The Lord only knows how Elizabeth’s letter found its way to the shore that ordinary day in June. I’ve thought about it these past seven years. It was an omen, a sign of what was to come. Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, it was surely a hint of what the future held. I was never one for believing in fate, that some invisible force was making things happen. Life is our own responsibility to make of what we will. We can sit back and let things happen, which amounts to little more than giving up, or else we can put things back on the proper track, the one we want.
Like receiving a letter from beyond the grave, all those years I pretended Elizabeth was dead to us, that she no longer existed. For all of us, I did this. Life was fine, as fine as I could ever hope it to be, until I looked down at the letter in my hand.
To: Cliff MacKay
The Forties Settlement
Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia
The address had been crossed out and it appeared that someone from the New Ross Post Office had written across the envelope: Try Chester Basin, Nova Scotia. c/o Dylan MacKay. Damn these small places that know more about everyone else’s business than they do their own. When I took the mail out of the box that day I knew, before I even turned the letter over to see where it came from. Holding it to my bosom, I hurried to the house, hardly able to draw a decent breath into my lungs. Alone in the kitchen I opened it with a knife, my hands shaking so badly I had to stop twice to regain my composure before managing to get it open. Struggling to swallow with the lump that was festering in my throat, I set the letter aside, giving my heart time to slow. And when I reached for it again, when the trembling had all but subsided, I couldn’t believe what she’d written. It wasn’t a letter for Cliff at all, but one for the children.
Dear Jacob and Jewel. I am well now. Well enough to see you. I struggled to swallow—my throat hurt so—and continued. I’m at Divinity Hospital. They will let you visit if you want to come. I really hope you will. I have missed you all this time and have never stopped thinking of you…Love Mumma.
Half the morning, I walked the kitchen floor thinking on what I was to do with this information, how best to keep this family together. I couldn’t tell Dylan about the letter, and certainly not Cliff. We’d made a decision years ago, and there was no way we were going to go back on it. I wouldn’t allow it. Elizabeth was gone from our lives and she’d stay gone. Case closed. Cliff would buckle if he saw the letter; I knew he would. He’d take pity on her the way he did when they were still living together. He’d bring her back into our lives again, if I knew anything at all about him, and the mayhem would start all over again. All those years she’d been gone—how would we explain that to everyone? Besides, the children were making out fine without her; Cliff, too, for that matter. The spark was back in his eye. Jewel and Jacob were smiling and laughing. Life was calm. Life was good. We were all happy. Why now, I kept wondering as I paced back and forth the kitchen that morning, why now?
I had to decide how best to handle this. If I ripped up the letter, she’d likely write more, and if Cliff got the mail one day, or the children, it would be game over. Elizabeth would be back and all the craziness that went with her. Granted, she’d suffered that breakdown after her father died, but things weren’t right way before then. Things were never right with Elizabeth. A few years in a mental hospital wouldn’t have changed any of that. In her letter, she said she was well, but I knew that wasn’t so. She wouldn’t be in the hospital if she wasn’t still sick.
And then it came to me—a stroke of brilliance if I say so myself. I slipped the letter into a brand new envelope of its own. I addressed it to Cliff MacKay, The Forties Settlement. I formed the letters so close to the writing on the original envelope that no one would know the difference. I even put her return address on the back, in the same place. I scratched out the address on the front and wrote: Return to sender, unknown address in large blue letters. And then I mailed it one day when we were in New Ross. Elizabeth would never bother us again.
You’re never prepared for what life throws your way, no matter what you might have told yourself over the years, no matter how many times you’ve run things over in your mind, just what you’d do and how you’d get by if tragedy ever struck. I was certain I’d pull back my shoulders and keep carrying on, one way or another. I’d be the strong one, someone other women would admire. I’d imagine Dylan watching me from beyond the Pearly Gates, saying, “That’s my girl. You can do it, Joan, you can do it,” so full of pride in me it would make my heart about ready to burst at the seams. But the mind is a powerful thing. You can do all those things again and again, figuring you’d be as strong as the next person when life calls you to be, but when disaster does come knocking, all those things you imagined yourself doing, all that strength you figured you’d possess, gets thrown to the gulls.
I’d leave the shore, I used to tell myself, if something ever happened to Dylan. Sell this old house and buy another one as far inland as I could get, maybe get a job or do more volunteer work to fill my days. Start a brand new life, is what I thought. I wouldn’t have to listen to the sea wind blowing or feel the rattling of the windows at night during another wicked storm, wondering if everyone was safe and who would survive come morning. I’d find a nice little spot big enough for me to grow some vegetables, maybe raise a few chickens just for the eggs. My life would become comfortable. And comfortable sure beats wishing things were something they’re not.
Our lives changed once Cliff and the kids moved here. Not right away, but over time they did. In the beginning, things couldn’t have been better. Dylan couldn’t have been happier to have his brother out fishing with him, and it was heartwarming to see that old spark in his eye again. Cliff knew him like no one else. They were two peas in a pod. Most times, out on that boat, they didn’t have to speak for each to know what the other was thinking. Dylan said it had been like that back when Jake was alive, too.
