The letters arrive, not predictably, but clustered. There are days when Beatrix arrives home from school to find two or three waiting for her on the kitchen table. Then there can be weeks with nothing. She never reads the letters there, in the kitchen, but she rubs the thin paper between her thumb and forefinger while she’s eating her snack, amazed that she is touching something that her parents touched not so long ago. That it has somehow made it from there to here. In her room, later, with the door almost shut, Beatrix reads each letter again and again. The format is always the same: Mummy writes first, and Dad second, his words often crammed into smaller and smaller spaces, sometimes cascading up and down the sides, one word at a time. Dad’s handwriting is hard to decipher; Mummy’s is all curves. They tell her about the neighbors, about her grandparents, what they ate for dinner. Dad tells knock-knock jokes. Beatrix tries to hear their voices as she reads.
After she’s finished with each letter, she carefully rips off the stamp for Gerald, then places the letter in the pile with the others, tucked into the drawer of her desk. Sometimes at night she reads them all. The more she reads them, the more she thinks about what’s left out. She doesn’t know whether they’re spending each night in the shelter. She’s not sure how often the bombs are falling. She wonders whether they’ve left her chair at the kitchen table.
Beatrix writes back every week, after church and Sunday dinner, sitting at the little desk in her room that overlooks the garden. She wants to tell them about the colors here: the way the yellow leaves cover the ground under the trees; the tiny purple flowers on the wallpaper on her bedroom wall; the golden raspberries from the garden that ooze out of the breakfast muffins. But she can never find the words. Or the words are there but it feels wrong to share them. She imagines the two of them sitting on the couch in the dark flat, her father worrying the hole in the arm, his fingers pulling at the white innards. Or she sees them heading to the shelter beneath their building, to their spot a few feet from the unsteady pine steps. The smell of urine and the skittering of the rats. Everything there feels muted, shades of gray and brown. So, instead, she tells them funny stories about Gerald. How she’s doing well in Latin. That William got in trouble for cheating on a history exam. About her new friend who’s invited her to the symphony in Boston.
She doesn’t tell them that every Saturday morning Mr. Gregory wraps a worn, berry-stained apron around his waist and makes pancakes. That Mrs. Gregory gives her a bath and tucks her in each night. That Sunday afternoons are her favorite time, when she and the Gregorys all sit in the library and listen to the New York Philharmonic on the radio. That some nights she can no longer remember what they look like. On those nights, she turns the light back on and stares at their photo, trying to memorize the details. Those are the nights they enter her dreams.