Beyond Eighteen (33 page)

I looked into the broken envelope I’d ripped
open with the intention of finding closure with Candi. Thrusting my
fingers into the gap, I could feel the cool, glossy surface of the
card. I pulled hard. The envelope crumpled and tore against the
rising pressure of my impatience. It only broke free after bending
to accommodate its jagged exit.

I tossed the envelope toward the end of the
bed as I felt Joanie push closer, her weight intentionally pressing
against my shoulder. I knew it was her way of telling me she was
here for me. I looked down at the card. A picture of Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
covered the front. Different shades of
melancholy blue and buttery yellow swirled and swam like turbulent
currents in an evening sky above a gloomy city tucked among waves
of bare, blue rolling hills. An out-of-place, dark green and brown
flame-shaped object, most likely a tree, burdened the picture with
its misrepresented size to the city below. Post-Impressionism at
its best.

I took a labored breath, preparing myself
for what I was going to find inside.

“Are you okay?” Joanie asked, resting her
head against my shoulder.

“Just mentally preparing myself for what’s
inside.”

I pull open the card. Writing filled the
interior from edge to edge, cursive with some words smudged toward
the bottom. I scanned the writing and noticed it was upside down. I
turned the card around and started to read the words that were
either going to give me closure or tear open every painful memory
of my past.

My Dearest Wilson,

Well, you are 18 now. I guess Happy Birthday
translates differently when writing from the disbelief that I
actually have an adult daughter. I know, where’s my right to say
that? Well, prayers only work if the other person you’re praying
for is listening. Wilson, I’ve prayed every day that somehow you’d
forgive me for what I did 10 years ago. I’ve hoped that you’d find
it in your heart to see beyond the person I was back then. I know
I’ve said this in every birthday card that I’ve ever sent you, but
I was hoping this time would be different and I’d actually hear
from you. I will not give up hope, because that’s about all I have
left for us. I will never give up on the dream that we may someday
have some type of relationship. I know I can’t expect to be the mom
you deserve to have, but I would like to be some part of your
life.

FYI, I just moved to Seattle the week before
your birthday. I was offered a really good position at Washington
General. I just couldn’t pass it up.

P.S. I’m truly sorry you had to go through
losing your grandparents alone. I wish I could have been there for
you, but they made it impossible for me to see you. I don’t even
know if you’ll see this card! The only way I found to talk to you
was through letters and cards I would send, hoping beyond hope
they’d somehow find you and I’d hear back from you. I wish my
parents would have found it in their hearts to forgive me for the
mistakes I made. Maybe, someday, you will…I love you and always
will until forever comes!

Love,

Candice (your mom)

I swallowed hard. Her words trampled my head
and annihilated my heart. At first, I didn’t understand where she
was coming from. I felt manipulated, framed, and used. How dare she
call me her daughter and pray for my forgiveness? She didn’t
deserve anything from me. It was going to take a lot more than just
a card on my 18th birthday to convince me that she’d earned the
right to have a relationship with me. But then I looked back down
at her words and started to feel the pain in her tone and through
her scribbly handwriting. The smeared letters seemed to be doused
with tear drops. And there was that one sentence where she
confessed to writing the same thing in every birthday card.
Every? I’ve only gotten this one.

“Holy f’ing shit, Wilson, she wants a
relationship with you,” Joanie said as we looked at each other. Her
eyes were wide, her face drained of any color, and her lips curved
as if they were at the point of deciding whether to smile or
not.

“What the hell, J. She said she’s sent me
other birthday cards. I’ve never gotten a fucking thing from her.
She never sent me pictures, letters, cards, or presents on my
birthday….nothing!” I steamed as my chest began to rise with each
deliberate breath I took.

“I know, what the hell is she saying about
birthday cards?” Joanie wondered as she took the letter and started
going back over the words Candi had written.

“Do you think your grandparents wouldn’t let
you have them?” Joanie said, her tone low, serious, and without any
sense of light.

“How? Why? When?” I asked in rapid
succession.

“Well, I don’t know. Did you ever pick up
the mail?” Joanie asked.

“No, most of the time I was gone at school,
so I didn’t really put much thought into it,” I said.