“Cliff could have been on the boat with me all along,” Dylan said when I mentioned how content he seemed. And I had to agree. We both knew whose fault that was. I don’t mind being the one to say that if it hadn’t been for Elizabeth, our lives would have been much different. How one person has the power to change so many lives is beyond me, but Elizabeth had that power.
The day Richard took off to Ontario with Miles Tyrell, my very first thought was of Elizabeth. If I could have done something to stop those thoughts I would have, but my mind wouldn’t keep me from seeing Elizabeth, alone in some hospital room, maybe wondering where her own children were. With Richard gone, I got to see first-hand what pain a mother goes through when she’s separated from her child, what lengths she’d go to just to know they’re doing okay. I knew I’d give my right arm to have Richard come on home regardless of how unruly he was. Elizabeth would be no different. And that thinking gnawed away at me day after day.
Kate Tyrell has six children scattered across the countryside and what all she knows about any one of them you could fit into a thimble. From the time they were old enough to toddle about, you’d see them gallivanting all over the neighbourhood like they didn’t have a place to go home to. So long as they came back at bedtime and the cops didn’t show up at her door, she never seemed to have a care in this world. I called Kate on the phone the day after Richard didn’t come home. Someone told me they’d seen him with Miles the day before, and they looked pretty chummy, so I thought it was worth a try. I should have known hers wasn’t a shoulder to be cried on, and I’d rather kiss a dead cod than ask Kate Tyrell anything, but I had to find out what she knew.
“Boys will be boys,” she’d said, “and the less we know, the better.” She gave a tittering little laugh. It’s a good thing my hands were gripped fast to the phone receiver and not Kate’s neck. I could have strangled the life out of her right then and there.
“Didn’t you ask Miles where he was going?” I shouted. But no, she’d watched him pack a bag without asking a blessed thing. Maybe it’s different with six sons. Perhaps with six sons there’s room to allow one or two to slip away unnoticed into the fog, but what about those of us who have only one?
Even when Elizabeth wasn’t in the picture, her presence was surely felt by the rest of us. It was why I went into Dartmouth with Cliff the second time. I had to see her for myself, let her know Jacob and Jewel were getting along just fine, and for her not to worry. If Richard’s leaving taught me anything, it was that. But how was I to know what we were about to find that day? How could any of us have known? Tell her about Jewel and Jacob? Why, we couldn’t tell her a thing. She was just sitting there with a blank look on her face. There wasn’t anyone at home. Not a soul upstairs.
On the way home Cliff made up his mind.
“The children, they’re doing fine without her,” I said to Cliff as I looked out the window. “Jewel, she doesn’t want her mother to come home. That’s what she said, Cliff. I swear on old Jake’s grave, that’s what she said…. We’re doing fine without her, all of us. It’s the truth and you know it.”
He drove for an hour or more, neither of us saying a word. I knew enough to keep my tongue still, let him simmer a little, see the way things really were, let him come to some conclusion on his own.
“You’re right,” he said, gripping the steering wheel when we were ten minutes from home. “She’s better off where she is…and we’re better off, too.”
It wasn’t an easy decision back then, but by God it was the right one.
We all find our own level of comfort, the one thing that makes an almost unbearable situation bearable. Maggie found it by heading out on the boat with Dylan after Jake died. She rolled up her sleeves and worked as hard as any man could. She never complained, just accepted what life had brought her way and found her own means of making it tolerable. The idea of the letters came to me when I got back home from Dartmouth that day. With the shape Elizabeth was in, it was hard to say if she’d even read them. In time, they might end up being thrown away, and all my time and effort would have been wasted, but I didn’t let that line of thinking stop me. Elizabeth couldn’t be there, that much we’d already decided, but it wasn’t as if we were intentionally keeping her from knowing her own children.
Right after I wrote the first letter a strange feeling came over me. Something about it felt right, cleansing in a way that brought me peace. Sending it would be out of the question, but that didn’t mean that someday she wouldn’t get to read it. Life is filled with mysterious happenings. So I packed it away, a someday letter, knowing that someday Elizabeth might come into possession of it. There are those who might say it was a useless gesture. To me it made perfect sense. And it felt good. Each letter I wrote never seemed like enough. I’d wait a few more weeks or even months and I’d sit back down at the table again.
But then Jacob called the other night, asking questions—some woman he saw on the news—and I knew Elizabeth was back. Resurrected from the past, a past that was surely catching up to us all. How would I explain any of it without him thinking I was a monster? So I told him about the someday letters and suggested he might want to show them to his mother when the time was right. He came right to the house the very next day. When he read the first one, a smile spread across his face. It was like Christmas morning all over again, seeing that smile of his, knowing I was the one responsible for putting it there.
“It was a thoughtful thing to do,” he said. “I’ll show them to Mum when I find her.” But a part of me trembled. Elizabeth was back. Everything was unravelling. It was all unravelling.