MY STEPFATHER BROKE DOWN MY DOOR AT 2 A.M. — UNTIL ONE TAP UNDER MY KITCHEN TABLE TURNED HIS RAGE INTO TERROR

Chapter 11

I called my uncle that evening from the back porch, while Otto slept against my leg and the sky over the neighborhood went from orange to iron.

He answered on the third ring.

“Nora.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“Your mother called this afternoon.”

Of course she had.

“She said only that you might call,” Paul said. “That’s all. Nothing else.”

I appreciated the clarification more than I could say out loud. It had been the pattern of my entire family to hand each other information in half-measures, and Paul, at least, was making an effort to mark the edges.

“I found out about the trust.”

A long pause with weather in it.

“I wondered how long it would take.”

“That’s a strange thing to say.”

“I’ve had nineteen years of wondering,” he said. “Give me that one.”

“I’m four months from thirty.”

“I know exactly how many months. I have the dates.”

I looked at the wooden airplane sitting on the porch rail beside me, which I had carried out there for reasons I could not have explained.

“Dad told you not to tell me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He told me twenty-nine-year-old Nora would be a different person than nineteen-year-old Nora, and that the difference mattered.”

I laughed once. The sound surprised me. “That’s an extremely annoying sentence.”

“That’s your father.” Paul laughed too, and his laugh was the same laugh I remembered from a man in a garage with a knife in his hand, and I had to press my thumb into my palm for a second. “He only talked in parables when he thought he was being wise. He was wrong about half the time. He was right about you.”

“You don’t know me. We’ve met five times.”

“I’ve read every statement for twenty years and I’ve watched your name in a bank record. That’s not knowing you. I’ll grant that.” A chair creaked. “You want to know what was in the letter.”

“The one Gordon took.”

“For Nora, when she chooses her own life.”

“Did you read it?”

“No.”

“You never read it?”

“Never.”

“You’re the trustee. That was the only document that changed the terms.”

“It didn’t change the terms,” Paul said. “That’s why I never opened it. The trust was already written. The letter was — he told me what it was for. He said it was for the day you felt like you’d done something wrong by living your own life.”

The sentence landed in me and stayed there, and I looked out across the dark yards and did not say anything for a while.

“He also said something about a second letter,” Paul said. “And a map.”

I sat forward. “Say that again.”

“When Andrew came to Salem in the spring before he died, he stayed three days in my house. On the last morning he told me he’d written something for Margaret and that the map showed where it was.”

“Dad came to Oregon the year before he died?”

“He did.”

“You never told me.”

“Your mother and I weren’t speaking by then. Everything went through lawyers. I was thirty-one and stupid about it.” He paused. “I’ve spent a lot of years being stupid about it.”

I looked over my shoulder. Through the screen door I could see Diane and Vance at the kitchen table, Diane’s hands wrapped around a mug, Vance listening the way she listened.

“Uncle Paul,” I said. “There are three circles on this map. Norfolk. Chesapeake. Virginia Beach.”

Silence on the line.

“I’ve been looking for that map for nineteen years,” he said.

My pulse changed.

“Why?”

“Because he told me he hid the second letter somewhere on that route and that I shouldn’t look for it, that Margaret had to be the one to open it, and if she died before she did, then it wasn’t anyone’s business.” Paul’s voice had gone careful and slow. “I asked him why hide a letter at all. He said he’d finally figured out how to fix something he should have fixed fifteen years earlier.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“Two weeks before the heart attack.”

I stood up. Otto lifted his head off my foot and looked up at me, waiting to see whether I was going anywhere, and I stayed where I was and looked at the map through the window on the kitchen table.

“So he died before he could deliver it.”

“He died before he could deliver it.”

“And Margaret doesn’t know it exists.”

“As far as I know, no.”

“Then there’s a letter from my father sitting in a house in Chesapeake. And the only person who knows where is dead.”

“Not necessarily,” Paul said.

“What do you mean?”

“He wrote more than one envelope, Nora.”

I went still. “How many?”

“Three that I knew about.”

I counted them out loud, because I needed to hear it said.

“One for me.”

“One for Margaret.”

“And the third?”

Paul did not answer for a long moment, long enough that I looked at the phone screen to check whether the call had dropped.

“Uncle Paul.”

“The third one was for your mother,” he said.

I looked through the screen door at Diane, sitting at a table in a house that was not hers, with her hands around a mug.

“Did she get it?”

“I always assumed she did.”

“What did it say on the front?”

A pause.

“I only saw it once, in his hand, on a desk. Twenty years ago.”

“Try.”

He exhaled.

“For Diane, when Nora is old enough to ask why.”

The sentence went into the dark around me and did not come back.

“Ask why what?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“Nobody in my family knows anything.”

“We know plenty,” Paul said, and for once there was no apology in his voice. “We’re just very good at not saying it. Andrew used to say that — that our family could turn any pain into silence in under a week. He wanted you to inherit something different.”

I turned and looked through the screen door again.

My mother had her head turned toward the yard, watching me through the mesh, and she had the expression of a woman who has known for nineteen years that this phone call was coming, and who had never once figured out how to make it ring.