“You never got the mail? Never waited for a
letter from a friend or a package you were expecting? Nothing?”
Joanie questioned. I watched her whole body change to
disbelief.

“No, I didn’t really think about it, J.
They’d get the mail and hand me my letters,” I said, feeling
totally stupid.

“What if they were keeping Candi’s letters
from you?” Joanie posed, creating a frenzied nervousness in my
gut.

I got up and paced the cold hardwood floor.
If they did that, if they didn’t let me see any of the letters and
cards Candi sent, where would they have put them?
Grams and
Gramps wouldn’t do that…but then again, they knew she was a loser
and they wanted to protect me.

“They wouldn’t do that,” I vocalized my
thoughts, pacing back and forth.

“Well, let’s just assume for a minute that
they did…where do you think they’d keep ’em?”

“J, hell, I don’t know; in their dressers?
Maybe under their bed?” I suggested as Joanie hoped off and dropped
to the floor, pulling up the beige country lace bed skirt.

“We should look for a box, maybe even a
couple of them. Assuming Candi wrote you every birthday and major
holiday, it could be a pretty big box,” Joanie said, muffled with
half her body lodged under my grandparents’ bed. “I don’t see
anything under here that has letters in it.”

I started to react to Joanie’s frantic need
to find a box that may or may not exist. My skin started to
perspire and my heart didn’t help out when it began to thrash in my
chest. I had to shake my hands out as I paced. The blood seemed to
refuse to circulate into my hands and feet. Before I realized what
I was doing, I found myself opening the top drawer of my grandma’s
dresser. I shuffled through what little was left from my
grandfather going through her things after she died. It was mainly
things that gave him a moment to feel her—her favorite scarf, a hat
she always wore when they walked on the beach, and a pair of wool
socks with a broach made from ivory wrapped down in the toe. No
letters, no unopened envelopes. Every dresser drawer I opened
revealed the same thing, just some odd items that must have held
some sort of special meaning to my grandpa. His world, wrapped up
and shoved in an old wooden dresser that smelled of cedar and
Woolite.

“What if they threw them out?” I asked
Joanie.

“Check your grandpa’s dresser,” she said as
she pulled another box out from under the bed and pulled the lid
off.

I hesitated just before pulling the handle
on his dresser. I’d never gone through his drawers before. This was
my gramps, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t know if I was ready to find
parts of his life that I had never been privy to. Cufflinks and
cologne were one thing; I didn’t know if I wanted to get real
personal with his underwear drawer. What if there were things in
there that would burst the bubble he’d been protected by for most
of my life? What if I found out he’s only human? I know that sounds
stupid and childish, but there was something about my grandpa that
made him a notch above human for me.

“What’s wrong?” Joanie asked as she stopped
and watched my body frozen at the closed top drawer.

“I don’t know if I can open these drawers
yet,” I answered.

“Alright, well, where else would they put
letters they wouldn’t want you to find? Better yet…was there ever a
room or place they didn’t want you to get into?” Joanie stood up
and scanned the room as she meandered over to me.

“No, not really.”

“No place your grams would act strange about
or get pissed when you’d play in or get into? Think, Wilson. Their
safe? Jewelry box? Closet?” As Joanie named each place she pushed
on her finger, trying to exaggerate her choices.

“Well, they didn’t have a safe, and my
grandma’s jewelry box wasn’t big enough to hold any letters. But
she was super possessive over her closet. She never wanted me to
play in it. She’d always yell at me when she’d find me up here
getting into her shoes and my grandpa’s coats,” I said
methodically.

“Bingo! I bet those letters are somewhere in
there,” Joanie said as she hurried to the small four-by-six walk-in
closet and flung the old white door open.

I reached up and pulled the chain that
dangled from a lonesome light bulb clinging to the center of the
ceiling. There was the proverbial click before the soft glow filled
the small closet. It wasn’t the brightest form of light for chasing
away and pulling back the shadows cast by pretty dresses and fancy
suits. Joanie took my grandma’s side and I took my grandpa’s. Every
shoe box she looked in had Grams’s heels, and all the ones I opened
contained Gramps’s dress shoes. We searched through three stacks of
boxes, two rows deep, and found nothing but shoes. No box filled
with letters, birthday cards, or mementos. There was no sign of
Candi anywhere to be found.

