Ruth stared at me. “I changed my mind. I can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can. Come on, let’s go.”
She set down her box, and we turned toward the dressers. We each opened a drawer, and sighed in unison at the chaos revealed.
It’s astonishing what a single life accumulates. The belts, lightbulbs, AAA batteries, bud vases, safety pins, expired medications, eyeglasses, rubber bands, picture frames, birth announcements, buttons from old coats, boxes that once held jewelry—all the things we think we just might need someday. These things we endow with a certain life—the possibility that we might use them, the memory we attach to them—and then, when we die, they become just things again. Again and again Ruth and I turned to each other, holding up a broken travel alarm or a never-used date planner from 1979, and said, “What on earth was he saving this for?” More than once one of us held up an unidentifiable object—a black plastic rectangle, a twisted piece of metal—and said, “What the hell is this?”
After three hours we had emptied the dresser drawers. Ruth shut the last one with an air of weary victory, and then reconsidered. She reopened each one and ran her hand all the way to the back.
“I think we got it all,” I said, but she kept looking. As each drawer came up empty, she seemed to grow more certain that there was something still to find. In the last drawer she checked, she found a small gray jewelry box, printed with the name of the jeweler in gold.
“Another one?” I said. “He really loved those empty jewelry boxes.”
Ruth shook it. “There’s something inside.” She made an excited face—a pirate about to open the treasure chest—and then she took off the lid. In a tone of wonder, she said, “I thought these were lost.” She showed me two slender gold bands—her parents’ wedding rings.
After that, Ruth didn’t want to clean anymore. She sat on the floor and turned the rings over and over in her hands, reading the inscriptions inside. I was glad she had found something that meant so much to her, but I couldn’t conquer the envy I felt at the emotion in her voice. I wanted to find something, too. On my own I lost the focus that had gotten us through the first task. I wandered from closet to dresser and back again, opening and closing drawers.
At Oliver’s bedside table, I picked up his favorite pen. “Can I keep this?”
“What?” Ruth looked puzzled. “Of course.”
I slipped the pen into my pocket. Then I bent to open the drawer, and found my reward. There it was—the exact thing I had been hoping to find, without quite knowing it—an envelope with my name on it atop a package wrapped in thick brown paper. I lifted it out with reverence, and felt immediately possessive, like Gollum with his ring. I didn’t want Ruth to see. I sat on the floor beside the table, hoping the bed would hide me from her view.
The package was rectangular in shape, big enough to hold a hardback book, but too light for that to be its contents. Oliver had cut up a brown-paper bag to wrap it, and had not done a terribly good job of either the cutting or the wrapping. The paper puffed out in some places, stuck out in jagged triangles in others, and I could see where he’d struggled with the tape, jammed it on in sticky little bunches and started again with new pieces. He’d tied a piece of red yarn around the package, a loose knot where perhaps he’d wanted a bow. I turned the package around in my hands, imagining what, out of all his things, he might have chosen especially for me—a necklace that matched his aunt’s opal ring, one of the chickens from the collection on the kitchen windowsill? Maybe he’d secretly tape-recorded his memoirs and was leaving them for me to edit—a plan for my future he’d finished making after all. I knew exactly which picture of Oliver I’d choose for the cover—a studio shot of him as a young man, his thick hair combed back, his eyes bright, his sly smile suggesting a wealth of clever thoughts. He looked in that picture like a man on the verge of an adventurous life.
My excitement made me hesitant, hoping that whatever was inside the package would equal my joy at discovering it. I opened the letter first, tearing the envelope as carefully as I could.
My dear Cameron,
I suppose you think yourself now relieved of duty—alas, I have one final task to charge you with before I release you from my employ. Deliver this wedding present to your onetime friend, the charming Miss Sonia Gray. Do not mail it—it must be delivered in person, by you. You will, of course, be compensated, at twice your normal rate, for however long it takes you to complete this task. Please show this letter to Ruth (unless of course I have outlived her) as a sort of invoice.
Your Miss Gray thinks perhaps you never replied to her letter because you are genuinely indifferent to her. She imagines you have at last become as detached as you always wanted people to think you were. I differ from her in this opinion. Still, I can well imagine your indignation at being sent to her. Right now you are thinking that the package is empty and its delivery just another scheme I have devised to torment you. I assure you this is not so. Remember that you have a long life yet to live, as I do not. I know you will not refuse me the time it will take to do this one last thing.
Yours, as ever,
Oliver Doucet
P.S. Don’t open the package. I invoke your overdeveloped sense of honor. And if there’s life after death, I’m watching you.
There were many things in the letter to upset me, but at first all I felt, like a punch in the throat, was disappointment that the package was not for me. Three years together, and Oliver’s parting words were instructions to deliver something to another, instructions not even signed with love. He’d never even met Sonia, but he’d chosen her over me.
I read the letter again. What did he mean when he said Sonia thought I was indifferent? How did he know what Sonia thought about anything? It took longer than it should have for me to realize that he was telling me he’d corresponded with her. He must have taken it upon himself to answer her letter when I wouldn’t, the way I answered the letters that he ignored. And what had they said to each other, these two people who had nothing but me in common? What other opinions on my psychology had they shared as they formed their secret bond? What had they told each other that I wouldn’t have wanted them to know?
I stood and paced away from the bed, then back. “Son of a bitch,” I said. My voice came out funny, like I was about to cry.
“What?” Ruth said.
I looked up to find her watching me from the foot of the bed.
“What do you have?” she asked.
I didn’t want to tell her. The thought of her reading the letter pained and embarrassed me. I didn’t want to explain about Sonia. I didn’t want her to know I merited not a final, sentimental gift but a task. “Nothing,” I said. She looked at me sharply, and I braced myself for more questions. But then she blinked, and her face relaxed. She gave me a sad smile. “Okay,” she said.
