The Letter I Don't Get

Chapter 11:

Margaret was up before me.

I woke to the sound of the kettle and the smell of the bitter stuff and the grey light coming through the shutters, and she was already at the table with her sleeves rolled and her hands washed, and there was something on the table in front of her.

A folded paper.

I sat up so fast my head swam.

"Is that it."

"Sit down and eat first."

"Is that it."

"Jane."

I got out of bed and crossed the floor in my bare feet and I stood over that table and looked down at the folded paper and my hands were already reaching for it.

Margaret put her hand flat on top of it.

"Sit down," she said. "And eat. And then I'll talk and you'll listen, and when I'm done talking I'll decide whether you get to hold it."

"Decide?"

"Decide." Her eyes came up. "Sit down, Jane."

I sat down.

I ate the bread. I don't remember tasting it. I drank the tea. My eyes never left that folded paper on the table between us and Margaret never moved her hand off it, and when I was done I put my cup down and I put my hands flat on the table and I said, "Talk."

Margaret took her hand off the paper.

She didn't give it to me. She folded her hands instead.

"Your mother wrote to me nineteen years ago," she said. "The letter came by a trader who didn't know what he was carrying. It was three pages and the first page was instructions and the second page was a warning and the third page —" She stopped.

"The third page was what."

"The third page was for you. Not for me. It's sealed and I have not opened it and I will not." She tapped the folded paper with one finger. "This is the first page. The instructions. I've read it enough times to have it by heart and I'm not going to hand it to you until you've heard me say the whole of it out loud, because you're going to want to read it in a corner by yourself and you can't do that with a thing like this."

"Why not."

"Because you'll read it wrong." She said it plainly. "Because you'll read it alone and you'll take it the way a scared girl takes things and you'll be halfway down that road before I catch you. So. Out loud. Now. And then you can have it."

I sat there with my hands flat on the table.

"Go," I said.

Margaret closed her eyes for a second. Then she opened them.

"'Margaret,'" she said. "'If this reaches you then I've done what I said I'd do and I'm still here and I'm still keeping my mouth shut, which is the hardest thing I've ever done, harder than the other thing. She's three years old today. She has my mother's chin and her father's temper and she laughs at everything.'"

My throat closed.

"'She has the gift. I know it the way you know a thing in your bones. She put her hand on a bird with a broken wing last week and it flew off before supper and she wasn't even tired after. Not tired, Margaret. Not a bit. Which means it's stronger in her than it is in me and God help me that's the worst news I've ever had to write down.'"

Margaret's voice was steady. She'd said it to herself a thousand times and she said it now like a woman reading a thing she'd memorized.

"'I'm not going to be able to tell her. Not ever. They've made it clear what happens to a family that talks. So I need you to do the thing I can't. I need you to be out there when it happens, and it will happen — she'll be thrown away for it, Margaret, and not for any reason she earns. They'll look at her and they'll decide she's not worth keeping and they'll do it in front of everybody so nobody can say it was done in a corner.'"

I put my hand over my mouth.

"'Be there,'" Margaret said. "'That's all. Don't come for me. Don't come before. Be there after. Have a bed and a fire and a door that bars. Have bread in the house. Don't ask her what happened until she tells you. And Margaret — she'll be fat, and she'll have been told all her life what that means, so you tell her what her mother said. Tell her her mother looked at her and laughed.'"

Margaret stopped.

The fire cracked.

"That's the first page," she said.

I sat there with my hand over my mouth and the tears running down over my fingers and I couldn't make a sound.

"Jane."

"Don't."

"Jane, look at me."

I looked at her.

"I have read that page every year for nineteen years," Margaret said. "Every year on her birthday I take it out and I read it and I put it back. And do you know what the worst part of it was, all those years? The not-knowing. The sitting out here in the dark with bread in the house and a bed made up and a door that bars, waiting for a girl who might come next week or next year or never."

"Then why didn't you come get me."

"Because she told me not to." Margaret's jaw worked. "Because your mother knew something I didn't and she was right about it and if I'd come for you they'd have known I existed and then there'd have been no door to bar at all."

I sat back in the chair.

My hands were shaking again and the tears were going and I let them, because there was no stopping them, and I sat in that chair in that cottage and cried for my mother, who had sat somewhere nineteen years ago with a pen in her hand and written down that her three-year-old laughed.

"Where's the rest of it," I said finally. My voice was wrecked. "The second page. The warning."

