Souvenirs from Another Life

Exiting the highway one night, a delivery driver fell asleep and rear-ended our car as we sat at a stoplight. He’d been at work all day and was moonlighting. We lived in an expensive city, where it wasn’t enough to have a full-time job. The airbag deployed and broke two of my ribs. 

One of the things I had always loved about my husband was that he was so big. He could pick me up with one arm. When he squeezed me, I could feel my bones crack. 

Now, I shrank and shrank. In the mirror, I could hardly recognize myself. By comparison, my husband was a giant, and every time he touched me, I was nearly crazed with pain. 

The boy who had driven the delivery truck into the back of our car wrote me letters. Pages and pages and pages of letters. It seemed that he, too, was crazed by grief. 

Our baby had died in the accident. The boy had lost his job and was on house arrest until the trial. He was barely twenty-five, with no savings. He couldn’t pay rent and ended up living back at home with his mother. Every night, though, he stayed up all night and wrote me letters. 

Or so I imagined. 

The envelopes continued to arrive day after day.   

My husband and I divorced.

I moved in with my mother and stepfather. The letters followed me to the new apartment. I was sleeping in a room that had previously been used for storage, and my old cradle was in the corner.

In the daylight, I knew that it wasn’t a cradle at all, but the objects in the room shifted and rearranged themselves in the dark. I saw everything, lying in that room. My ribs had healed months earlier, but they, too, ached all night. It should have been yet another phantom pain that kept me up, but on the x-rays, I could see them, spanning the dark shell of my rib cage, glowing ghostly white, as faint as gauze.

My mother had, on the mantel, a portrait of my family, taken when I still had a family. The photographs I found all over the apartment were proof that these things had happened: my courtship, my wedding, the birth of my child. I had, at one time, been a mother. 

I threw the boy’s letters into the trash without reading them. It wasn’t cruelty. I couldn’t read them. The words floated off the page, the letters of the alphabet separating and dividing until they could have been a meaningless collection of anything—beads or buttons, even. Anything that, once orderly, had been spilled out into the atmosphere.

The boy had also been a baby, once, and for that and many other reasons, I pitied him, and his mother, who, during the early hearings, had sat behind him in the courtroom and wept, and the judge, who’d had to sit in that room and listen to everyone, and my husband, who had been transformed into a giant but was still powerless in the face of despair, and who had fallen in and out of love as if it were a pool you could dip your legs into and then retreat from when the temperature shifted and everything changed around you. 

Or, perhaps, I was the one who had retreated, and yes—that was it. 

Many years have passed. 

He is remarried now, and the new wife has a baby once a year—fat, cheerful ones, the kind you see in ads—and they are up to six now, and I want to write him a letter, I want to write everyone a letter, and say, Is this the one? Is this the one who makes up for it? 

I lie in bed at night sometimes and think about that. 

But also, I know him. There’s still a hollow there for him, too, and nothing that will ever be able to fill it. Nothing can replace the time when we were young, and our baby slept in the bed between us, in the space that our bodies had made for her.

LEAH BROWNING

Leah Browning is the author of three short nonfiction books and six chapbooks. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Broadkill Review, Four Way Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Threepenny Review, Newfound, Watershed Review, Superstition Review, Santa Ana River Review, South 85 Journal, Forge, The Homestead Review, and elsewhere.