I picked up the package and headed for the door. Ruth said nothing as I passed her, but when I looked back, she met my gaze. She looked so small there on the floor, dwarfed by the large room and the enormous quantity of Oliver’s things. When Oliver was alive, she and I had fought about the best way to care for him, but now there was no one else in the world who could understand how much I missed him, how hard it was to accept that he was gone. I went back, sat beside her, and put the package between us on the floor. I handed her the letter.
As she read, I tried to imagine the other letters, the ones that began
Dear Sonia
or
Dear Oliver,
and went on to dissect me. I felt like I’d joined a laughing crowd only to have a hush fall over them at my arrival, everyone looking away. After the day we argued about Sonia, Oliver had never mentioned her to me again. I’d never seen him writing her a letter, never come upon any replies from her in the mail. I prided myself on being a good liar. Why, then, was I amazed over and over at other people’s capacity for deceit?
Ruth looked up from the letter. To my relief, she didn’t ask for explanations. She said, “You don’t have to do it, you know.”
“He pulled out all the stops to make sure I would.”
“You could just mail it.”
I shook my head. As betrayed as I felt, I couldn’t bring myself to dismiss the last lines of the letter.
I know you will not refuse me,
he’d said. “I need the money,” I said.
“I could pay you whatever you would have made. For someone who lived the life of the mind, he actually left behind quite a bit of money.”
I took the letter back from her. “He said I had to go.”
“I know how much you hate to disappoint him,” she said quietly. “I know what that’s like. But now he’s dead. You can’t disappoint a dead person.”
My throat tightened. I certainly felt like I could. Rereading the letter, I heard Oliver’s voice as clearly as if he were in the room, giving me a set of instructions to follow—how to make a sandwich, how to interpret an event, how to deliver a package. When he wrote those words, he was still alive. We both looked at the package. “What do you think is in it?” I asked.
“Well,” Ruth said. “It’s smaller than a bread box.”
“It’s also smaller than an elephant.”
“Yes, but that’s imprecise. Better to say it’s smaller than a bread box.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s no bread in it,” I said.
Ruth picked up the package and turned it gingerly in her hands. “He said it’s a wedding present, right? It’s so light. Maybe there’s jewelry in it. Something like the ring he gave you.”
At this, I felt a surge of anger. “Or maybe it really is empty,” I said. I snatched the package back and gave it a good shake.
Ruth gasped, her hands flying up. “What if it’s fragile?”
“Then it’s broken.” I shook it again. A rustling and thumping. So Oliver hadn’t been lying—there was something inside, something for Sonia. “This is going to be awful.” I set the package down, gently now. My anger drained away as I began to worry that I had indeed broken something precious. “Why would he do this to me?”
Ruth didn’t answer. She was staring at the package, a half-smile playing on her lips. After a moment she said, “Because he was a bit of a bastard. Didn’t you know?”
I got Sonia’s
number from information. A recording picked up—not even her voice, which I’d been braced to hear for the first time in eight years, wondering if I’d recognize it, but a hollow, computerized one. When I spoke, I sounded as strange and stilted as the recording. “Sonia, it’s Cameron. I’m bringing you a package from Oliver. I’ll be there in a few days.” I paused, and let the pause go on too long. I felt like I’d dialed the wrong number and somewhere a stranger was bent over an answering machine, listening to me breathe. I hung up without saying another word.
From the backseat of my car I retrieved my battered old atlas, which I hadn’t used since a back-roads trip to see a newly divorced friend in Sewanee, Tennesee, two years before. Ruth and I pored over it at the kitchen table, plotting my route. It looked to be about fifteen hundred miles, passing through seven states in three days. In spite of myself, I felt the stirrings of a certain familiar excitement—the anticipation of departure. I was not looking forward to the arrival in Boston, and I didn’t know where I would go after that. But I knew how good it would feel to be driving into darkness, singing along with
Nebraska,
alone in a traveling world. With moving, I have always been partial to the in-between, the blurred highway outside the window, that suspended time when everything you were lies behind you like a molted skin, and everything you might become shimmers at the horizon. You might choose anything and make it happen, constrained by nothing but your own imagination, sure that not even gravity can hold you.
Ruth tried to persuade me to wait a week or two. She said there was no need to pack all my things, that I could come right back and take my time moving out. But I knew, even if she didn’t, that once I was out of the house it would be anticlimactic if I returned. The single day I took to pack was far more time than was necessary, and so I paid many visits to the attic, looking over all the fragments of Oliver’s history I would never see again. On my last trip up, after some deliberation, I added the sad-eyed picture of Billie to my box of photos. When Ruth came over the next morning to say good-bye, I asked her if I could have the picture, and she said of course, she had no idea who the girl was. I didn’t tell her. My request inspired her to offer me many more things. I let her press on me a carved box from Russia, a small framed copy of a portrait of young Oliver, a first edition of his first book, the value of which she dismissed with a wave of her hand. She kept insisting that I wait one more moment; she was sure there was something else Oliver would have wanted me to take.
“I doubt it.” I did my best to smile. “It’s not like he wrapped anything up.”
She sighed. We stood at the open front door. It was already early afternoon. My car waited in the driveway, the trunk full, Sonia’s package in a place of honor on the passenger seat. I was anxious to go, rattling my keys in my hand just like my father always did. I could hear him saying, “We’re burning daylight!” If I didn’t get moving, I’d soon be jingling the coins in my pocket in imitation of him, whistling under my breath.
“I think,” Ruth said, “that it’s me I want you to take.”