Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,91

email—I was aware that something was missing, that the most important piece of the puzzle had not yet fallen into place.

I began to fear I’d been on the wrong path. That I should have been writing something else altogether.

And so it was that I showed up at your place seven days after our first meeting. Your home was a bungalow in the west end of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, red brick with a wire fence enclosing the small backyard. Inside, the house was organized and clean, sparsely furnished. Cream-coloured carpet covered every square inch of the floor, kitchen included. I thought this was odd. Perhaps you didn’t want your feet ever to get cold.

You had spent the entire intervening week reading and rereading the letters from your parents and Marta. I don’t know how I knew this, since you didn’t mention it and the letters were stacked neatly in the folder, which was itself placed neatly in the centre of the dining room table. But I got a flash, as if in a horror movie, of the table’s gleaming surface scattered with the papers and you, late at night, half mad, with your head in your hands.

You looked at me directly, composed. You were wearing a worn grey sweater with leather patches on the elbows. There was a pot in a tea cozy and a plate of store-bought cookies, the variety pack: rectangular chocolate, round vanilla with cherry jelly in the centre. Despite the table’s being set for tea I saw you were not interested in small talk. “How long have you had these?” you asked, pointing at the folder of letters.

I needed a moment to compose myself. I pulled back a chair and sat down. Then I nodded at the cups and saucers. “Shall we?”

“How long?” you repeated.

“Six months.”

You were still standing, your knuckles gnarled against the handle of your cane. “Then why didn’t you—” But you stopped, remembering that it was you who had stood me up at the deli and not the other way around. “I don’t know what I was expecting,” you said at last. “Something else. Not this.” And you spread your free hand in front of you, as though presenting me with the letters yourself. I recognized the helplessness inherent in the gesture.

“So,” I said, “tell me what you thought.”

I’ve learned to ask open-ended questions, and I thought this would get you started, but you just shook your head and walked over to the kitchen counter. You stood by the window over the sink, looking out at the tiny fenced-in yard. There was one letter you had removed from the file, a letter you had singled out from the others. With your back towards me you picked it up from the counter and began to read. Your voice was steady, with a kind of restraint in it, as if you were a tightrope walker and each word in front of you a step.

You had to focus very hard not to fall off.

“‘Dear Pepik,’” you read. “‘Mamenka and I send you a hug and a snuggle. We look at your photograph every day and pray to God for your safekeeping. But why have you not written, miláčku? We are desperate to hear from you. To hear any news from you at all.’”

It was the letter, of course, that I was intimately familiar with. But hearing it read by the grown child to whom it had been addressed . . . When you finished reading I tried to but could not look you in the face. It was too bare, too personal. I had never in my life felt so close to someone and at the same time so impossibly far away.

I didn’t meet your gaze, afraid of what would be revealed if I looked up.

“I want to thank you, Lisa,” you said finally, in that half-Czech, half-Scottish lilt of yours. “For getting in touch. You have changed—I don’t know how—”

You cleared your throat and looked down at the letter held loosely in your hand, the letter that had arrived so improbably across an ocean of time and grief. The file folder was still in the middle of the table, and you opened it and found the place where the letter belonged chronologically. You put it back in, closed the folder, and patted it just once. A gesture that said There now, that’s finished.

Then you got up and went over to a small desk in the corner of the room. “Now it’s my turn,” you said. “I have something