VERA LIVED ON EIGHTY-FIRST Street, between Amsterdam and Broadway, in a four-story walk-up the color of cream stone. According to the address on her letter, she lived on the third floor in 3A. Fiona and Drew stood on the sidewalk behind me for support, though Drew still believed I should just mail the letter back instead.
“What if she doesn’t want to see you?” she asked.
“I’d rather find out in person if someone I’ve written letters to over the last thirty years died,” Fiona argued, and her wife sighed and shook her head.
I understood where Drew was coming from—perhaps it would have been easier to just send back the letter. My aunt and Vera’s relationship wasn’t my business, but because I knew the story, I felt . . . obligated, I guess. To finish it.
I had heard so much about Vera, she almost felt like a fairy tale to me—someone I never thought I’d meet. My hands were clammy, and my heart raced in my chest. Because I was about to meet her, wasn’t I? I was about to meet the last piece of my aunt’s puzzle.
I took a deep breath and scanned the buzzer box. The names were smudged—almost illegible. I squinted to try to make out the numbers at least, and pressed the buzzer for 3A.
After a moment, a quiet voice answered, “Hello?”
“Hi—I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Clementine West and I have the letter you sent my aunt.” Then, a bit quieter: “Analea Collins.”
There wasn’t a response for a good long moment, so long I thought that maybe I wasn’t going to get a response, but then she said, “Come on up, Clementine.”
The door buzzed to unlock, and I told my friends I’d be back in a minute.
Then I took a deep breath, and steeled my courage, and stepped into the building.
Pursuing Vera felt like opening a wound I had sutured together six months ago, but I had to. I knew I did. If she and my aunt had kept in touch over the years, then why hadn’t Analea ever mentioned it? If they had stayed friends, why didn’t it work out? I thought Analea had cut ties with Vera, like she had with everything she loved and refused to ruin, but apparently there were more secrets to my aunt than I had originally thought. Things she kept hidden. Things she never let anyone see.
I used to want to be exactly like my aunt. I thought she was brave and daring, and I wanted to build myself like she’d built herself. My aunt gave me permission to be wild and unfettered, and I wanted that more than anything else, but ever since she passed I’d recoiled from that. I didn’t want to be anything like her, because I was heartbroken.
I was still heartbroken.
And now I had to tell someone else, someone who also loved Analea enough to write her letters thirty years after their time ended, exactly what I never wanted to hear again.
I stopped at apartment 3A and knocked on the door. My aunt had told me about Vera, about what she looked like, but when she opened the door I was immediately struck by how much she reminded me of my aunt. She was tall and thin, in a burnt-orange blouse and comfortable slacks. Her grayish-blond hair was cut very short, her face angular for a woman in her late sixties.
“Clementine,” she greeted, and suddenly pulled me into a tight hug. Her arms were thin, so it surprised me how strong she was. “I’ve heard so much about you!”
Tears prickled in my eyes, because she confirmed what I had wondered—whether this letter had been a fluke, or if it was another line of conversation in a long history of correspondences back and forth over years and years. And it was the latter.
Analea had kept in touch with Vera, and they had talked about me.
She smelled like oranges and fresh laundry, and I hugged her back.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, too,” I murmured into her blouse.
After a moment, she let go and planted her hands on my shoulders, getting a good look at me from beneath her half-moon glasses. “You look just like her! Almost a spitting image.”
I gave the smallest smile. Was that a compliment? “Thank you.”
She stepped back to welcome me into her apartment. “Come in, come in. I was just about to make some coffee. Are you a coffee drinker? You have to be. My son makes the best coffee . . .”
What my aunt had failed to mention, however, was that Vera had a very slight Southern accent, and her apartment was filled with pictures of a small Southern town. I didn’t look at them too thoroughly as I came into the living room and sat down, and she fixed us two cups of coffee and sat beside me. I was a little numb, everything a blur. After so many years of hearing stories about this woman named Vera, here she was in the flesh.
This was the woman Analea had loved so much she let her go.
“I was wondering when I’d be able to meet you,” Vera said as she sat down beside me. “It’s a surprise, though. Is everything all right?”
