13. Maya
Maya
"Daniel's First Real Letter"
Three weeks after I left, a letter arrived at my mother's — I was still using her address for some things while the mail redirect sorted itself out. My mother handed it to me over coffee one Sunday morning without comment, just the envelope, cream-colored, my name in Daniel's handwriting.
I looked at it for a moment. His handwriting is something I know the way I know his footsteps on the stairs, the particular pressure and slant of it, the way he writes the letter M — in my name — with a slight flourish he's probably never noticed he does.
I turned the envelope over. Looked at it from the back. Then I opened it.
He had written three pages. On legal pad paper, yellow, the pad I knew was in our kitchen junk drawer. Not a formal letter, not typed, not composed — written, the way you write when you're trying to get to the true thing rather than the impressive thing.
Maya,
I'm not asking for anything with this. I need you to know that first. I'm not writing because I want you to come home or because the house is too quiet or because I can't function without the system you maintained — though all of those things are true.
I'm writing because I've been trying to listen, finally, and I don't have anyone to listen to except myself, and I'm finding that I have a lot to answer for.
I found your sketchbooks in the study. I want you to know I looked at them carefully. Not because I had the right to, but because I'm trying to understand what I failed to look at when you were here.
The blank pages at the end.
I know what they mean, Maya. I know what it means that a woman who used to fill a sketchbook every six weeks has forty pages of nothing in the most recent one.
I didn't know what it meant when you were in the next room, and I'm ashamed of that.
I should have asked. I should have noticed.
I should have been paying attention to what was happening inside your life, not just to whether the surface of our life was intact.
I've been going back through the past few years. Not to prosecute myself — or not only that. To actually understand.
The miscarriage. I was in Denver. You said you were okay and I believed you because it was easier to believe you, because I was three thousand miles away and the project was critical and you had always been okay before.
I came home three days later and you had put yourself back together and I told myself: she's handling it. She's okay. Maya is steady.
I should have gotten on the first flight. I should have been there in the room. I should have known that someone can sound okay on the phone while being very not okay, especially someone who has spent a decade learning that the way to keep a marriage running is to not introduce complications.
I made you feel like you couldn't be complicated without it being a problem for me. And I'm so sorry. That is a terrible thing to have taught someone you love.
I'm not writing to ask for forgiveness. I'm writing because I want you to know that I am looking, finally, at what I should have been looking at all along.
Daniel
I read it twice in my mother's kitchen, with my coffee going cold, which felt appropriate.
Then I called Priya.
"I need to read you something," I said.
"That sounds ominous."
"It's a letter."
"From Daniel?"
"From Daniel."
There was a brief pause. "Go ahead."
I read it. All of it, including the part about the miscarriage, which I had to stop for a moment in the middle of and breathe through. Priya was quiet the whole time. When I finished, there was a pause.
"Okay," she said. Then: "That's different."
"I know."
"He mentioned the miscarriage."
"Yes."
"Specifically. With actual — understanding. Not 'I had to work' as an explanation."
"Yes."
"Hm." Another pause. "How do you feel?"
I looked at the letter in my hands. "Like I've been waiting for someone to say something true to me for a very long time," I said. "And not knowing that I was waiting."
"That makes sense."
"It doesn't change everything."
"No," Priya said. "It doesn't."
I did not write back. But I did not throw the letter away. I put it in the pocket of my new sketchbook, the one that was filling up, the one that was becoming itself.
Three pages of Daniel's handwriting, pressed between the pages of me becoming myself again.
That night, I couldn't sleep, and I got up at two in the morning and sat at my drafting corner — I had set up a small space in the sitting room, a proper work surface, finally — and I drew until four.
Something abstract. Colors that I'd been thinking about.
Lines that were doing something I didn't have words for yet but that felt like the beginning of a language.
I went to sleep at four-fifteen and woke at seven and went to the studio and did good work.
Something, I thought, is beginning.