13. The Letter
The Letter
Elena Sela's letter came to the resident agency in the third week of May, forwarded from Washington, and Nate did not tell me about it for four days.
I want to be scrupulously fair here, because we have both had to look at this and neither of us comes out of it well and only one of us has been forgiven publicly.
He did not hide it. He put it in the inside pocket of his jacket, and he took it out at night and read it, and he did not mention it, and when I asked him on the Thursday whether something was wrong he said "long week," which was true, and which was a lie.
And I did not push. Because — and here is where the two of us met in the middle of our respective defects like two cars on a one-lane road — I had spent five weeks not asking him about September, and asking about a letter would have meant admitting I was a person who asks, and I had built a very tidy little theology in which the not-asking was love.
So for four days we were wrong with each other in a way that neither of us had language for.
Nothing happened. There was no fight. We had dinner twice.
He came over on Saturday and we watched something and the dogs lay in their heap and I lay against him on the sofa and there was a letter eleven feet away in a jacket on a hook and a September in an orchid room and neither of us said one word, and I have never in my life been lonelier in a room with somebody.
He told me on the Wednesday, in the truck, in the parking lot at Hendry's, before we got out.
"Elena wrote to me."
"Okay."
"Four days ago." He was holding the wheel at ten and two in a stationary vehicle. "I've read it about thirty times and I want to read it to you because I can't summarize it, I've tried, and every summary I make is a lie in my favor."
He took it out of his jacket. It was one page, handwritten.
I'm not going to reproduce all of it. The middle of it is hers.
But the last paragraph, which he read twice because his voice went the first time, said — and I have permission for this; I wrote to her in 2028 and asked, and she said yes, and added a line I've also kept — that she had been thinking since his visit about why he came, and she had decided it was not to be forgiven, because he had not asked to be.
She thought he had come to be *sentenced*.
And that she was not going to do it, because she had spent four years learning that you cannot spend a life paying a debt to somebody who is not collecting, and that Arturo had been a grown man who chose a thing, and that the only part of it Nate was ever owed was the promise, and that a promise made to a frightened man in a garage by a person who meant it at the time is not a lie, it is just a thing that turned out not to be in his gift.
And then, at the bottom:
*You told me you had a woman in California and a dog. Marry her. Stop running the case.*
Nate folded the letter up.
"So," he said.
"So."
"So here's the part I've been sitting on for four days, and I'm going to say it badly." He turned and looked at me. "I'm going to take the job."
The parking lot at Hendry's Beach at six in the evening is gulls and dog barking and somebody's car door, and all of that went on happening.
"The DC job," I said.
"The DC job."
"Right," I said. "Okay."
And Nate Corrigan put both hands over his face and said, through them, "Lila, I swear to God, if you say *okay* to me one more time—"
"What do you want me to say?"
"Something!" He dropped his hands. He was not shouting; he was worse than shouting, he was level.
"Anything. Ask me a question. Ask me *one question* — ask me when, ask me for how long, ask me if I want you to come, ask me to stay, tell me not to go, tell me you're angry — I have been standing in front of you for six weeks holding the biggest decision of my life out in both hands and you keep putting your hands behind your back. "
"Because it's your career—"
"It's my *life*," said Nate. "And I thought it was yours, and I have started to think that you don't think that, and I would rather you told me than kept being wonderful at me."
I got out of the truck.
I want to be honest: I got out of the truck.
I opened the door of a parked vehicle in the middle of the most important sentence anybody has ever said to me and I got out and stood in the parking lot, and Floss started whining in the back, and after about four seconds Nate got out on his side, and we stood on opposite sides of a Ford with the whole Pacific going orange behind him.
"Don't do that," he said. "Whatever that is. Don't."
"I don't know how to do this," I said.
"I know."
"No — Nate, listen to me, I am not being poetic.
I do not know how." My voice came out wrong.
"I don't have the — there's no *procedure* for this.
When Grant left, do you know what I did?
I made a spreadsheet. I made a spreadsheet in the parking lot of a bank in Ventura and I paid it off in forty-seven months and I have never told one living soul how much it was, not Tess, not my father, nobody.
That worked. That is the only thing in my entire adult life that has actually worked and it worked because I did it alone and told nobody and asked for nothing.
" I was crying now, in a parking lot, in front of a man and two dogs and a woman putting a surfboard on a roof rack eleven feet away.
"And you are asking me to put that down and I don't have anything to put in my hands instead. "
Nate Corrigan came around the front of the truck.
"Beach," he said. "Now. Both dogs. We're going to do this on the sand like adults."