In reply, I reached into my purse and pulled out the letter she’d sent my aunt. It was a bit crinkled from battling with my wallet, but I smoothed it down and handed it back. “I’m sorry,” I began, because I wasn’t sure what else to say.
She frowned as she took the unopened letter. “Oh,” she whispered, realization dawning, “is she . . .”
There were things that were hard to do—complicated division without a calculator, a hundred-mile marathon, catching a connecting flight at LAX in twenty minutes—but this was by far the hardest. Finding the words, mustering them up, teaching my mouth how to say them—teaching my heart how to understand them . . .
I would never wish this on anyone.
“She passed away,” I forced out, unable to look at her, trying to keep myself tied tightly in a bow. Together. “About six months ago.”
Her breath hitched. Her grip on the letter tightened. “I didn’t know,” she said quietly. She looked down at the letter. Then up at me again. “Oh, Clementine.” She reached for my hand and squeezed it tightly. “You see, I recently moved back to the city. My son has a job here, and I wanted to be near him,” she rambled, because it felt better than lingering on those words—she passed away. She swallowed her sadness and said, after a moment, as she gathered herself back together, “May I ask what happened?”
No, I wanted to reply, but not because I was ashamed. I wasn’t sure if I could talk about it without crying.
It was why I didn’t talk about it at all—with anyone.
“She . . . she hadn’t been sleeping well, so her doctor prescribed her some medicine a while ago. And she just . . .” For all the times I’d rehearsed this, they all failed me now. I didn’t know how to explain it. I was doing a bad job. “The neighbors called for a wellness check on New Year’s Day when she wouldn’t answer the door, but it was too late.” I pursed my lips, screwing them tightly closed as I felt a sob bubble up from my chest. “She just went to sleep. She took enough that she knew she wouldn’t wake up. They found her in her favorite chair.”
“The blue one. Oh,” Vera’s voice cracked. She dropped the letter and pressed her hands against her mouth. “Oh, Annie.”
Because what else could you say?
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, pressing my nails into my hands, focusing on the sharp pain. “There’s no easy way to talk about it. I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, honey, it isn’t you. You did nothing wrong,” she said—
But I did, didn’t I? I should have seen the signs. I should have saved her. I should have—
And then this woman whom I didn’t know wrapped her arms around me and pressed me tightly into her burnt-orange blouse, and it felt like permission. The kind I hadn’t let myself have for six months. The kind of permission that I’d been waiting for, as I sat alone in my aunt’s apartment, and grief welled up so high it felt suffocating. The permission I thought I’d given myself, but it hadn’t been permission to cry—it had been a command to be strong. To be okay. I told myself, over and over, I had to be okay.
And finally—finally—someone gave me permission to come undone.
“It’s not your fault,” she said into my hair as a sob escaped my mouth.
“She left,” I whispered, my voice tight and high. “She left.”
And she broke my heart.
This woman who I didn’t know, who I’d only ever imagined in my aunt’s stories, held me tightly as I cried, and she cried with me. I cried because she left me—she just left, even as I chased her, her coattails fluttering, just out of reach. She left and I was still here and there were so many things she hadn’t done yet, or wouldn’t ever do in the future. There were sunrises she’d never see and Christmases in Rockefeller Plaza she’d never complain about and layovers she’d never catch and wine she’d never drink with me again at that yellow table of hers as we ate fettuccine that was never the same twice.
I’d never see her again.
She was never coming back.
As I sat there crying into Vera’s shoulder, it felt like a wall had suddenly come down, all of my pent-up grief and sadness washing away like a broken dam. After a while, we finally pried ourselves apart, and she got a box of tissues and dabbed her eyes.
“What happened to the apartment?” she asked.
“She gave it to me in her will,” I replied, then grabbed a few tissues and cleaned my face. It felt raw and puffy.
She nodded, looking a little relieved. “Oh, good. You know it was mine before she bought it? Well, not mine—I only rented it from this stodgy old man who overcharged for it. He passed away, so I had to move out, and his family sold it to your aunt. I don’t think they ever knew what it did.”
That surprised me. “They didn’t?”
