The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck Read Free Book Online

my left elbow; a chrome-framed mirror stood up on its accordioned stand like a trained seal, and its small circular face barked at me that yes, I was still here, yes, I sat in my mother’s chair, and yes, behind me were the palmlike branches of trees in a garden whose fecundity hadn’t penetrated this abandoned room in a long, long time. The last item I found, before I found the letter, was a brass key dangling from a long thin silver chain. There was so much more in the desk, rows of hanging files to be gone through, drawers I hadn’t opened yet, secret compartments waiting to be discovered—and of course the promise of that key, as shinily modern as the door key was rusty and old—but when I found the letter I stopped, because the envelope was addressed to me. “Master James Ramsay,” she’d written, as adults wrote to children thirty or forty or fifty years ago (which is to say, before I was born, and she was born as well). Her handwriting was childlike, each block-printed letter neatly, discretely distinct from its neighbor, as though she were terrified that someone might not be able to read what she’d written.
    In twenty-one years my mother had written me only one other time, on my first birthday, but my grandmother died less than a year after my mother left, and my great uncle, who took me in, refused to read it to me, and so I didn’t find out what my mother had written until seven years after she’d composed it. By that time my great uncle had moved into a retirement villa in Rhode Island and shipped me off to his youngest son and daughter-in-law in Florida. They’d put the letter in a small box they hid in their attic, which, as it happened, was the only place I felt safe when they launched into one of their frequent and violent arguments. The box, I remember, was mislabeled “John’s Things,” but somehow I knew it was mine, and so, when I was eight years old, to the tune of breaking glass and bouncing cutlery, I finally read the words “I left you because it would have been worse if I stayed.”There was more than that, of course, but not much more, and in the end it all came back to that one line. To the second clause really: it would have been worse if I stayed . At eight what bothered me most was that up until then I hadn’t realized things were bad, let alone that they could have been worse.
    Her second letter was no less infuriating, but this time I was better able to understand my anger. “I met your father in the dunes behind Jones Beach,” it began . “He was one of three black-haired boys. One boy’s hair was black and thick and straight,” the letter went on to say (the letter that actually began “Dear Jamie”) “and one boy’s hair was black and thick and wavy” (well, it actually began with a date, “July 31, 1991”—my twelfth birthday—and a location, “Outside Istanbul,” but whatever) “and one boy’s hair was black and thick and crinkly, kinky I want to say”—my mother wanted to say. My mother wanted to say that the third boy’s hair was like still-new, still-soft steel wool but she didn’t: she just said that she wanted to say it was kinky, and that she thought the boy was Jewish. She said it—wrote it, I mean, nearly thirteen years after the events to which it alluded. “The second one was Black Irish or maybe Italian, and the first one could have been anything, Latin, Mediterranean, Asian maybe, or maybe it was just some Anglo with straight black hair,” and that was all my mother had to say about my father’s hair—my fath ers’ hair, I suppose I should put it—or about my fathers, or about herself. The letter, written in Istanbul but mailed from Ithaca, New York on August 18, was addressed to my grandmother’s house on Long Island, but the address to which it had been returned after being stamped “UNDELIVERABLE” was Dutch Street, and as soon as I finished reading I looked up and caught another glimpse of myself in my mother’s