The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [85]
Of course I am, it read.
The handwriting was familiar to her, with its walking-stick r and its o’s that didn’t quite close at the top. But it took her a moment to figure out where she recognized it from.
She spent the next few hours twisting her engagement ring around and around her knuckle. A potato chip bag was dipping and spinning in the middle of the road, and she watched it ride the breeze until a boy rode by and flattened it beneath his bicycle.
Finally, on a blank sheet of paper, she wrote, If you are who I believe you are, tell me something only you would know about me.
She was unaccountably nervous. She knelt on the porch, closing her eyes as she slipped the note into the fissure. Something deep within the ground seemed to wrest it from her fingers like a fish plucking a cricket from a hook.
For the rest of the day, every time she went outside, she expected to see a flash of white paper waiting for her in the grass. But it was not until the next morning that she found one: I love your gray coat with the circles like cloud-covered suns.
She stared closely at the breach in her lawn. If she followed it on foot, she calculated, she would eventually reach the scorched field where she had gone to deposit her letters.
On a fresh sheet of paper, she replied, Everyone we know has seen me in that coat. It doesn’t prove a thing.
Early that afternoon, an answer arrived: I love how you laugh with your mouth wide open, and how you snort sometimes, and how embarrassed it makes you when you do.
She wrote, Well, yes, that’s definitely me.
I love the joke you told at Zach and Christina’s wedding reception.
She wrote, If this is a trick … this had better not be a trick. Is it?
I love how easily you cry when you’re happy.
So the correspondence went on, hour after hour and day after day, pushing across the distance of the soil. All his letters were love letters, delivered while she was sleeping or mopping the kitchen, weeding the garden or out buying milk. When she held them up to the sunlight, the faded marks of earlier messages emerged through the stationery: Bailey had two kittens last week, and I named the first one Bowtie, and the second one Mike! I hope you’re better now, I truly do, because I am, I tell you, I am. I think there’s something terribly wrong with me. They came in a variety of hands and were often hard to decipher. She presumed he had salvaged the pages from under the ground, a few dozen among the many hundreds of thousands that had rained down over the generations of the dead.
I love the way you stand at the mirror in the morning picking the lip balm from your lips.
I love the inexplicable accent, from nowhere anyone has ever visited, you use when you’re trying to sound French.
I love that first moment, at night, when you trace the curve of my ear with your fingernail.
Soon the situation no longer seemed strange to her. It was as if the two of them were kneeling on opposite sides of the bedroom door, sliding notes to each other along the floor. Then it was as if the door had vanished, vanished entirely, and they were simply sitting in the bedroom together. When she had crossed the threshold she could not say, only that she had. He was her fiancé—she did not doubt it—but what had brought him back to her?
It was one of those peaceful mid-April evenings with a coral sky the uniform hue of a paint sample, and from the hills of Los Angeles came the shick-shack of insects, and from the highways came the gusting sound of traffic, and because of a broken stoplight at Sunset and Laurel Canyon, she was fifteen minutes late to the bookstore, so one of the cashiers escorted her directly to the reading annex, a dimly lit room lined with shelf after shelf of remainders, where twenty or thirty people sat in poses of quiet thought or conversation, their shoulders touching as they swiveled around in their chairs, and he was not there, or at least she did not see him, and Once there was a country where