A short story by Aneesha Needamangala
They met on the side of the road, near a dusty parking lot surrounded by a faded gas station and a tilted, dark green sign with large white letters, yellowed with age. Boston. 50 miles. Esther fumbled with a large canvas tote bag, crammed full of old books and magazines from a garage sale she had passed a mile or so back. Her once shiny black boots had gone gray with the grittiness of silt, and she paused to wipe her smudged tortoise-shell glasses. She looked up at the man.
“I’m so sorry, normally you would never find me in a situation like this, I just really need a ride,” she explained.
The man didn’t pause to ask why Esther hadn’t taken her car or why she had insisted on buying every book that had a blue cover at the garage sale. He simply pushed open the door to his car, tossing his brown satchel to the backseat. Something about Esther’s awkward demeanor told him they had something in common. She looked lost, like something had gone wrong. As if she’d lost control. While they drove past open fields of sweet beige grass, Esther noticed that the man’s hair looked mostly silver, yet his eyes appeared youthful, a playful shade of green. They didn’t speak much on the drive that day. The man concentrated on driving and Esther shifted her attention to the pile of books she had collected. She loved the feeling of gently creasing the spine of a book and running her fingers along the crisp pages, filled with words she longed to read. As they made their way into the Boston suburbs, pulling up in front of a small house painted the color of bricks, Esther turned to the man.
“Thank you for the ride…sorry, I don’t think I caught your name,” she said, in a clumsy but earnest tone.
“I’m Neil,” the man said, giving Esther a slight smile as he turned towards her. “And it’s no problem at all,” he continued, “I just hope you’re alright.” His voice sounded deep. It soothed Esther the way a lullaby might. His eyes, while lively, held a complex emotion to them. One Esther couldn’t place her finger on yet resonated with.
She immediately warmed to him, insisting on getting his address to send along a proper thank-you note. At first Neil had resisted. He didn’t consider a thank-you note to be necessary. But something about the way Esther looked up at him with her wide brown eyes and smiled with a small gap between her front teeth made him oblige.
After dropping Esther off, Neil drove home, a couple miles away. More of a house than a home, appealing in size and design, it lacked a sense of comfort. As he entered the house, he could almost hear his footsteps echoing as he tossed his keys on the kitchen counter and sat on the couch, pouring himself a glass of Johnnie Walker. He felt tired, more than anything else. Tired of coming home to an empty house each night, of rolling over in the night to find the other side of the bed cold, with the sheets still pressed. It had been two years since Deirdre passed away, but Neil remembered his loneliness beginning long before that. From Deirdre’s first cancer diagnosis, Neil’s life had turned into overnight stays at the hospital and anxious waiting room sittings. They had initially moved to Boston from Atlanta, so that Deirdre could be closer to her parents, but upon the loss of their daughter, Deirdre’s parents rarely called Neil or extended a dinner invite. While he hadn’t made many new friends in Boston, Neil didn’t care to move back to Atlanta. He wanted to maintain some sense of stability. As he brushed his teeth before bed, Neil recalled the early days of his marriage, filled with excitement and anticipation.
“Those days are long gone,” he thought to himself, before climbing into bed and gently switching off the lamp beside him.
The next morning, Esther promptly sat at her kitchen counter, nibbling at a piece of toast thinly spread with orange marmalade, writing a note to Neil. She may have only spent half an hour with him, yet she longed to speak to him. To hear the calming lull of his voice. The enigma of him intrigued her. She wrote a short note, thanking him again for the ride and asking basic icebreaker questions. Esther mailed it nonetheless and spent the next few days waiting in anticipation for a reply. A week later, a response came. Neil wrote a longer note than Esther did, filling it with a surprising amount of detail. Esther learned that Neil enjoyed spending time at the antique bookstores in Harvard Square and that he enjoyed reading contemporary classics. The works of Donna Tartt, Joan Didion, and Toni Morrison had won permanent placements on his bookshelves. The letter responses continued for several weeks. One afternoon, Esther began to read over Neil’s latest letter, gently cracking open the wax seal clipping the envelope together. As she read, he mentioned something profound. He mentioned Deirdre. Esther was struck. Not with sadness or sympathy, but that he trusted her enough to share his grief. Maybe, Esther thought, she could trust him with hers. The last lines of the letter held especially true for her.
After Deirdre’s passing, things have been difficult. It’s been silent.
Silence was different than quiet. One welcomes quiet in their life as a sign of relaxation, tranquility, and peace. But silence was what death left behind. Silence was a haunting abyss of everything the dead left unsaid.
Unlike Neil’s, Esther’s wound was fresh. It had been less than three months since her fiancé, Graham, had taken his own life in their apartment back in New Haven. Esther could still remember, with a clarity that made her fingers tremble, finding Graham in the bathroom, water overflowing past the door. She could still smell the metallic crust of blood left on the rim of the sink, could see the slumping black bag that carried away the man she was to spend the rest of her life with. Her heart began to thud angrily, as if it was trying to break free of her body. She had never suspected anything, caught on to any hints. She had work and taking care of her parents and upcoming wedding plans, that in all the chaos, Esther’s relationship had dissolved.
It hadn’t been her fault, so everyone told her, but she felt to blame. He hadn’t left a note, any indication that Esther could not have caught on to the signs. Left with guilt and grief for the man she was to love, Esther could not bring herself to tell her friends the true story. Worse, Esther wasn’t sure if she’d ever truly loved Graham. They had been introduced by friends at a dinner party, and though they had gone on a romantic first date, shared a kiss by the Charles River, were constantly told by the people around them that they were perfect together, all Esther was sure about at the time was that she was nearing her late forties and lacked a partner. Her parents, who had once prided themselves in having such an overly studious daughter, had desperately called her every other week to ask if she was interested in being set up with an old family friend, most of whom, Esther had discovered, were rotund middle-aged men devoted to their jobs and their mothers. Love, which had once seemed only a thing of the future, had been thrust in Esther’s face by her friends and family. But when she obliged and let Graham into her life, love had failed her. She didn’t know if she could trust it again. In her letter to Neil, Esther poured her heart out. Telling him the things she longed to confide in someone about.
Three days later, Esther sat on her sofa reading a well-loved copy of The Goldfinch she had collected at the garage sale a few weeks back when, through the tattered gray curtains that lined her window, she saw the postwoman dropping off another week’s load of mail. Darting outside in bated anticipation, Esther grabbed her mail and ran back to the house, littering real estate magazines and grocery store coupons on the grass. Inside, Esther frantically searched for Neil’s letter. When she opened it, she did not find a lengthy response as she had expected. Instead, she received an invitation to Neil’s house that weekend.
On Saturday evening, Esther pulled her hair into a low chignon, wearing a light blue sweater and black skirt with thick, cable-knit tights. Driving through the heavy rainfall and arriving at Neil’s house, Esther hesitated as she stood in front of the door. They had gotten to know each other, share secrets, all through their letters, yet they had only spoken in person once. But when Neil opened the door, dressed in a slim fitting gray suit with the same charming smile and warm eyes Esther remembered, all her hesitation and anxiety melted away. There was no need to talk, no awkwardness or resistance. They embraced on the front porch, taking a moment before leaning in for a kiss. As they kissed, they wept. Wept for the grief they shared and the love they both desired.
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