He Fell 10,000 Feet and
Landed Safely
16.

this is far and away the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me alec—

“Me too,” he replied, grinning at the empty room. “I just wish I could write you back.”

i have already begun a second letter—but where shall i hide it?

“Maybe you could keep them all in one safe place. I can look for them and once I find them I’ll tell you where.”

what a splendid idea alec—only dont read them all at once—

“And maybe you could save something else for me, too. Like a time capsule!”

Time capsules weren’t a thing yet, but Josie promised to leave him a “treasure box,” and on a weekend morning he went hunting for her letters, thinking over the conversations they’d had so far. The board didn’t seem to work like a telephone, since she’d always been there to answer apart from that one time in his room. If their dates always matched, a hundred years to the hour, there would have been times when one found the other absent.

There were no hidden compartments in his closet. No loose floorboards either. Next, he took the cushion off the window seat, lifted the lid, and pulled out a stack of spare blankets. Now here would be the perfect place to hide something, provided no one else had found it in the intervening years. The compartment was lined in cedar wood, and he ran his fingers along the seams of the smooth red planks. There was a small notch at the edge of one of the planks, where the base of the cupboard met the side. Alec stuck his finger in and pulled, muttering “yessssss!” when the board yielded to his tugging.

There was a four-inch gap between the bottom of the storage compartment and the floor. He pulled out the wooden panel and laid it on the rug. It didn’t look like there was anything but dead insects and dust bunnies in the hidden space, but he wouldn’t expect her to leave anything so easy to find. He leaned into the chest, dipping his hand into the dark perimeter of the space, his fingertips trailing over splinters and globs of gray dust.

Finally he felt something soft but firm wedged between the cupboard base and the plank that kept it mounted above the floor, and he pried it free and brought it up into the light. The package was wrapped in oilcloth, and his heart thudded joyfully as he pulled off the covering and read his name on the first envelope in the stack. There were a dozen in all!

It was a mild sunny day, so rare for November, and he brought the first letter down to the back terrace tucked inside his school copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This letter was longer than the one he’d found in the library, and when he finished it he felt he knew her better than ever. She gave him a scene-by-scene account of the Thanksgiving Day incident, and told how three days later Cass was still quiet and pale and couldn’t eat much; of jolly Dr. Jennings, his English accent and his bizarre conversations with her mother’s “spirit controls”; and of the suffrage rally, and “The Enchanted Head,” and Mrs. Gubbins’s prophecy that she would never marry. Of course it is balderdash, but why did it affect me so? I don’t know if you can understand why it upset me, being a boy, she wrote. He kept all her letters in a shoebox, along with the notebook he used when they communicated—a little archive of his own.

“I don’t think about growing up or getting married,” he said a few nights later, once he’d told her of the hiding place beneath the window seat. “It’s a long time from now, you know? Plus people get married a lot later now than they used to.”

i think of it all the time—it is different for us—it is an escape—into an even more difficult circumstance perhaps—but i suppose most women find it a risk worth taking—

“I wonder why your mother got married,” he mused. “It seems like she didn’t really have to, with a rich patron like Mr. Vandegrift, and then Mr. Berringsley.”

i cant imagine her falling in love with anybody the way heroines do in novels—i wish i could remember my father—perhaps she was different when he was alive—

“Hey, you mentioned Dr. Jennings in your letter. I read about him in the archive, too. I was thinking about looking him up on the computer, to see if the spirit was right.”

i am terribly curious but emily says none of us should know too much about the future—

“Hold on a second.” He grabbed his mother’s iPad from the kitchen counter and did a Google search for “Henry Jennings.” The first hit was the doctor’s Wikipedia entry. President of the New York branch of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1912-1919. Died 1919, aged 39. “I found him. Do you want to know?”

no—i mean yes—but dont tell me the date—

“I don’t know how you’re gonna take this,” he said, “but Baldassare was right.”

December came, and with it new traditions. Together Alec and his mother collected pine cones and spiky sweetgum seed balls from the bottom of the backyard, spray-painting them gold and silver for Christmas tree decorations. They arranged his grandfather’s antique train set and all the little shops and houses in a circle around the base of the tree, and his mother remarked with satisfaction that sometimes nostalgia really is as nice as it used to be. Grammy Sal drove over from Bridgeport to stay for a weekend, and Alec helped her bake and decorate an army of gingerbread men. They showed up in his lunchbox, so cheerful and perfectly iced that it felt wrong to eat them.

Some nights he’d read another of Josie’s letters with a flashlight under the blanket. Her whole life was spent inside the four walls of this house, but she never ran out of things to write about: what she’d learned of the places she wanted to visit someday, Stonehenge and Delphi, the Colosseum and the Pyramids; ridiculous things Cass (or Mrs. Gubbins) had said or done; and her memories of the year they’d lived in New York City. Alec shivered to read of a carriage-ride through a slum on the way to Mr. Berringsley’s Wall Street office when an old woman with horrible red sores around her eyes reached into the cab, grabbed Josie’s hand, and offered to tell her fortune.

She transcribed everything she could remember of the sessions with Dr. Jennings, and wrote that she didn’t know if she believed in a “higher power,” or an endless cycle of death and rebirth, or a lost continent at the bottom of the sea. I think of all the civilizations that have come and gone: they had their gods, just as we have ours. Emily says it is only sensible to question and to doubt.

His mother said nothing more about the talking board or the impossible letters. He knew she was uneasy, but she had so many other things to worry about right now that he thought she must have filed the whole business under “my son’s overactive imagination.” Sometimes when he thought of Josie he had to wonder if he was making her up, if he’d been so struck by her picture that he’d convinced himself of something that was utterly nuts.

But Danny believed in all of it, too, he knew the letters were as old as they appeared to be, and Alec took comfort in what Josie said about the sense in doubting. If you questioned your own convictions, you’d end up either smashing them or strengthening them, wouldn’t you? Alec questioned his every day, but the Clifford girls were still there—still here, in a manner of speaking. Talking to them made him happier than he’d been in what felt like forever, and that had to count for something.