But maybe these letters can serve as a sort of stand-in for me, once I’m gone. It could be any day now, I know. I’m certainly not ready to leave you, and I imagine (if I may be so bold) that you’re not ready for me to leave either. So I hope these will ease you into it. You, who I imagine might need a gentle cushion the most. Your mother, your father, Abe: I’m not as worried about them. But I know things come a little harder for you, and that’s one of the reasons I hate to leave you the most—because I would have loved to stay and try to help you a little more. Help you overcome those old anxieties, those old nervous tics (that we both share, by the way).
Here’s how it will work. Open these letters in order. Do not open a letter until the task presented in the previous letter has been administered to absolutecompletion. Do not be overwhelmed by sadness. It won’t do you any good.
Eventually, I think something interesting will come out of all of these.
And by that I mean:
I’ve kept a secret for a very, very long time. And now (in death, as it were) it seems like the perfect time to loosen my grip on it a little bit.
For now: be okay. I imagine you’ve just left Harry’s office, you’re maybe even sitting outside reading this as you make your family wait in the car (in addition to our anxieties, we also share impatience!), but now you can go home, Lottie. Do something nice. Read a book. Tomorrow’s envelope will be a fun one, I promise.
Love, H.
(and p.s. kid, if I had any capacity for thought or emotion from THE GREAT BEYOND, I would miss the shit out of you right now.)
I wasn’t crying as I folded the letter up and replaced it carefully into its envelope, but my eyes were burning and my throat felt tight. Her words, always so three-dimensional, always so close to me, made it feel like she had been standing behind the bench, reading over my shoulder the entire time.
(No, Aunt Helen wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be dead.This was all some kind of weird joke, like the time she’d decorated her house for Christmas on Halloween.)
I walked back to the car, slid into the backseat next to my brother.
“Well?” Dad said immediately, and Mom nudged him in the ribs.
“Nothing to report,” I said quietly, and I watched my parents exchange the subtlest of looks, watched my mom nod pointedly, watched Abe almost imperceptibly sigh. “Maybe later,” I clarified. “I just need a little while.”
“It’s okay, honey. We get it,” Dad said.
It wasn’t okay, not even close. But I knew what he meant.
The house was empty. Margo could sense it immediately, by the way the door seemed to shut just a little bit heavier, by the way their footsteps echoed with a tiny bit more resonance through the foyer as Alvin threw his bag to the ground and called their parents’ names.
“Mom! Dad!”
“They aren’t here,” Margo said, but he didn’t hear her, and he bounded up the stairs as she followed after him, trying to catch her breath, to make him understand. Their parents were gone, and they weren’t safe here.
“Mom! Dad!” Alvin shouted, bursting into their parents’ bedroom, turning on the light.
The bed was mussed, but their parents were not in it.
A lamp lay broken on the ground.
A picture of the four Hatters had been knocked crooked on the wall.
There was a broken window, and the night breeze billowed in, making the curtains move like silent ghosts.
“Alvin,” Margo said again, this time her voice no more than a whisper, “they aren’t here.”
—fromAlvin Hatter and the Overcoat Man
2
Lunch was subdued, sullen, each of us in our own worlds, me refusing to let the letters out of my sight for even a moment, terrified that something completely irrational would happen to them: they would blow away in the wind; they would vanish into thin air; they would spontaneously combust. So I waited in the car while my parents went into the deli to pick up the sandwiches, and then we ate at home, me with the letters stacked neatly next to my plate. I knew my parents and Abe were dying to know what they were, what the first one had said, but I knew if I talked about it I would start crying and probably never stop. Like Alice, crying in our kitchen until I was washed away in a river of my own tears.
After lunch I went up to my room and sat down on my bed, spreading the letters out carefully on my bedspread, getting my copies of the Alvin Hatter books andlaying them out in order. I had read these books so much, loved them ever since I was a little girl, I knew every plot twist and denouement by heart. My copies were torn and creased and dirty; Abe’s were pristine and unopened (he had a second set for reading) and claimed the top shelf of his bookshelf, the one with the glass cabinets.
I’d heard Abe’s friends laughing at him once about keeping children’s books displayed in his room, but then I’d heard him tell them how much each one was worth (first edition, first printing, signed by Helen Reaves, naturally). They’d stopped laughing pretty quickly.
I picked upAlvin Hatter and the Everlife Society, my personal favorite. The moment I started reading, I was no longer in my bedroom, no longer sad, no longer even myself. I was an unseen friend of Alvin and Margo Hatter’s, following along with them as they escaped with the Everlife Society and tried to find out what happened to their missing parents. There was danger in these pages, but there was also a kind of safety, an underlying knowledge that no physical harm could come to our hero and heroine themselves; they’d found the Everlife Formula and drank from it. Alvin and Margo Hatter were immortal.
