Chapter Six #2
Listening to those other people talk, Diana learned everyone carried some kind of grief, and her pain wasn’t special.
The commonness of the shared loss repelled her.
She stopped attending the meetings and never returned the social worker’s follow-up phone calls.
Maybe quitting was a mistake; maybe she would have found solace in that group like the others had.
She’d never know. Since then, she’s worked to forget the stories she heard in that room, sitting on the metal folding chairs around the untouched box of cookies.
Sometimes, usually late at night, they come back to her, adding to her own grief and expanding her pain.
“It’s not for me, Lax.”
“What about a therapist? One-on-one with someone?”
Diana shakes her head.
“Will you at least tell me what’s going on? You’ve been doing so well. Has something changed?”
If she tells Lakshmi about the letter, she will never be able to hide from the fact Tom did something terrible and kept it from her.
“Diana?”
Diana meets her friend’s kind, worried eyes. She came to Lakshmi for help. She can’t get that help if she keeps this story to herself. She has to trust someone, and there’s no one better than Lakshmi. With shaking hands, Diana removes the letter from her tote and places it on the table.
“This is a letter from Tom. He wrote it before he died. I just found it. Will you read it, please? I could use some advice.”
Lakshmi nods. A moment into reading, she reaches for Diana. Diana laces her fingers between her friend’s, Lakshmi’s cool skin against her own. She examines the paint on Lakshmi’s hand—mustard yellow, black, flecks of gray, a little spot of pink on her thumb.
When Lakshmi arrives at the last sentence, she squeezes Diana’s hand. “This is . . . Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not.”
“You didn’t know about this? This crime?”
“I have no idea what this is about.”
“What about these ‘others’ Tom mentions? He says”—Lakshmi releases Diana’s hand and points to the letter—“they may come into your life? What does that mean?”
“Another thing I don’t understand.”
“No one’s come by the house or work? Or sent a letter or package? Or called you?”
“No to all of that,” Diana says, “but now that you ask, I didn’t check the landline. I never give that number out, though, so I doubt anyone’s called there.”
“You have a landline?” Lakshmi looks at her quizzically, head tilted to the side.
“We got it when we moved in; it came with the internet. The telemarketer calls and hang-ups got so bad last year that I turned off the ringer.” Diana sips her chai. “He hid the letter for me to find; did you catch that? I don’t understand any of this.”
“Where did you find the letter?”
“In a time capsule from 2012 that the kids and I opened two days ago. The letter was written in 2014, sometime after he was diagnosed in May and before he died that September.”
Lakshmi sits back, staring at Diana. “I have no idea what to say.”
“I did some research at work yesterday and again today. I didn’t find anything useful.” Diana pulls out her laptop. “I thought maybe you could help me. Two heads are better than one and all that.”
“Yes, of course, I’ll help you. Whatever you need.” Lakshmi bites her lip. “Diana, he’s not asking you to sort this. You don’t have to do this.”
“But I do. I need to be prepared in case those people come looking for me. Imagine you discovered a letter like this from Ramesh. Would you put it away somewhere and forget about it?”
Lakshmi tugs at her braid. “I probably wouldn’t be able to let it go.”
“Why wouldn’t you ignore it?”
“Because I love him.”
“And because you’d have to understand why he didn’t tell you about this before.
” The next part is hard to say out loud.
Diana forces herself to meet Lakshmi’s gaze, instead of looking away.
“There’s another reason, too. The kids were there when I found the letter.
I wouldn’t let them see it, of course, but Duncan looked for it.
I guess I hadn’t hidden it well enough. I never thought he’d go through my room. ”
Lakshmi gasps. “He read it?”
Diana nods. “So I can’t ignore it, even if I might want to. He misses Tom so much, and if I don’t figure this out, his feelings about his father could become confused or twisted. He could grow to resent Tom because he kept a secret like this. I can’t let that happen.”
“Of course you can’t,” Lakshmi says, standing up from the table. “I think we need the wine after all.”
Diana offers a small smile. “Maybe we do.”
While Lakshmi rounds up the bottle and glasses, Diana turns on her laptop.
She enters her password, JUNE30, Tom’s birthday.
A five-year-old photo of her family on a hike in the Berkshires fills the screen.
