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Suddenly I understood. “You brought these?”
Oscar nodded.
“They made us promise we’d come, even if they couldn’t.”
Something in the way he said it made my stomach drop.
“Couldn’t?”
His expression changed.
Tommy had died eight months earlier.
Cancer.
He’d known he probably wouldn’t make it to the lake, so he’d prepared his box.
Ray had already been gone.
I looked at Luis.
I couldn’t ask, and he seemed to understand that.
“My father’s alive.”
The breath left me.
“Nick?”
“He’s alive. He’s ill, though. Traveling this far wasn’t possible.”
I looked down at the photograph of the pocketknife.
“Does he know I’m here?”
Luis smiled.
“He’s been asking me every hour.”
Something inside me finally broke apart right then.
I had spent decades training myself not to miss three people because I believed they had stopped missing me.
“Did they ever talk about me?” I asked.
Anna looked almost surprised. “Mr. Harold, I’ve known your name since I was a child.”
Oscar nodded. “Same.”
Luis smiled.
“Dad used to tell us about the lake. He said you were the only person who could beat him swimming.”
“He cheated.”
“I’ve heard that too.”
I laughed, then started crying. And nobody tried to stop me.
Eventually, Anna sat beside me.
“There is something else,” she said.
She pointed toward the letters.
“Dad never understood why you didn’t receive them.”
Neither did I.
***
But on the drive home, one question wouldn’t leave me alone.
What had happened to all those letters?
I barely slept.
Early the next morning, I went into my basement.
After my father died, I’d packed what remained of his office into boxes. Most hadn’t been opened in decades.
I found his old desk at the back.
The bottom drawer was locked.
I almost ignored it.
Then I remembered something.
My father kept a tiny brass key inside an old tobacco tin.
The tin was still in one of the boxes.
The key fit.
Inside the drawer were tax records, receipts and photographs.
And underneath them was a stack of envelopes.
The first had my name on it.
So did the second, and the third.
Some had Australian stamps.
Some German.
Some Portuguese.
I sat on the basement floor.
Twenty-three letters.
Most were unopened letters my friends had sent me.
But near the bottom were three envelopes I recognized immediately.
My handwriting.
My stamps.
The letters I’d given my father to mail.
He hadn’t only stopped their words from reaching me.
He’d stopped mine from reaching them.
I opened the oldest. Near the bottom, 18-year-old me had written, “Don’t forget about me over there.”
Suddenly, I was 18 again, standing beside our mailbox while he told me those boys had their own lives.
My father hadn’t merely watched me wait. He’d known.
Beneath the letters was an envelope with my name on it, written in my father’s hand.
It wasn’t sealed.
Inside was a letter he’d apparently started years later and never found the courage to give me.
*You were going to leave. First Australia, then wherever the others went.*
*The store needed you.*
*Your mother needed you. I told myself that one day you’d understand why I kept those letters.*
I read it until the words blurred.
My father had been terrified I’d leave.
Instead of telling me, he’d made the decision for me.