Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [31]
I couldn’t stand thinking like that. I had to find her and figure out the real story. That was the simplest route to answering the nagging questions in my head. And it was time, after all, just as I’d told Della. So I kept reading. Five years after that first letter from Crestwood Home, Caroline wrote Della that she had left Connecticut and moved to Portland.
I’m crazy about this city. I have no money, but I don’t care. I’m going to school at some crappy community college to get an accounting degree. On the weekends, I head to Mount Hood or Tillamook where I can hike or swim or just sit outside by myself. I finally feel like I’ve gotten past my problems. I feel like I can move on with my life.
A year later, Caroline wrote that she had gotten a job at an accounting firm. They’re paying for part of my school, can you believe it? And they’ll hire me full-time when I graduate!
In November, a few years after that, she wrote that she was still at the accounting firm, that she liked it very much, and best of all she’d met someone special.
His name is Matt Ramsey, and Della, you would adore him as much as I do. He’s the kindest, most gentle soul you’ve ever met, and you know what? He loves me, too. He loves me like crazy. Sometimes I can’t believe it, and sometimes I think it will all fall apart the way everything else did, but I’ve learned how to get myself past those thoughts, and so most of the time I’m just content. That’s a word I’d never think to apply to myself. But there it is.
The next letter on the stack wasn’t actually a letter, but a wedding announcement that appeared to have been printed on a home computer.
Caroline and Matt Ramsey are pleased to announce that they made it official on August 12.
Below that, a new address was listed, and Caroline had handwritten:
Dear Della,
Sorry I didn’t tell you about this ahead of time, but it was just us and a few friends on the mountain. I’m sending you a picture.
Miss you, Caroline.
No mention of any parents, I noticed. I wondered if my father had received one of these, if he had studied it, silently, while I was in the other room.
I flipped the announcement over. Fixed to the back with a pink paper clip was a photo. I unclipped it and raised it to my face, and there was Caroline, a little older but not much different than I’d remembered. She was standing, holding a bouquet of wildflowers, wearing a loose ivory cotton dress. The hair around her face was streaked blond from the sun, the same way mine got in the summer. She was tilting her head to one side, and the man behind her, who must have been Matt Ramsey, had leaned in and put his face next to hers. They were both smiling broadly, with smiles in their eyes, as well. Matt had longish, thick brown hair and brown eyes under bronze wire glasses. One of his hands was squeezing Caroline’s bare arm, his new gold wedding band glinting in the sun.
Matt looked kind, I thought, and very much in love with my sister. I felt a rush of happiness for both of them, for the sister who had gone off to boarding school alone and then on to some clinic. I continued looking at the picture, at Caroline in particular, silently asking, “Do you know what happened? Did you have anything to do with it?” But now, faced with the picture of Caroline’s adult face, rather than the vague image of her teenage self, I found it harder to place on Caroline the suspicion I’d been so quick to adopt.
I read the last of Caroline’s letters. There were only a few more, and they were usually brief, telling Della about her job at the accounting firm or how she and Matt had gone rafting or skiing or camping over the weekend. The return addresses on the last letters were all the same, on Northeast Jarrett in Portland.
Caroline could be at her home in Portland right now. The last letter had been written over a year and a half ago, but she could easily still live there. She might be sitting in the sun,