If Raven was indeed “not stupid,” as he claimed, he must have known that the poem he’d copied would drive Lily mad. I can give not what men call love! The desire of the moth for the star! I admit I took solace in his “very truly yours,” though the careful reader will note, as I did not, that the “very truly yours” was a verbatim echo of Lily’s sign-off in the previous letter.
I cooped myself up in the house, scribbling draft after draft, looking for the right combination to melt his heart so that Lily’s rejection of him—and how I dreamed of writing that letter!—would sting as much as possible. I was going to put a stop to it. I was going to shut Lily down, to return her to nothingness. I hadn’t counted on my feeling her loss. Nor had I counted on my ineluctable empathy for Raven. Yes, I knew he was a murderer and that he deserved to suffer, but somehow in my plans I hadn’t considered the coldness, the emotional fortitude that would be required of me to be the cause of someone else’s misery like that. I had expected the justification to bolster me, but it wasn’t enough. I had to harden my heart, do my duty, feelings be damned. My conscience would be clean, like an executioner’s.
Dear Henry,
I was shocked by the brevity of your last letter! Having sent a picture, I expected at least a few pages from you. More than a poem. I long ago gave up on the idea of “what men call love.” If you remember, that’s what ended me up with a con man. I welcome your “devotion to something afar,” but how about we shrink that distance down? I gave up all communication with Clancy and all other potential suitors to be with you, despite the fact that we can’t be together physically! I am already in your heart now and I am real, Henry, and I can feel your soul through the pages of your letters,
so the time has come to make things explicit, to uncork your feelings and spill them out on the page. You would be lonely without me, Raven. You do not want to lose me now. Imagine your loneliness now and multiply it by a thousand. What would happen if I went away? Think about it. Tell me how much I mean to you. Imagine your life without me in it. Write to me and tell me how much it would hurt. You need me. I need you too Henry. You exist for me.
Lily
Maybe Raven would write back with a long declaration of love, maybe he would send another poem. Either way, Lily was close. She had penetrated Raven’s pericardium … only a matter of centimeters to the dark center of his heart. Every day I visited the Mailboxes Store to check the box. It invigorated me to think that all my preparation was finally going to come to some fruition. No matter what Raven wrote in his next letter, I would stick it to him. Or maybe after two more letters from him. I kept up the routine of showering and shaving, kept dressing in my old suit. Calvin Senior had been right—it was possible to instill a sense of dignity in oneself by cleaning up and dressing right. I wondered how I could have ever lived otherwise.
So when Patty came to the front door one afternoon, after I had finished rinsing and drying my lunch plates, I thought I was finally going to cash in on my respectable exterior. I knew she expected to see what her father had seen. She was surprised
to find me looking so clean and dapper without her help. It lent credibility to my plan.
She herself looked like she had had a rough couple of weeks. And yet she was a vision, all pale skin and large eyes. She’d been crying, which made her look all the more beautiful to me. Not for the fact of her having cried—this is difficult to explain—but for what crying did to her face: her eyes were bloodshot, the skin under her eyes was puffy and soft, and her lips looked fuller. One look at her, and all my emotional buttresses crumbled to the ground.
“Patty—I’m sorry about all of this. I miss you horribly.”
Her eyes teared up. “I miss you too, Owen.” She cleared her throat. “I decided to come over because I think we can try to put all of this behind us. We’re married. That’s something I take very seriously.”
“Me, too. I know it’s been hard. This was something I had to do.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever understand.”
I shook my head. “You’ll be surprised. You have to be a little more patient. If you hadn’t found the letters, you would have never known until the end.”
“But this is the end, Owen.”
“Almost, almost. We’re very nearly there. It will only be a matter of days, and then I can explain everything.”
“No,” she said. “This is the end, Owen. Whatever you’ve been up to, it’s over.”
“Try to understand. I can’t stop now. The finish line is a hundred feet away.”
She crossed her arms. “You don’t know, do you?”
“What?”
“He’s out.”
“Who?”
“Henry Raven.”
One part of me was total disbelief, the other plunging through empty space. I did my best to show no reaction, even as I felt the blood draining from my face, my stomach clenching.
“That can’t be,” I said. “I just got a letter. Lily just got a letter.”
