Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,25

bleeding all over your new Christmas coat than you were about the cut. How old were you then? Five? Six? Not that long ago, really.

I stopped off at the Banards’ next door to let them know what’s happened. They haven’t seen anything, of course, but they promised to keep an eye out. And just now, after I got in, your father went out with the car again, “Just to have a look.” We agreed that one of us should stay at home in case you call. I’ve got the TV back on, listening to the early evening news.

We’re grabbing at straws here, Elizabeth. Your dad driving around in the Buick, me writing this interminably long letter. But what else can we do? There’s nothing we can do. I keep going back to a line from that poem by your namesake, about “my old griefs” and “my childhood’s faith.” Waiting for you, writing this letter, I feel like I’m teetering between those two sentiments, a pessimism born of experience and a desperate hope born of helplessness. In dredging up all these old griefs from my past, I cling to the thought that this act itself will somehow create a better future for both of us, that with these words I’ll weave a charm that will spell our reconciliation and draw you home.

For times of doubt and trouble, the nuns at Sacred Heart prescribed prayer. We even had special rosary services before important exam dates. God, we were told, would always hear and answer our prayers, no matter how big or small they were. There was a caveat, however, a kind of special exemption that the nuns told us about, one that always infuriated me, and that never failed to put my childhood’s faith to the test. And this was that, yes, God would always answer our prayers, but maybe not in the ways we expected or even wanted.

Well. I want to finish this letter before you get home. And then we’ll have dinner and cake, and things will begin to get better for us, you’ll see. I promise.

Tim couldn’t believe the Christmas dinner he was treated to when he arrived in Vietnam. He was stationed at a scrubby base camp up in the hills in the middle of nowhere, and yet on Christmas day a giant double-rotor Chinook helicopter magically descended from the clouds to deliver full turkey dinners to all 120 boys at the camp. They had corn bread dressing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, shrimp cocktail … “Shrimp cocktails! Where the heck did they get shrimp cocktails?” Tim wrote.

And just as the recruitment sergeant had promised, there was Budweiser beer, all you could drink. Hell, they even had a bar right there on base, with Vietnamese girls in shiny long dresses and pigtails serving martinis. Scruffiest bunch of soldiers you could ever imagine, and their hooches nothing but falling-down shacks propped up with sandbags, but he wasn’t complaining, not yet. More than anything he was looking forward to getting out and seeing some of the countryside. As radio intelligence, his missions were strictly top secret, so he wasn’t allowed to say when and where he was going exactly, but he’d write me as often as he could. And where were the letters I promised him, by the way? I had his address now so there wasn’t any excuse.

“I keep thinking back on that night,” he wrote. “Hard to believe it was only a year ago. Already seems like ten. But when I close my eyes I can remember like it was yesterday. I see your white skin on the rug, and the firelight glow on your hair, and that soft look in your eye when you told me you love me. I swear, it’s the one thing that keeps me going. I’m sure glad I got you back home waiting for me. You’ll always be the number one girl for me, Laura Jenkins. Now write!”

That spring at Sacred Heart, meanwhile, I was finally beginning to feel myself more a part of the school. To be sure, I still had little in common with the well-bred Catholic girls who were my classmates. But over time people can adapt to almost anything, I suppose. Even prisoners begin to feel at home.

My fitting in had to do mainly with my work on The Beacon. I’d begun a series of profiles on SHA personalities called “Spotlight On … !” Kim gave me half the third page to write about whomever I wanted, and for