Margaret stood up.

She went to the hearth and she picked up the fire iron and she moved a log and the sparks went up and she put the iron down and she didn't turn around.

"Margaret."

"The warning was for me," she said. "Not for you."

"Margaret."

"The warning was about what would happen if I talked and I'm not going to talk about it." She turned around. "Not today."

I stood up out of the chair.

"Not today?"

"Jane—"

"You've had not today in your mouth for two days and I have been patient — I have been so patient — and you give me my mother's writing and then you stand there and tell me there's a page you won't discuss—"

"Jane, sit down."

"No."

The word came out of me loud and it filled the cottage and I stood there with my chest going and my face wet and my fists at my sides.

Margaret didn't flinch. She stood in front of the hearth with her hands folded and she let it come and she waited.

"There was a wolf at your treeline last night," I said. "There were boots in your frost. My bag came back with every coin in it and my mother's ring in the tin. Something is out there and it knows where I am and it gave my things back — and you're going to stand in front of me and tell me not today?"

"Yes," Margaret said.

"Why?"

"Because if I give you that warning you'll run."

The room went quiet.

"You'll run," Margaret said again, softer. "You'll take that bag and that ring and you'll be out that gate before the sun's over the trees, because you're twenty-two and you're hurt and you've got nothing left to lose and running is the only thing that feels like doing something. And I'll stand in this doorway and watch you go and then I'll go and look for your bones in the spring."

I stood there.

I wanted to say she was wrong. I wanted to say it and mean it and I stood in the middle of her cottage with my fists at my sides and I couldn't.

"Two days," Margaret said. "That's all I'm asking. Two more days. Let me get some food into you and let me look at that cut on your palm and let me tell you what I know in the order it needs to be told. And then you can go and I won't stand in your way and I won't ask you to stay, and I'll give you the bag and the ring and every page your mother ever wrote."

"And if I say no."

"Then you say no." Margaret shrugged, small, tired. "And I'll put the bread in your bag myself."

I sat down.

I sat down and put my face in my hands and she came over and put the folded paper on the table next to my elbow and I put my hand on it and it was warm from her hand and it was the only thing of my mother's I'd touched in four and a half years that wasn't a chair or a coat.

"Two days," I said into my hands.

"Two days."

"Then you tell me everything."

"Everything." Margaret sat down across from me. "Now eat something that isn't bread. I'm going to make you a proper breakfast and you're going to sit there and be grateful and not make that face."

---

I went out an hour later.

She came with me that time. Stood at the gate with her arms crossed while I walked the edge of the yard twice with my boots on and my coat done up, and my knees held, and my hands didn't go numb, and I came back to her and she said "Better" and went inside.

I stopped at the well.

There was a stone rim around it, low, wet, and I sat down on the edge of it and put my hands on my knees and looked out at the gap in the trees.

It was daylight. Full daylight. The frost had gone off the grass and the sun was up behind the trees and everything was plain and ordinary and fine.

I closed my eyes.

Come on, I thought. Come on, come on. Just once. I'll take once.

The room behind my ribs.

Still empty. Still nobody home. The furniture still there and the dust still not settled and the place where the rope had broken was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.

I reached in and I sat down in the empty room and I waited.

Nothing came.

"Please," I said, out loud, sitting on a well in a stranger's yard. "Please. I don't know what I'm supposed to do."

The well didn't answer. Doris scratched around behind me and the sun came up over the trees and the world went on being ordinary and fine, and I sat there with my hands on my knees and my wolf gone and my mother's letter folded in my coat pocket and I didn't know anything at all.

"Jane."

I opened my eyes.

Margaret was at the door with the shutter in her hand and her face had gone wrong, grey and hard, the way it had gone at the treeline.

"Come in the house."

"What is it—"

"Jane. Come in the house."

I got up off the well and I turned around.

There was a rabbit on the doorstep.

Lying on the stone, on its side, clean, no blood on it anywhere. Its throat was open and neat and its eyes were closed and it had been set down there with care. Not dropped. Set down. Positioned, with its head toward the door, so that whoever opened it would find the head first.

Margaret stood in the doorway with her hand on the shutter and her knuckles gone white.

"You didn't hear it," I said.

"No."

"You've been up an hour and you didn't hear a thing."

"No." She looked at me. "It's a gift, Jane. It's not a threat. It's a gift."

I looked down at the rabbit.

"It's a courtship," Margaret said.

Chapter (11) Ends.