“He’s out. Walked out yesterday. His conviction was overturned.”
“How is that possible?”
“The bullet stuff got thrown out on appeal. Some moron judge ruled that the bullet-lead analysis tests weren’t reliable. The DA doesn’t even know if they’ve got enough to try him again. Owen, it’s horrible.”
“Yesterday. Where did he go? Does anyone know where he went?”
“It’s over,” she said.
I was very close to grilling her on the details—the bulk of my emotional momentum pushed me in that direction. But I knew I couldn’t. I had to stop somewhere. I had to think of Patty. I sat at the kitchen table, head in my hands.
“It’s over,” I said.
“They fucking let him out.” She shook her head. “How could they let him out?”
“They’re idiots.” I stood up. I collected myself. I stepped toward her, and she shied away.
“I think we should see somebody,” she said. “I’m really confused, and I think we need to find somebody who can help us sort this out.”
“Sure,” I said. “Good idea.” My voice was like someone else’s voice.
“Why are you wearing a suit?”
“Just tell me when and where,” I said. “We will work this out.”
After she left, I dug through the stack of letters in my office until I found the one from Raven’s cellmate, Moses Lundy. I immediately typed up the following note:
Dear Mr. Lundy,
I have been informed that Henry has been released. If this information is accurate, do you think you can tell me where he’s going to be residing once he’s out? He forgot to include a forwarding address in his last letter.
Sincerely,
Lily Hazelton
I tried to maintain as measured a tone as possible, in part to act as though it would be no big deal for Moses to provide
Lily with Raven’s new address, and in part because it was the only way I could begin to calm myself. Was it true? Patty didn’t seem to be bluffing, and had she been, it would have been too easy to catch her in that lie. It must have been true. Raven had never mentioned an appeal. Was it some sort of surprise to him? That wasn’t how prisons were run. Raven must have been expecting it. He should have told Lily. I couldn’t stand it. All of the emotional reticence I’d assembled for the letter to Moses Lundy started to crumble. I was overwhelmed by Lily’s sadness, Lily’s confusion. It wasn’t fair. My head spun and my heart dragged. I was like a child trying to put a wooden block into a series of misshapen holes, not understanding that the block I held belonged to another toy altogether.
We had an appointment to see a couples specialist that Monday. I wasn’t sure how I was going to approach the session. I didn’t believe that anything less than the truth would be useful therapeutically, but I also didn’t believe that telling the truth would be of much use to me. I still had to stick it to Raven somehow, and spilling the beans of my plan would not bring me closer to that goal.
I was in a therapy-pickle. Show up on Monday and go through the rigmarole about book research, or start to tell the truth and make some real progress with Patty. I was genuinely on the fence. Yes, I had a plan. Yes, it had been watertight and clever. But I was not blind to what was happening in my life and my marriage. I was not too stupid to know that the damage I’d done by now wasn’t going to get magically stitched up. Tell the therapist the truth. It’s the only way out. It is over. Then the feeling would return, the feeling in the pit of my gut the moment
Patty told me he’d gotten out, the primal feeling of anger I felt when I thought about how he had so coolly and cruelly dropped Lily without so much as a goodbye.
Could the man who had corresponded so openly and eloquently with my Lily Hazelton really be so purely cruel? Was all his tenderness and insight and soul-searching a simulation? I could not believe that. I knew Raven. Underneath the predator, behind the mask of cruelty and unfeeling, was a regular human being. How else could he have written Lily those letters? I did my best to keep that anger in check with the hope that Moses’s response would explain everything.
Monday morning rolled around, still no response from Moses Lundy. I was supposed to meet Patty at the therapist’s office at noon. I’d offered—in a gesture of goodwill—to pick her up, but she said the therapist preferred us to arrive separately for now. I guess the therapist didn’t want us comparing notes on the drive home.
The only thing I knew about this session was that it was supposed to be a “fact-finding mission,” each of us describing the series of events leading to our arrival at therapy. I still had not decided whether I was going to tell the truth. So much was uncertain. What if I were to spill the beans and then find that the overturned verdict thing had been an error, or that Raven was indeed out but he wanted to find Lily and surprise her in person? I couldn’t tell the truth, not yet. But frankly I didn’t feel like lying to Patty anymore. I had been very lonely lately and I wanted to patch things up. It is amazing how life can put us right on the edge of a sword. It might have turned out differently if we’d gone to the therapist in the same car.
