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“Isn’t it just.” Ellie beamed, and Patrick felt a tug in his chest. He’d seen a similar look in Will’s eyes when he opened his drag closet, had heard that verve in April’s voice while they discussed Kismet lore over Margo’s kitchen table.
The fragile joy of showing somebody else the thing you love the most.
“There’s more,” said Ellie, reaching for the second box of her parents’ personal effects and pulling it into her lap. She placed a hand protectively on its lid.
“This is their story,” she said. “Their whole lives, they didn’t want to share it with anybody outside of the family. But I think it’s time. And I have a feeling that you might be just the person to hear it, Mr. Lake. I’ve always considered myself a little bit psychic, actually. I used to read palms down on the boardwalk. I was rarely wrong about people, and now, with you sitting here in front of me…it feels right.”
With an even more loving touch than before, she lifted the cover off the second box and, one by one, handed Patrick fragments of the past.
It began with a letter, written in a fine, elegant hand, on paper so old and thin it was almost translucent between his fingers.
New York City
1949
Dear Axel,
I am sorry that it has been so long between letters (not that I really expect you to have noticed my silence). A great deal has changed since I last wrote you: Charles and I are married now, can you believe it? It was only a small, private affair, just the two of us at City Hall. The couple from next door were witnesses. There were none of the usual blessings, no breaking of the glass, no hora, although we did have a rather excellent lunch at the Bossert afterward. Mother and Father would have positively detested it, which I am more than willing to admit lent a brighter shine to the occasion.
My only regret is that you were not there to meet Charles, to have a drink with him and discuss whatever dull matters men always seem to bring up over hard liquor. Baseball and automobiles, perhaps? I asked for a glass of scotch at the restaurant and toasted my husband, but really, I was toasting you, the only man I’ve ever known who truly understood me. I sipped the scotch and my throat burned and I told myself it was the alcohol making my eyes water.
I tell myself all kinds of marvelous stories these days, Axel. I even write some of them down; fantastical tales of castles in the stars and men who fly. “Wondrous strange!” as your old pal the Bard would put it.
I showed some of my stories to Charles. Even that felt, for just a moment, like a betrayal—I know you kept asking to someday read my scribbles.
He liked them a lot. So much, in fact, that he took one into his studio—a tiny room in our apartment, little more than a closet really—and came out an hour later having sketched the most tremendous illustrations.
“We make quite a team,?” he said, and he kissed my cheek, and I giggled. Me, Axel! Like I was a schoolgirl. Charles sent the story and his pictures to an editor he knew at a magazine. “Incredible Tales,?” I think it’s called, or “Tales of Wonder.” Maybe something will come of it, perhaps nothing will, but if there is one thing I learned, I daresay we all learned, from that terrible, terrible war, it is that if nothing matters, then surely everything matters. It is our duty, I think, to do for ourselves what those who are no longer here cannot do. To grasp opportunity, to say today that which might be too late to say tomorrow.
There are so many things I never told you, Axel. About me, about who and what I really am. I tell myself I didn’t have the words, but that’s another lie.
The truth of the matter is I was afraid. And now it is far too late to tell you anything, which I suppose is why I am sitting here in my nightgown by candlelight like some gothic heroine, writing a letter to a dead man. In the hope that by putting ink to paper, this simple act of creation will somehow carry a part of me to a place where even the tiniest fragment of you might still reside. That is just one more story, I suspect.
But isn’t it a pretty one?
Your sister,
Iris
“Axel,” Patrick breathed.
“My uncle,” Ellie said. “He died long before I was born. I’m not sure my mom ever got over it. I suppose that’s why he’s everywhere in her work. She gave him a second life, a destiny far greater than the one he was saddled with. Her shining prince from the heavens.”
Patrick handed the letter reverently to Ellie and picked up the next artifact from the box: a photograph of the second young woman from the wall, hands perched on top of a baby bump. “Her name was Eleanor,” said Ellie. “They named me for her.”
A story began to form in Patrick’s mind, each new piece of its puzzle falling into place.
Postcards that Ellie’s father, Charles, had received sporadically throughout the years, bearing stamps from all over the world, unsigned, only ever containing one or two lines, from an anonymous correspondent who appeared to have traveled extensively.
You would love Paris.
I find myself once again walking in the city of the seven hills. I sometimes think I never left.
The moon is so bright here in the desert. I never imagined there could be so many stars.
“I think I’m starting to understand,” said Patrick, passing the final postcard back to Ellie. They both held it between them, and Patrick realized he didn’t want to let it go. Eventually, Ellie released it into his hands.
“Charles and Iris,” he said. “They were both…?”