Joanie left first before I reached up to
snatch the chain that was swaying back and forth. I pulled the
chain tight, and looked up at the same time. That’s when I saw a
brown cardboard box, hidden under grandpa’s V-neck sweater vests. I
would never have seen it, except for the fact that I was on
heightened alert to find a box with letters from my birth
mother.

“Wait, J, I found a box. Would you grab that
desk chair and bring it here?” I hollered out of excitement.

“Where?”

“The top shelf of the closet.”

“No I mean where do you want the chair?”
Joanie was curt as she carried over an old, hand-carved honey oak
chair.

It looked super heavy, even awkward. She
pushed it through the closet door, and it only barely fit. I was
pinned in the closet and she anxiously waited outside the doorway,
a bystander of circumstances. I stood on the chair. On my tiptoes I
was just high enough to reach the farthest corner. I wedged the
tips of my fingers into the shorter flap of the box and pulled as
hard as I could. My grandpa’s rainbow collection of sweater vests,
folded perfectly to hide the box, cascaded and tumbled off one
another then fell past me through the air and landed on the floor.
The box scraped like sandpaper as I pulled it to the edge of the
shelf. It was slightly bigger than a shoe box, and seemed to have
some weight, but nothing I wouldn’t be able to get down myself.

As I balanced it in my hands, my toes
teetered on the edge of the chair. When I shifted my weight down on
the balls of my feet, the teeter gave way to totter and I tumbled
off the chair. Swimming through the air, I collapsed against the
back wall and the box sailed toward Joanie. I landed hard, twisted
on the floor, while the box hit the top of the chair and landed
next to me. The only thing that crossed my mind was
God, I must
have looked graceful.

“Oh, shit, are you okay?” Joanie screamed as
she pulled the chair out of the closet and landed on her knees next
to me.

“OUCH…that hurt. I think I banged the top of
my foot against the chair. Mother…F’er, that hurts, ahhhh,” I said
as I began to chant under my breath every foul word that would make
my grandma turn over in her grave.

“Does your neck hurt? How about your back?
Oh my God, that was so scary,” Joanie breathed.

Truthfully, I was more embarrassed than
hurt. I kept replaying how ridiculous I must have looked flying
through the air. I’m just glad nobody else saw it.

“I’m okay. Can you hand me the box?” I asked
as I adjusted myself to a sitting position, my back against the
back wall of the closet.

I pulled my knees up, taking the pain off my
lower back. I wasn’t about to tell Joanie that my back right above
my tailbone was beginning to throb. J caught the flaps of the box
between her fingers and dragged it toward us. Maybe it was heavier
than I thought.

“Here,” she huffed as she reached around and
dropped it next to me. I stretched out before we both folded our
legs criss-cross applesauce on the cedar floor of my grandparents’
closet.

I inhaled roughly, blowing out a breath
filled with anxiety, fear, and confusion. I pulled on the edges,
folded to seal whatever was so important to keep confined. The
scrape of the cardboard flaps against each other seemed to echo
deep in my mind. Then the sound abruptly stopped; with my eyes
closed tight, I couldn’t stop from wondering if I was making the
right decision. My heartbeat ricocheted across my ribs, under my
breasts, and up through my throat before rebelliously crashing in
my head.

I heard Joanie gasp just before I opened my
eyes. I could tell by the look on her face, the contents of that
box were exactly what we’d been looking for. She had her mouth
covered by both of her hands, her eyes exaggeratedly round, and
every part of her irises visible with shock. I lowered my sight to
the box that sat heavy across my thighs. An array of colored
envelopes mixed with cream and white rested in a perfect row.
Pinched and clustered by rubber bands, I noticed not one jagged or
ripped edge. They were all still sealed with the same intention
from when they were mailed—secured and protected. The cluster of
banded envelopes closest to my gut seemed to hold less than the
larger group at the end of the row. My windpipe closed as my heart
clung to whatever ledge in my throat it could find. I didn’t
realize I was holding my breath until I gasped. Joanie reached over
and held back the aged cardboard flaps that kept wanting to return
to their natural closed position.