The Correspondent: A Novel by Virginia Evans - 57

Mr. Theodore N. Lübeck

11 Farney Road

Arnold, Maryland 21012

USA

May 11, 2019

Oh, Theodore. How can I describe it? I will do my very best, though the gluttonous eyes have nearly quit. They’ve seen a golden glimpse of heaven on earth, and now they demand rest (this is my first clear seeing day in a week, so I’m taking the opportunity to write). How to put words to my pleasure? What little my eyes have seen? I am home. The landscape soars, immense and distant and gentle, and the sky is crisp and alive, clear, moving, and textured, the air a raw quality I never knew existed. All the green, the stone, the water. My sister is wonderful, clever, and quiet. You know who she most reminds me of? Harry. Hattie and my three half brothers, well, it seems as if I’ve had all four of them all along.

I don’t know how it is that I’ve waited until the age I am to begin traveling, and now being nearly blind, but then that’s not true. Of course I know, and I want to tell you. I want to tell you something I have never told anyone. I should have. You’ll see I should have once you’ve read what I have to say. Bear with me; my penmanship has gone to shit shit shit.

Gilbert did not die from drowning, as I told you, but now I want to tell you exactly what happened. I have never told this to anyone. I probably couldn’t tell it, but I am going to try to write it. We took the children to a lake on the border of Canada for vacation. Bruce was ten, Gilbert eight, and Fiona four. We stayed in a lovely little lodge right on the water, two connected bedrooms, the children in the one room with two single beds, with Fiona always tucked in against Gilly, and Daan and me in the other room with a nice big four-poster bed and we had a view of the lake and a fireplace in the room. Rosalie and Lars came along, too, and Rosalie was hugely pregnant with Paul. We were served all the meals as part of the stay. It was July, so we’d escaped the wretched heat and gone on up to Canada by train. Can you remember how lovely it used to be, traveling by train? We were there by a small lake—Lake Saint-Pierre, in the French part, but Daan could translate for us. It was Fiona I’d always worried over (my baby, only girl), and the boys were always so capable it was like when I had Fi, in my mind the boys had grown up. And anyway, what happened is that Daan was playing chess with Bruce at the house and Fiona was napping. Lars and Rosalie had taken a canoe to a small island, so it was only Gilly and me down at the lakeside. I had been distracted all week. Daan and I had been arguing in the weeks leading up to the trip, an issue of our competing careers and whose would take precedence. I’d brought some legal documents along and that had bothered him because it was supposed to be family time and there I was with my briefcase, so I was sneaking work in whenever he wasn’t around. I’d brought a file down with me to the little fishing dock there and Gilly had been sitting fishing for some time while I looked through the file, but he wanted to swim. He’d been patient. He was always very kind to me, Gilbert was. Quick to forgive, not demanding. That boy was so kind to me. Anyway—where was I, yes, he had waited patiently, but he started to beg and whine. He was a moving, athletic, energetic child, not suited for sitting still at all. I was absorbed utterly, making notes on the case, ignoring him. It was a case about a robbery, I recall. He asked me again and again, would I please swim with him, but I was irritated, being distracted, and indignant that I should have a moment for myself. I told him shortly that I would not, that I had to read the file, or whatever I said. I’m sure I raised my voice. It makes me sick to think about it now, Theodore. Finally he asked me, if I wouldn’t swim, then would I watch his dive and give him a score, and I waved him off, told him yes, to go ahead, I was working, but I would score his dive. There around the fishing dock the lake had been cleared of underwater stones and things, and it was deep, but they’d told us clearly that there were low, hidden stones and shelves all around the waterline, never to dive or jump from a place other than the fishing dock, and we’d told the children that, too, but Gilbert was fearless, reckless, and maybe he was punishing me for ignoring him, but I didn’t see Gilbert step off the dock and onto the shore. I didn’t see that he had climbed up onto a smooth boulder about fifteen feet away and that he was standing there so high. I heard him call out to me, thinking he was there at the end of the dock, or not really thinking of him at all, Theodore, I was irritated with him, and he said, WATCH. Watch me. Watch my dive, Mom. I wish I could remember, but here is where things go murky. I lose the trail in my memory, but one thing is clear, Theodore. Without looking up, I said, JUST GO, COLT. JUMP! It was the nickname I used for him. We were obsessed with the horse races, had loved to watch the horse races together. Secretariat had won the Triple Crown just the month earlier, and it was how I called Gilbert, my child, swift as a colt.

Sometimes I imagine it, his body folded against the summer sky, then stretching out, then down into the lake. Hands arms head body legs pointed feet toes toenails. I didn’t see it, but I imagine it. There was a shelf there where he dove in. His neck broke and he didn’t come up, Theodore. It took me a few seconds to register the lack of him. That’s how Gilbert died, and I’m sorry. I am so very, very sorry. I’m going to put the pen down for a bit.

I never told Daan. I tried many times, I wanted to, but now he’s dead. I’m sure it’s why our marriage ended. I have wondered if Rosalie knows. Maybe not the details, but my part in it. I’ve always felt she knows.

That was the end of many, many things, one of which was any desire I had to go anywhere. No more travel. Look at what Sybil on travel had turned out—a dead child. My second son, gone like that. You can imagine the aftermath: grief and guilt on repeat for forty years. I guess in one way I am a writer. I am a correspondent. It’s been terribly difficult writing this, yes, because of my eyes, but also because it’s a hideous story that would be better by far if it could simply be untrue, but here we are and I wanted to write it once before I can’t write it anymore. I spent my life afraid, but now I am trying—trying not to be. After all, what is there to fear in the end, really? Loss? I’ve lost the most. Death? I’ll welcome it. I am trying to drive the haunts out of myself and to the page. This is my last one.

I told my daughter recently that my grief has been an unbearable noise in my head for decades, and yet now, finally, I have written this letter to you and I’m surprised to find it is finally quiet.

There is a quote from one of my friend Joan Didion’s essays. It’s from the last essay in The White Album . The quote is: “What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace,” and then it goes on, and then, “Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time.” This feels like the truest thing I have ever read.

I guess there’s no bottom to a person, but I feel you have left fewer stones unturned than anyone else who’s ever passed through, and it’s taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that, Theodore.

Hattie says I can stay here as long as I like. She lives in a lovely, flat house on a small loch, plenty of rooms. I wonder, is it mad for me to ask, would you like to come over to Scotland for a few weeks? You really can’t imagine the cows here, like Chewbacca from the Star Wars films Harry had us watch. You have to see it to believe it. Furthermore, I wonder, when I get back, if you might want to just go ahead and move into the house with me. Why not? I need a companion, with my eyes. I know it’s rather forward of me, but you said yourself that your house doesn’t mean anything immense to you, and it’s mine after all with the good view through the trees of the cove. Consider it. I’m being absolutely serious. Bruce even said we could spruce up your house and keep it for a rental property. Wouldn’t that be smart of us? And with the money we make on the house we can travel—

It would be lovely if you were here. Of course you know I’m yours, have been for quite some time, with affection,

Sybil