A pigtailed Phoebe sits on Tom’s shoulders; Diana and Duncan stand on either side, offering half-hearted grins.
Why did she select this photo as her screensaver? It hadn’t been a happy day; that hike, in fact, had been a disaster.
That summer, Diana’s parents had rented a bungalow on a small lake near Stockbridge for their vacation and planned to spend two weeks attending classical music concerts, visiting museums, and watching the sunrise from the dock behind the house.
They invited Diana, Tom, and the kids for a long weekend, and Diana agreed without consulting Tom.
He’d been withdrawn and unreachable for weeks.
A relaxing time away, Diana had decided, was exactly what they all needed.
Tom, however, was unwilling to embrace a few lazy days on the lake and mapped out that hike for the four of them, confident the kids would be able to keep up. “They can handle it,” he said when she protested. “The exercise will be good for them.”
They spoke in biting whispers, the house too small for privacy. A heat wave had rolled through the area, and the bungalow, which had appeared so charming in its online posting, was suffocating with its tiny windows and lack of air-conditioning.
Arguments between Diana and Tom were rare; she could count on one hand the number of times they’d fought.
Typically, Diana capitulated when Tom’s position became unyielding, her desire for peace overriding her need to be right or to win.
She gave in quickly and often, falling into this habit early on, somehow intuiting that her adaptability was a necessary ingredient in their relationship.
That day, however, a restless Phoebe had kept her up all night, and Diana’s exhaustion superseded her instinct to compromise. “They’re four and seven, for God’s sake,” she pressed. “The hike is too strenuous for little kids. They can stay with my parents, and we’ll go.”
“They are coming with us,” he said. “I will get water bottles and snacks. You find the sunblock and hats.”
“But Tom—”
He didn’t give Diana the courtesy of listening to the rest of her sentence.
Instead, he stalked out of the room and into the hallway, where he greeted her father with artificial cheerfulness and made small talk about the weather.
She waited for him to come back and finish their conversation, but he never did.
Diana’s assessment of the kids’ perseverance was, in the end, accurate.
The hike included bouldering up a steep incline, crossing a rickety bridge, and passing through a swarm of gnats that flew into their noses and ears.
Phoebe, usually the most optimistic of children, fell apart after the bugs, refusing to walk a step farther until Tom put her on his shoulders.
Duncan trailed behind, dragging his feet, his shirt drenched in sweat.
Diana kept her emotions in check for the kids’ sake, smothering her anger like she would extinguish the last flames of a campfire, ensuring nothing remained, not even one small cinder.
She fed Duncan gummy fruit snacks and promised him a new Lego set if he’d take a few more steps.
They finished the hike, but it took twice as long as Tom expected, and Duncan threw up in the parking lot when they finally made it to the car.
The photo had been taken during one of their many pauses to let the kids rest. A young couple passing by, looking like an ad for an outdoor living magazine, not a bead of sweat anywhere, offered to snap a photo for them to “remember this awesome day.” Diana forced a smile and thanked them for their thoughtfulness while avoiding eye contact with Tom.
That evening, while the kids slept in front of a window fan and Diana drank half a bottle of rosé on the dock, her feet submerged in the brisk, mountain-fed water, Tom made excuses.
He did not apologize or acknowledge her feelings, assuming, perhaps, they’d subsided like they had after every other disagreement.
Instead, he talked about a trial that had ended badly, with a judgment against his clients, a retired couple facing foreclosure.
When he said they were going to lose their house, she thought he was going to cry, and she forgave his rigidity and remoteness, wrapping her arms around him.
She let herself forget the kids’ discomfort, her anger, and his unwillingness to listen to her, and instead embraced a positive memory of that hike, one that was good enough for her to select a photo from that day as her screen saver.
Lakshmi sits back down at the table and opens the wine bottle. “Where shall we start? Have you tried googling Tom?”
Diana clears her throat. “Yes, and it wasn’t helpful. I couldn’t find a way to begin an organized search. I thought you could help me do this with some amount of logic.”
“Let’s focus on what he’s saying. What’s a fact, not an emotion?” Lakshmi pours the wine and hands a glass to Diana. “Where did he live when he was eighteen?”
“Tom turned eighteen in 1982, the summer he relocated from Vermont to college in North Carolina.”
“Where in Vermont? I never heard him talk about his hometown.”