His Favorites by Kate Walbert

Author:Kate Walbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

TWO

* * *

I don’t know how others reconcile what happened before with what happens now. For me, the past is a cool, dark pond in which I will always stand partially submerged. That’s just the way it is.

How Master’s letters got by Michelle, or house security—whether he charmed one of the other students into slipping the thin blue envelopes under my door—I cannot tell you. He may have claimed he needed to alert me to some detail about class or a group dinner out—this before cellphones, email, texts—so that the messenger understood the urgency, or maybe she was just excited to be in on the subterfuge: Master’s letters a known secret among certain girls.

I found the letters often, folded airmail envelopes, surplus stationery from Master’s Madrid days; he’d had a Fulbright. Sometimes on my pillow or underneath the door, once even tucked in a returned assignment. Charlotte P. may have noticed the blue corner visible in the folded essay Master slid across the seminar table to me. She looked away.

Certain girls knew about Master’s letters. Girls who knew about other things: how to get into bars in Boston or clubs in New York City on the weekends; how to fool adults; how to negotiate entire summer months on their own in their parents’ city apartments. They had internships for fashion magazines or museums or publishers or weren’t working at all, just reading thick books and having sex with the boys returned from their boarding schools, or those boys’ older brothers, or uncles, or even, and this is true, fathers. I guess killing Stephanie defined me as one of those girls, her death like a heavy cloak, woolen and wet, its stench making me an easy mark—like Dora Maar alone at her table in that restaurant, slicing her own skin, watching the blood rise and bead.

I slit the first envelope open with a sharp knife, borrowed from Michelle’s kitchen, slowly unfolding the page, its lines and lines of sentences so foreign and exotic on that thin paper they might have been written in a different language. The only other letters I receive are goofy cards from my mother, or an occasional note from my father written on hotel stationery. Stephanie had sent me postcards the one summer she went to sleepaway camp in the Smoky Mountains, my name and address decorated with smiley faces and daisies, the news from camp, as she put it, mostly her love of archery and the free candy at canteen.

Master’s letters were from a different continent, the words cramped into a tight, barely legible scrawl. I imagined them composed on a tiny desk, in candlelight, in a whisper.

Dear Jo(e), he wrote. I hope I didn’t scare you last week. Please do not say a word about our talk. I felt you could understand my cousin’s true absence, how much I miss him. I felt you could understand this in a way no one else can, given everything you have been through. I hope you will forgive me anyway.

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