Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [34]
“Damn,” I heard Ty say from the doorway. “I just remembered I have to call a guest who’s checking in this week. I’ll meet you at the front desk, okay?”
I glanced at him over my shoulder. “No problem.”
I turned around again, and my eyes fell on the pile of Dan’s letters I had arranged after reading them this afternoon. I picked them up and flipped through them once more, turning over the envelopes to look for some writing on the back, some scribble of a phrase that might tell me more than the letters had. There were only four of them, and although Dan chatted about his surroundings and his activities, he didn’t let his emotions seep out the way Caroline had. The letters seemed to have been written out of a sense of duty, as if Dan was writing to a distant grandmother who sent money occasionally.
The oldest letter had been postmarked from East Lansing, Michigan, where Dan was attending Michigan State University. He talked about football games and late nights and the crisp fall campus, but not much else.
The next letter was written a few years later, postmarked from Detroit:
Dear Della,
I graduated a few months ago, and I’ve landed a sales job. I’m sharing an apartment with a few friends from school.
He wrote a few anecdotes about people at work and the slovenliness of his roommates. He closed with,
I don’t like Detroit that much. How’s everything with you?
The letter was devoid of real details. Nothing there that I could follow up on.
The next two letters were similar in their descriptions, as well as their lack of emotional substance. The first was postmarked from Santa Fe, a place I’d never been. Dan reported that his company had transferred him, that he was finding he liked the open brown plains of the Southwest. The last letter was also postmarked from Santa Fe and had been written over six years ago. I figured that Dan would have been thirty-two at that time.
I tried to imagine my brother, who was permanently seventeen in my mind, in his late thirties now. I imagined that his sandy blond hair, which he had worn long during high school, was now clipped short. Maybe he was even balding. Maybe he wore glasses over his light blue eyes. I tried to envision him in a distinguished suit, but I couldn’t seem to get him out of the faded jeans and black T-shirts that had been his teenage uniform. I wondered if he still wrote stories, if he carried around small notebooks that he filled with his stocky scribble. I hoped so because it was something he had in common with my mom.
I could remember Dan, so often in the parlor room that no one else used, sitting at the octagonal table. He would hunch over his notebooks, his hand pushing across the page. I used to try to spy on him. I’d sneak in from the kitchen, crawling stealthily, I always thought, until I reached the far couch or the big leather chair, something I could hide behind. I would peek my head out and watch him, trying to figure him out, this brother who was part man, part boy. But almost immediately, and without looking up from his notebook, Dan would say something like, “Hey, kid. I know you’re there.” Usually, I wouldn’t respond. I would hold my breath, hoping he was just guessing, that he had an inkling but maybe didn’t really know I was in the room. But he always knew. He would tiptoe over to me, and although I couldn’t see him, I could sense the shift in the room, and the anticipation made me shake. Then he would scream to scare me, and I would scream back, and he would tickle my stomach until I begged him to stop.
I knew I should go downstairs to meet Ty, but I kept looking at the envelopes from Dan, turning them over and over. I took out the letters, then returned them to their places, hoping I would see something different, something that might make it simpler to find him.
I had called the Santa Fe directory today, just as I had Portland, and I’d gone through the same process, but there was no Dan