The Letters

The Voicemail

Nolan James Webb was found in the crosswalk at Burnside and Twentieth at 11:42 PM on a Sunday in November. Hit-and-run. The driver never stopped. Audrey's last text to him: "Bring back chips if you remember." He didn't bring back chips. She's been paying forty-seven dollars a month for three years to keep his phone number active. Not to call him. To hear his voicemail. Two seconds of his voice: "You've reached the voicemail box of Nolan James Webb." Every night, in the dark, phone on the pillow where his head used to be. Her therapist calls it a transitional object. Her sister Diane calls it unhealthy. On a Thursday in November, the phone rings instead of going to voicemail. And Nolan answers. Groggy. Confused. Like he's waking from deep sleep. He doesn't know where he is. He doesn't know he's dead. His actual phone is in a plastic bag on a shelf in Audrey's closet, battery dead for three years. She's calling his number, not his phone. Something else picked up. They fall back into the old pattern. They'd dated long-distance for two years, Portland and Seattle, seven hundred and thirty nights of phone calls before he moved in. Their whole relationship was built on disembodied voice. Forty nights. His voice fading a little more each call, like a radio station losing signal. By night twelve, he notices something is wrong. He can't remember anything except the dark and waiting for her to call. No days. No life outside the conversations. He asks her on night thirty-two. "What happened to me?" She doesn't tell him. She can't. If he knows, the connection might break. But he's fading. And so is she. Eight pounds lost. Dark circles. Curtains drawn. Phone on the pillow. Diane finds her in bed at two in the afternoon with nothing in the fridge. One of them has to say it. One of them has to hang up.

The Seat

Row G, seat 14. Every Tuesday at seven-thirty for eleven years. She sat in 14, Dana sat in 15. The Rialto Theater on Fourth Street, ninety-six seats, single screen. They never missed a week. Dana has been dead for two years. She still goes every Tuesday. Still sits in 14. Leaves 15 empty. One November Tuesday, a woman is sitting in her seat. Small. White-haired. Green cardigan buttoned to the neck. Reading glasses pushed up on her forehead. Eating peanut M&Ms from a box in packaging that was discontinued in the 1990s. She refuses to move. Her name is Bette Olsen, from Duluth, Minnesota. She was married twice. First to Walter, thirty-two years, the love of her life. Then to Phil, three years, a mistake. Walter died of a heart attack in 1983. In seat 14 of the Rialto. He and Bette had attended every Tuesday for twenty-six years. Bette died of a stroke in her kitchen in 1997. She's been coming back to the Rialto every Tuesday since. Sixteen years alone before the narrator started coming. Thirteen more years of watching from the dark. She took the seat on purpose. "I took your seat so you'd have to sit somewhere new. So the pattern would break." They watch movies together through the winter and into spring. Bette shares her M&Ms. The narrator shares her grief. And Bette grows fainter week by week, the projector light passing through her shoulder, Walter pulling like a tide from wherever he's been waiting since 1983. The last Tuesday is in June. When the credits roll, seat 14 is empty. A box of peanut M&Ms sits on the armrest with one left inside. The narrator sits in seat 14 now. She eats peanut M&Ms at every movie. And when a young woman with red eyes sits down alone in seat 16, she offers her the box.

