Chapter Twenty-Five #2
It was the same kind of off-kilter remark she would make when they were first dating that would cause him to scratch his head and wonder if she was pulling his leg, and, when it dawned on him that she wasn’t, wonder how long he’d be able to bear her company.
It had taken losing her, and feeling dead, and having her gradually take him back for him to realize what now seemed like the most obvious thing in the world: he could bear her forever, because he loved her.
She’d taken him back because she loved him.
He might have had no idea what to make of her, or she of him, but they’d both had the idea to make something, and thirty-nine years later, even in the face of all they’d lost, they were still making it.
—
After confirming he could indeed read the letter if he wanted to, she anchored it under the salt shaker and didn’t touch it again. Apparently, he was to continue being the bearer of it, whether he read it or not. When they stood to go, he slipped it back into his pocket.
They drove the short distance to Sandusky, then across the bay to Cedar Point, where they wandered through eddies of sweating, overstimulated children and exhausted-looking parents.
Cal negotiated his forearm crutch around all those feet, got knocked into a couple of times, but was ready for it.
Once again, Becky wanted to ride a roller coaster, and this time Cal said he would sit it out.
She contemplated the Blue Streak, which looked like a giant stack of razor wire, and the Iron Dragon, which she worried would give her whiplash.
She settled on the Gemini—a ferocious-looking fortress of wooden lattice with two sets of cars running through it.
Cal found a bench nearby to sit on while Becky stood in line.
She waved to him from the platform, climbed into one of the cars beside a little girl with a ponytail.
The two of them spoke for a moment, grinning with excitement. Then a bell sounded, and they were off.
If only she was right, and there was a chance of all this happening again.
The wisdom that comes with age was needling, he found, because it brought the clarity of hindsight without the means to change anything.
He’d spent so much of his early adulthood thinking he’d been truncated in life, because of his leg.
Because he hadn’t been able to say he’d served in a war, that great marker of identity.
But war had marked his father in a manner that had left him forever damaged, and it had wiped Skip’s mark away completely.
They were the truncated ones—them and countless others who’d gone before and were doubtless to follow, since the world that purported to want peace seemed always to be at war.
All Cal had had to do was pick up the pieces of his own mistakes.
In fact, that, as he saw it now, was his life’s work: trying to make right what he’d gotten wrong.
Maybe that was what Sean Robison had been talking about in the fourth grade; maybe Cal’s special thing was his determination, after taking a wrecking ball to his life, to put it back together.
Wasn’t it a fair measure of a person, what they did with their mistakes?
How they managed to stumble into some of the right steps, after taking all the wrong ones?
He wasn’t sure. He was too easy on himself, certainly.
Too lax. He could forget what he and Becky talked about last week, but he heard Sean speaking to him as if it had happened that morning.
He also heard Becky’s grassy voice as she spoke to him in Fink’s for the first time.
He saw his father’s face when he first held Skip, and remembered his own surprise.
Saw Tom and Skip figure-eighting their bicycles in the street out in front of the house and nearly colliding.
Felt the stubbly back of Skip’s neck when he hugged him for what turned out to be the last time.
This is why old people seem distant and distracted, he thought.
We aren’t living in the past; the past is living in us.
And it’s talking. We get old to be able to recalibrate everything we thought was going to be important.
We get old just to hear it. It says, the days, the days, the days.
High overhead, the Gemini went roaring by on its tracks. Becky and the little girl airborne, screaming with delight, maybe, while Cal, down on the ground, took the envelope from his pocket and fished out the letter. It was undated, and her eight-year-old handwriting was blocky and uniform.
Dear 60 Year Olde Me,
How’s the weather? Just kidding. How do you like being old as dirt? Also just kidding. I hope you still have a sense of humor!
Really though this is a serious letter. Are you famous? Do you still hate beets? Did you marry Sticky Wilson?
I hope you’ve swum the English Channel and climbed Mount Everest (because you’re too old to do it now). I hope you have a library with a thousand books. I hope you are happy and have a wonderful husband and a wonderful house and lots and lots of wonderful children!
I’ll be going now, but I also want to be sure to say I hope you have straight teeth and super shiny hair.
Most Sincerely,
Long ago, she’d called the letter a vision of her future self.
Cal had always imagined it would be some sort of prediction—one that would lay out actual circumstances, dates, maybe a diagram of what she would achieve and experience along the way.
Of course, it wasn’t any of those things.
She’d told him before—more than once—that she couldn’t predict the future.
This “vision” was an eight-year-old’s. It was nothing more than an expression of hope.
She came through the little swinging gate smiling, her cheeks ruddy and her hair blown back.
He bought her a funnel cake, the coils of hot, greasy dough dusted heavily with powdered sugar.
She blew on it and carried it, in its folded shell of paper plate, onto the double Ferris wheel with him, where she somehow remembered that the car they’d sat in last time had been orange.
This car was green, and as they sat eating warm, greasy dough, it pulled them backward and around and up, higher and higher, until they paused there to let someone on or off, down below.
She leaned over and kissed powdered sugar onto his cheek.
The view, which seemed made for them because of the day, and because they’d stopped at the Ferris wheel’s highest point, was panoramic, breathtaking.
Almost too much; Cal had a mild fear of heights and felt like the two of them could vanish into thin air, up there, and no one would even notice.
Plus, the car was rocking a little. Becky, he realized, was moving forward and back, rocking it deliberately.
Don’t, he wanted to tell her, but the look she gave him—impish, challenging—said, Do.
So he moved his body forward and back, rocking the car with her, and before long, as if by their doing, the wheel began to turn.