and commit their lives to each other. He had told her everything about his life, leading her down the path of his past with a running commentary that detailed childhood friends, unhappy memories, regrets, first loves, past relationships. She had learned the tapestry of his life by heart. The intimacy of marriage meant that she sensed the slightest shifts in his moods, felt any burden resting on his mind. There was no space for secrets between them.

But never had he mentioned anyone called Lisa, nor visiting Boston.

Cara heard footsteps on the stairs. Someone had most likely been dispatched to collect her. She hurriedly folded the letter and pushed it back under the book on the bedside table. For now, it was time to say goodbye to her husband, but the address in Boston was branded on her memory and she would start there on the trail to uncover his secret.