I had some time to kill before the appointment with the therapist, so I drove over to Second City to check my mailbox. It was a windy day, and traffic was light. Trees waved their branches at me as I drove past, urging me toward my fate.
“Mail hasn’t come in yet,” said the wife/sister behind the counter.
I waited fifteen minutes, then left.
I was backing out of my parking spot when a postal truck pulled up. I reparked and went back in. It was about noon when I finally opened the mailbox. Inside was a letter from Moses Lundy. I unsealed it right there and read it. I was dizzy by the time I reached his signature.
“Sir? Are you okay?”
I needed to lean on something, so I leaned on the wall, but then I needed to sit, so I sat on the floor. Once seated, I needed to lie down, so I lay down, but even lying down, I still felt like I needed to lie down.… When I came to, the wife/sister was
hovering over me. She had her hand on my wrist, taking my pulse. I had always found her to be strange looking, but now, with her face so close to mine and her clammy hand on my wrist, and me just having come to, she was a vision out of a nightmare.
I screamed. She leapt backward. The husband/brother behind the counter held his hands up as he crept toward the phone.
“Now, now,” he said, “it’s going to be all right.”
“It’s not!” I yelled. “It’s not!” I snatched up the letter and ran out of the Mailboxes Store in a state of profound agitation. When I recollect that outburst—always in embarrassment—I picture the lonely mailbox key still stuck in its lock, its identical twin affixed to the same cheap wire ring, swinging back and forth in the turbulent wake of my departure.
Dear Lily Hazelton,
Henry Joe did get out, the lucky guy. He spent some time writing goodbye letters to his penpals but yours must have gotten lost in the shuffle. I know he’s gone back to live with his woman in Mount Pleasant who has been keeping an eye on his truck and things since he went in. You can probably find her in the phone book, her name is Portia Snow, they been together a long time. Too bad you didn’t get his goodbye note. Specially because out of all Raven’s penpals we liked your letters best.
Sincerely,
Moses Lundy
I never made it to therapy. I went home. Straight to my computer, where I performed a directory search for Portia Snow in Mount Pleasant, CO. There was no Portia Snow listed there. No Henry Raven. I broadened the search to the whole state of Raven’s incarceration. No Henry Raven, no Portia Snow. Finally, I generated a list of Snows, any first name.
P. Snow, Mount Pleasant, CO. A phone number. No address listed.
I threw the printout into my bag, along with a ratty, old, dying-battery laptop, the letters Raven and I had sent each other, the Xerox of CJ’s journal, my microcassette recorder, and all the pictures I had of Lily and Raven. I ran into the bedroom and filled a suitcase with the most conveniently accessible clothing I could find. I would wear my suit no more.
It was only a matter of time before Patty would realize I wasn’t going to show up. I knew she would come looking for me at home. I was in a rush. Nevertheless, I made a special, time-wasting trip to the front closet to retrieve our Frisbee, for what better memento of our time together could I carry with me out on the open road? I never used it, of course, for lack of someone to play with.
It was in the back of that closet, behind the rack of coats, below the shelf of board games, that we kept a safe. Among the items in that safe was a big wad of emergency cash. I opened the safe to retrieve it. Then, on impulse, I removed the Glock semiautomatic and ammunition, too. I was headed onto the open highway, with cash, and I would need protection from my fellow Americans.
I scanned the house quickly to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I stuffed some extra mouthwash and deodorant into
my bag. I threw some food into a plastic garbage bag. I took a gallon of water from the earthquake kit in the garage. The car was loaded and I was ready to depart, but something was bothering me. I had to go back to my office. It held nothing I needed and yet I was forgetting something. The big desktop computer in the center of my work table looked like it was going to miss me, I thought, and then it struck me. The book. Patty would go looking in there for the book, and, encrypted or not, she would soon realize there was no book. I started up the computer, but it took a long time to boot up, and I was getting impatient. I had planned to copy some large document, encrypt it, and name it
MY_BOOK.DOC
or something like that. Instead I poured a half gallon of milk into the computer’s tower, dousing the motherboard and hard drive with a gurgling, bubbling, creamy-white electrical storm.