What the Letter Couldn't Fix, and What It Could

Josephine read the letter standing up, in the hallway, with her stopwatch still looped around her wrist and a four o'clock appointment fifteen minutes out, because grief, Mara was learning, rarely waits for a convenient room.

When she finished, she didn't cry, and she didn't laugh the sharp laugh Peg had laughed, and she didn't go carefully blank the way Edwin had. She just stood very still for a moment, the letter loose in her hand, looking at something past Mara's shoulder that wasn't in the hallway at all.

"She says she thought if she told me the truth, it would take something away from me," Josephine said finally. "That I'd built a whole self out of surviving a random, blameless accident, and she was afraid that if I knew a person had caused it — a person with a name, a dog, a bad morning — I'd have to grieve something different than what I'd spent thirty years grieving, and she didn't think that was hers to take from me." She folded the letter, the family gesture, Mara thought, the one they all seemed to learn eventually. "She might have been right. I don't know yet. I've built an entire life around 'nobody's fault.' I'm going to have to find out if it still stands on 'somebody's fault, and she was sorry, and she paid for it in more ways than money for thirty-one years.'"

"I'm sorry," Mara said, and meant it more completely than she'd meant almost anything in her adult life. "Not for her. I can't apologize for her, I don't think that's mine to do. I'm sorry this is landing on you eleven days into a week you didn't choose."

"You didn't cause any of this either," Josephine said, and there was something almost gentle in it, an echo of exactly what Carol had once said to her on a hospital floor thirty-one years ago, passed forward now like a relay baton neither of them had known they were running. "Funny. Your mother taught me that line. Seems only fair I get to hand it back to her daughter."

Julian, from the doorway, said nothing at all, which Mara understood, later, as its own kind of gift.

"Can I call you?" Mara asked. "Not to fix anything. I don't think there's fixing left to do. Just—"

"Just to see how the walking's going?" Josephine's mouth curved, not quite a smile, close enough. "Yeah. I'd like that. Tell your mother, wherever she ended up, that it took thirty-one years, but the letter finally arrived exactly when it was supposed to."