“No, they never lived there, but the renters knew. The man I took the lease over from warned me. He’d figured out the hard way. He thought someone else had a key to the apartment and was coming in and rearranging his things! It was only after he got her name that he realized the woman who kept breaking in had passed almost five years prior.” She shook her head, but she was grinning at the memory. “I almost didn’t believe him until it happened to me, and I met your aunt!”
She didn’t seem much like the Vera in my aunt’s stories. This Vera was more put-together, wearing a string of pearls, looking as pristine as her simply decorated apartment. And if little things were different, maybe some of my aunt’s story was, too. “Why didn’t things work out?” I asked, and she gave a one-shouldered shrug.
“I can’t tell you. I think she was always a little afraid of a good thing coming to an end, and oh, we were a good thing,” she said with a secret smile, her thumbs rubbing against the wax seal on the back of her letter. “I never loved anyone quite like I loved Annie. We kept in touch through letters, sometimes every other month, sometimes every other year, and we talked about our lives. I’m not sure she ever regretted letting me go, but I wish I would’ve fought a little more for us.”
“I know she thought about it,” I replied, remembering the night my aunt told me the whole story, the way she’d cried at the kitchen table. “She always wished it had ended differently, but I think she was afraid because . . . the apartment, you know. How you two met.”
Her mouth screwed into a coy smile. “She was so afraid of change. She was afraid we would grow apart. She didn’t want to ruin it, so she did what she did best—she preserved it for herself. Those feelings, that moment. I was so mad at her,” she admitted, “for years. For years I was angry. And then I stopped being so angry. That was just who she was, and it was a part of her I loved with the rest of her. It was how she knew how to live, and it wasn’t all bad. It was good, too. The memories are good.”
I hesitated, because how could they be good when she left us? When the last taste in our mouths was lemon drops? “Even after . . .”
Vera took my hand and squeezed it tightly. “The memories are good,” she repeated.
I bit my bottom lip so it wouldn’t wobble, and nodded, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. The coffee she’d brought was cold by now, and neither of us had touched it.
My phone buzzed, and I was sure it was Drew and Fiona asking if I was all right. I probably needed to get back to them, so I hugged Vera and thanked her for talking with me about my aunt.
“You can come back anytime you want. I have stories for days,” she said, and escorted me back toward the door. Now that my head wasn’t spinning, I took note of the pictures that lined the hallway.
Vera was in almost all of them, standing beside two children of varying ages—a boy and a girl both with a headful of auburn hair. Sometimes they were toddlers. Sometimes they were teenagers. Fishing at the lake, elementary school graduation, the two kids sitting on a smiling old man’s knees. They both looked very much like Vera, and I realized they must be her children. There was not another person in the photos, only ever the three of them. And I couldn’t stop looking at the boy, with his dimples and pale eyes.
“My youngest called us the Three Musketeers when she was little,” she said when she caught me staring at the collage of pictures, and it felt like I heard her through a tunnel, and she pointed at a photo of a beautiful young woman in a wedding dress beside a smiling dark-haired man. “That’s Lily,” she said, and then motioned to the picture of a face I knew too well.
A young man with a crooked smile and bright pale eyes and curly auburn hair, in a floral chef’s apron as he cooked something over a well-loved stove. He stood beside a shorter old man with his back curled over, wearing a similar chef’s apron that read I AIN’T OLD, I’M WELL-SEASONED, his eyes the same bright pale gray. I stared at the photo in bittersweet awe.
“And this is Iwan,” she went on, “with my late father. Iwan really loved him.”
“Oh.” My voice was tiny.
She smiled. “He’s opening up a restaurant in the city. I’m so proud, but he’s been so stressed lately—I sometimes wonder if he’s doing all this because he loves it, or because of his grandpa.”
I stared at the photo of the man I knew—Iwan with his crooked and infectious smile. It must have been taken just before he moved to NYC. And suddenly, something clicked, looking at that photo. Of all the things that had changed in those seven years, the most prominent was the look in his eyes. There was unabashed joy there.
And I wondered when that left.
“Maybe you’ll meet him someday. He’s very handsome,” Vera added with an eyebrow wiggle.
“He is,” I agreed, and thanked her again for letting me cry on her shoulder, and with one last hug, I left and met my friends out front on the sidewalk, who both declared—rather immediately—that I looked like I needed a drink.
They had no idea.
