9. On a Thursday #6
After looking through the entire box, Charlie selected five of Frank's letters and five of Helen's, completely at random.
She didn't choose them for any reason she could articulate.
All she felt was they were just the ones her hands reached for, the ones that felt like they belonged with her.
She wrapped a rubber band around the bundle and placed them in her work bag, alongside the Walkman, all twelve of Katie's mixtapes, the eleven Christmas tapes plus the original she'd pressed into Charlie's hand the morning she left for Caltech, and then her copy of Rumours and other albums she felt were necessary to keep with her at all times.
These were the things she carried every day.
She'd read them when she was ready. Helen had said so. Not because you feel like you have to. Read them when you need to remember.
Charlie closed the box and put it back on the shelf in the coat closet while the ten letters stayed in her bag.
She stayed on the floor for a while after that.
The apartment was quiet, and Charlie sat in it, with nothing to protect her from the onslaught of silence. Her hands still smelled like old paper and pipe tobacco, and the ten letters in her bag felt like they were radiating a feeling from across the room.
Sixty years. Frank and Helen had written to each other for sixty years.
Through a war, through distance, through everything the world had thrown at two people who simply refused to stop showing up for one another, because there was just no other option for them.
She'd held the proof of it in her hands.
She'd touched the ink where Frank had written I think it's my heart, ma'am on an envelope flap, the same line that had started everything, turned into a joke, turned into a vow, turned into the truest sentence either of them ever said.
The only sound that remained was Katie's mixtape still playing through the stereo's speakers, a small respite to the silence of the room.
She almost turned it off. Almost pressed stop and shut down the stereo, going to bed and letting Christmas Eve just be over.
Until the next track started, stilling Charlie's movements.
Ric Ocasek's voice, quiet and haunted, begins to ask a question Charlie had never really heard before.
She'd heard this song a hundred times. Katie put it on this mixtape for a reason this year, as they had listened to it often on the radio on their trips to and from Illinois the past few months.
But she'd never paid too much attention to the lyrics.
Not like this. Especially not sitting on the floor of an apartment that has always fit more than just her, surrounded by the proof of a sixty-year love story, on a night when every person she'd ever loved was either gone or far away.
Charlie stared across the room. The one plate still left to clean, the one glass left behind. And that one chair still pulled out from the table.
Charlie's mind suddenly went to Joss. Not with longing or regret, but just with the quiet realization that she understood, finally, why it hadn't lasted.
Joss had been real for Charlie. Joss had been kind and beautiful and had shown Charlie what a relationship could be with a person where love was real.
But Joss had not been the answer to this question.
Charlie and Joss had known it then, in their breakup.
The care for one another was always strong, but it wasn't lasting, not the way that Frank and Helen knew it without argument.
Charlie understood that more now, with Frank's handwriting still swimming in her mind.
Frank had paid attention. To Helen's dreams, with every fake ailment, every visit to the nursing station, every letter across the Pacific. He had paid attention to her dreams with the devotion of someone who understood that love wasn't just a feeling. It was a practice. A daily act of showing up.
And Helen had done the same with every letter back, every door she left open, even with every "What is it today, Beckman?" that really meant I'm glad you're here again.
The song played on through the stereo and Charlie sat with her own two hands that could fix anything in the world. Everything except for the empty chair across from her. She could fix it to be strong, structured, industrial. But she couldn't fix it being hollow.
And for the first time in her life, Charlie Wickett felt overwhelmed with wanting something she couldn't build.
It wasn't an engine, or a career, or even a dream she could chase with enough stubbornness and talent. She wanted someone. Someone who would show up the way Frank showed up for Helen, because that was it, wasn't it? Showing up was the whole thing. Showing up and staying.
She wanted what was in the box of letters. She wanted someone to write to across impossible distances, someone who would show up to advocate to be together, who would choose her over anything else entirely.
She wanted her person. The one she didn't have. The one the song kept asking her to find, the one that would stop the apartment from being empty, and the one where, this Christmas Eve, would refrain from feeling like the longest night of the year.
Charlie turned off the stereo and sat there in the silence as she let the question stay in the room with her, unanswered, because, for one of the first times in her life, Charlie Wickett didn't have the answer.
But what she did know, was that she was done pretending she didn't need one.
On Christmas morning, she put on Frank's aquamarine coat and drove to the ocean.
She walked to the water and stood with her feet in the ocean, in the same spot where Helen had stood only three months earlier.
The water was freezing now, but she paid it no mind, instead looking out over the Pacific.
Standing here, in the footsteps of Helen and Katie and even Frank, was the first time she felt something other than hollow.
"Merry Christmas, Mom," she said to the water. "Merry Christmas, Dad."
The lap of the waves against her feet was all she needed to feel them right beside her.