The Recipe Box

Helen died in her sleep in February. Frank ate frozen dinners for four months. Lost twenty pounds. Their daughter Beth left groceries on the counter and tried not to say anything, and then said everything, and none of it mattered because Frank couldn't boil water and didn't care to learn. In June, looking for a Phillips head screwdriver to fix a loose cabinet hinge, he found the recipe box in the junk drawer. Wooden. Craft-fair quality. Eight inches by five by two, with a brass clasp. Inside: dozens of index cards organized with tab dividers cut from cereal box cardboard, labeled in Helen's blue ink. Pot roast, chicken parm, beef stew, meatloaf, Sunday sauce, shrimp scampi, chicken soup. Every card had notes in the margins. Not general cooking tips. Instructions written directly to Frank, anticipating his specific mistakes. The first attempt was pot roast. He burned it. Set off the smoke detector. The second was chicken soup. Barely edible, but he ate it at the table for the first time since February. The third was beef stew on a rainy day, and the kitchen got warm in a way that had nothing to do with the stove. The fluorescent light stopped buzzing. A trace of vanilla and floral perfume drifted through the room. The stew came out perfect despite everything he did wrong. It happened every time after that. The oven that runs twenty degrees hot corrected itself. Under-salted food arrived seasoned. A wooden spoon migrated back to its old position in the drawer. And a tuneless humming filled the kitchen from everywhere at once. Helen is teaching Frank to feed himself from the other side of wherever she is. The last card is in an envelope at the bottom of the box. Scrambled eggs. The simplest recipe. The note underneath says: "You can do this one yourself, Frank. I know you can. I love you. Now eat a real breakfast."

The Photographer

Nora Voss photographs the bereaved. Eleven years of sitting in living rooms with widows and orphans and parents who've buried children, making portraits of people in the worst season of their lives. Most photographers won't touch the work. Nora can't stop. Because roughly one session in twenty, her camera captures something that wasn't in the room. A hand on a shoulder when the subject was alone. A shadow with no source. Fingers laced through a widow's hands. Forty-three files in a folder on her desktop labeled "errors." She has never told anyone. Graham Tierney calls on a Wednesday in November. His wife Claire died three weeks ago. He wants a portrait in their home, a Victorian on Birch Lane where Claire played Chopin on a piano by the fireplace every evening for thirty-two years while Graham read in the wingback chair beside her. Session one: forty-eight frames. Claire appears in five of them. Standing behind the piano, sharp and clear, hands on the lid, mouth open as if trying to speak. Session two: sixty frames. Claire appears in thirty-one. She's closer. Both hands on Graham's shoulders. Her expression is desperate. Session three: eighty-four frames. Claire appears in seventy-one. She is draped over the chair, arms around him, cheek against his head. Nora reads her lips across thirty consecutive frames. "Help him stop." Graham has been taking sleeping pills. The doctor prescribed them after the funeral. Two bottles of thirty. Seven pills remain. Fifty-three pills in thirty-five days. He's been trying to get close enough to the edge to reach Claire on the other side. Claire isn't trying to pull him through. She's trying to keep him here. Nora has the photographs. She has the pill count. And she has maybe three or four nights before the thing Claire is screaming about becomes the thing no one can fix.

The Matchmaker

Barry died of a brain aneurysm in the garage on a Tuesday afternoon in October. He'd just finished a sixty-two-mile cycling ride, pulled in, and collapsed reaching up to hang his bike on the wall mount. Sara found him four hours later, still in his cycling shoes. She sealed the garage. Parked in the driveway for two years. Through snow, through ice, scraping her windshield at six in the morning rather than open that door. Twenty-three years of marriage. She wasn't ready to open anything. Then the sprinklers went off. A construction site, no rain in weeks, no malfunction on record. The system soaked Sara and a steel fabricator named David Sterling, a blunt widower from Pittsburgh whose wife Jennifer had died in a car accident eight years prior. They ducked into a coffee shop and talked for three hours. Two weeks later, an elevator trapped them together for forty-five minutes. Software glitch. No explanation. David asked Sara to dinner. She said no. That night, the radio in her hallway clicked on by itself and played Sam Cooke's "You Send Me." Their wedding first-dance song. Barry is matchmaking from the other side. And he is terrible at it. A food poisoning incident that hit only David. A car that wouldn't start. A hotel double-booking. A dream where Barry appeared, fading at the edges, and told her: "You're not dying, Sara. But you're not living either. Open the door." The garage door. David, three bourbons deep in a bar, told her the truth nobody else would. "You park in the snow, Sara. You scrape ice off your windshield at six in the morning rather than open a garage door." Sara opened the garage for the first time in two years. She told Barry about David. She felt arms she couldn't see and heard two words in her chest: "Go. Live."