Love Letters

Many months have passed since the diagnosis, and you’re still grieving for her. She’s not dead yet. But she’s lost, like a child is lost— her mind the ocean floor, where she kicks up sand and churns in the water. Al, we call it, or AD— never by its real name as if mentioning the word would bring bad luck— the need to cross one’s self across the heart, throw back to the ocean half of one’s catch, turn three times and pray to the East. Papa’s and her letters, written during their courtship, are tied with a faded, red ribbon and sunk in a safe deposit box at Bishop Trust. Long ago, she gave them to you for safekeeping. At the time she exacted a promise from you, that you would not read them until she was dead. We twist down the spiral staircase curled like a strand of seaweed into the cold room of vaults, the heavy thud of door distinct as your sadness following us everywhere. There, you turn over the bundle of letters in your hand like unbelievable money. “I’m so tempted to read them,” you say. You want her back, the feisty and independent one, the one who could, at eighty, do ten knee bends in aerobics class, dance a smooth jitterbug and shuttle like the tide to and from the house about her business. Not this Elizabeth you mourn, the one who can no longer reason, who points and giggles at fat people and smells, sometimes, like the ocean. Time slides like Dali’s clock. Elizabeth is surprised that she once was married and had a husband, that she once gave birth to sons.