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“You’re a lucky little guy, you know that?” I smooth my hand over his fur. “You found a reason to feel, a reason to be content, a way to get rid of all that darkness inside of your soul. Eh?”
It soothes both of us when I talk like this, as though I can extract some of my dog’s newfound optimism and zest for life and take it for myself.
But apart from my affection for Boxcar and my readers – my wonderful loyal readers – there’s still this pit inside of me.
This black hole, gaping, sucking away all the good emotions no matter what I do.
Maybe it’s made me grim, monomaniacal, focused only on my writing and my reading and the necessary public appearances I have to make to keep my career alive.
Maybe it’s made me pessimistic about ever finding somebody who will make the bleakness go away.
I laugh away the grimness in my thoughts, sitting up and focusing on the task in front of me. Two evenings every week, I settle down to make some progress on my latest heap of fan letters.
I don’t have the time to respond to them all, but I always write back if I feel like the reader would appreciate it, or if I can help them with something.
I consider it my duty as a man who’s experienced so much success in his life, not to treat my readers like they’re somehow beneath me or inferior to me.
In keeping with my usual ritual, I close my eyes and dip my hand into the box, letting my fingers curl around an envelope at random.
Taking it out, I study the handwriting.
My chest tightens and a strange feeling courses through me, my heart hammering against my ribcage hard. A warm feeling pricks at the back of my neck and all my muscles tighten, my abs crushing together, my chest bulging as though trying to burst out of my shirt.
What the fuck has come over me?
The address is written in pink pen, with a heart instead of a dot above the i in Mitchell. The letters are broad and cover most of the envelope, as though the writer could barely contain themselves as they wrote it.
An insane, insane, fucking insane urge rise inside of me…
Find the woman who wrote this, find her, and bring her back to my house.
I shake my head forcefully, trying to laugh away the ridiculous notion.
Plus that heart is something somebody still in school does, so there’s no damn way I’m going to be attracted to that. I might write about the darker parts of humanity, but I’d hurt any bastard who ever tried to touch a child.
Hell, I have done that before, a few years back when I was at a bar and I overheard some creepy motherfucker hitting on a sixteen year old girl who told him, over and over, that she was just waiting for her mom to finish cleaning the back office.
She also told him she was underage. But this pervert didn’t give a damn.
I rose from my seat and marched over to him, staring down as flames flickered through me.
In my more hopeful moments, I’ve wondered what it would be like to have a child. Each time I allow this unlikely scenario to come to life in my mind, it’s always followed by this fierce protective urge inside of me, a twisting grinding need to keep them safe.
But it’s unlikely I’ll ever find a woman who prompts that sort of need in me.
Except this handwriting, this letter – its prompted more than I can understand.
That man rose from his seat and swung at me, and I let him hit me, let him land a good one on the side of my face. And then, once I knew I could get away with a self-defense plea, I tooled that bastard up for daring to talk to a child in that way.
Maybe it’s what happened to me, the isolation, the tortured and torturing sea, that makes me more concerned than most with protecting children. Maybe that’s why I donate half my royalties to various charities that benefit children.
I tear the letter open and let my eyes skim over the words, my breath getting louder and louder the more I read. It’s written in a perky tone, but there’s an underlying vulnerability, and I’m relieved to see she mentions her age twice.
Twenty, twenty years old, making her twenty-three years younger than me.
But the age gap seems meaningless as I read and reread her words, stopping to linger on the section about her parents, empathy igniting inside of me and joining these confusing feelings of lust and possession.
I’ve never been so moved by words, so compelled, so spurred to take action.
Not by any book I’ve ever read or written, not at any time in my entire life. It’s like she’s reached inside of me and curled her hands around my heart, Maddison, Maddison Smith…
