Part 5

Part 5. Luke's Letter

Fabian closed the door quietly behind my mother and stood for a moment with his back against it, as if he were holding the whole hospital at bay while I found the courage to open what she had pressed into my hand. The envelope was thin and yellowed at the edges, and the seal had been broken once and pressed shut again with a carelessness that told me my father had read it long before it reached me. My name was written on the front in a hand I had not seen for thirty-one years.

Fabian pulled the chair closer to my bed and sat down without asking whether I wanted him there, and I was grateful for that, because I did not trust my own voice to ask him to stay. "Take your time," he said softly, and his hand rested lightly on the blanket near mine, not quite touching me, as if he were afraid that any sudden movement might break something fragile between us. I nodded, although I was not sure that time would make this any easier.

I slid my finger beneath the flap and drew out two folded sheets of paper that smelled faintly of dust and of a house that had been closed for a long time. The ink had faded to a soft brown, but the words were still clear, and I read the first line aloud before I could stop myself because I needed to hear it in a real voice and not only inside my own head. Luke wrote that he did not know whether I would ever read his letter, and that he was writing it because he could no longer bear to believe that I had simply walked away from him and from our son without a word.

He wrote that he had waited outside my house for three nights after Fabian was born, hoping that I would come to a window or send him even a brief message. Each night he had gone home with nothing but the cold in his coat and the sound of his own footsteps on the pavement, and he had begun to fear that my silence meant I had already decided to forget him. "He waited," I whispered, and Fabian nodded slowly, his eyes fixed on the page as though he were trying to learn his father's face from the slant of his handwriting.

Luke wrote that he wanted to raise our son with me, that he was willing to work any job he could find, and that he would marry me as soon as we were able to stand before anyone who would listen. He said that he did not care about my parents' disapproval or about the small rooms we would have had to share at first, because a family did not need a perfect house to be a real family. He promised that he would wait for any word from me, even if that word came months later, and that he would never ask me to choose between him and the life I had hoped to build.

The next part of the letter made my hands shake so badly that Fabian reached out and steadied the paper for me without taking it from my hands. Luke wrote that a man had come to his door only days after the birth and told him that I had chosen adoption, that I wanted no contact with him or with the baby, and that I had already left town to start a new life somewhere else. He wrote that he had not believed it at first, and that he had gone to my parents' house to ask me himself, but my father had met him on the porch and told him that I was gone.

"I never said that," I said, and my voice sounded raw even to my own ears. "I never chose adoption, and I never left town to escape either of you." Fabian looked at me with a steadiness that held me upright. "I know," he said. "He told me I was born to a woman who died, and he told you I was adopted by strangers. He told my father you had chosen to disappear. He gave each of us a different ending so that none of us would ever look for the others."

I read on, and Luke described how he had written to me again and again in the weeks that followed, sending his letters to my parents' address because he had no other address for me. He wrote that none of those letters had ever been answered, and that he had finally stopped writing not because he had stopped loving me, but because he had begun to believe that my silence was itself an answer. He said that he had prayed every night that someone, somewhere, was holding Fabian safely and telling him that he had been wanted.

"Do you think he ever stopped believing the lie?" Fabian asked at last. "I think he believed it because no one ever gave him a reason not to," I answered. "My father made sure that every road between us led to a closed door." We sat together until the light outside my window began to soften, and I folded the letter carefully along its old creases as if I were handling something that could still be broken by careless hands.

When I turned to the final page again, my eyes caught the last lines I had almost missed in my haste to understand the rest. The final line of the letter gave the address of Luke's mother and said that if I ever read these words, I should ask the older woman about the photograph Luke kept beside his bed.