The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 20: The Drawer

Maggie Doyle did not believe in lying down quietly.

By noon on my first day in her body, I’d learned that about her the hard way. She couldn’t take the wheel. Whatever rule governed these things, a host who’d already gone under stayed under. But she could lean. She could set her jaw so my teeth ached. She could clamp a hand around the edge of the blanket until the knuckles went white. And when I tried to say Colleen’s name out loud, she did something to my throat that felt like swallowing a fist.

Don’t, she said. I mean it.

“I haven’t said anything.”

You were thinking it very loudly.

I lay back against the pillow. The cancer had a way of announcing itself in the afternoons, a dull, deep pressure under the right ribs, like someone had set a brick there and was slowly adding more. Dani had dialed the pump up an hour ago. It took the edge off but not the weight.

The Intercessor had gone. He did that, vanished mid-conversation and left me to sort out the room. I’d gotten used to it, the way you get used to a landlord who only shows up when something breaks.

“Okay,” I said to the ceiling. “Let’s try something else. You tell me what you want.”

I want you to leave.

“Other than that.”

A long pause. The oxygen hissed. Out past the window a crow landed on a bare branch, shifted its feet, and took off again.

I want to finish, Maggie said at last. I don’t want to be dragged. I want to be done with all of it, the tubes and the nurses and the way everyone lowers their voice when they come in. I’m seventy-eight. I did my part. Her voice was dry as old paper. The only thing I haven’t done is hang up the phone.

“You’ve been hanging up on her for fourteen years.”

Don’t you dare.

“I’m just saying what the room says.”

The room can mind its own business.

I almost smiled. It struck me that I’d been trading with this woman for less than a day and I already liked her more than I’d liked half the foremen I’d worked under.

“Maggie,” I said, “I’m not going to push you. I couldn’t if I wanted to. I’m only here because something’s unfinished, and I’d rather find out what than guess.”

It isn’t yours to find.

“Then it’s yours. Tell me.”

The back of my head went still again, and I let it. I’d learned with Rian that you can’t pry a locked door. You wait next to it and keep breathing.

After a while, I felt her shift. A small movement, the way a cat resettles in a chair.

The nightstand, Maggie said. Bottom drawer. Don’t open it.

It wasn’t an invitation. It was the kind of instruction you give so that someone will know where to look.

I waited until Dani’s rounds were done, which meant until about four, and the light in the window had gone the color of weak tea. Then I swung my legs over the side of the bed. It took a full minute. Each movement had to be negotiated with a body that had stopped taking orders somewhere around June. I got the oxygen line looped over my arm, found the rail, and bent down in stages until my hand closed on the knob.

I said don’t.

“I heard you.”

The drawer stuck, then slid. It smelled of cedar and lavender and old paper.

I’d been braced for something terrible. A will, maybe, or a pistol, or whatever it is people keep in drawers when they’ve decided to stop hoping. What was there was a rubber-banded stack of envelopes about four inches thick.

I lifted the top one out. It was a plain white envelope, addressed in blue ink in a tight, upright hand I knew from the whiteboard in the back of Maggie’s head. Colleen Doyle-Ramirez, 2210 Saguaro Lane, Phoenix, Arizona. Under it, stamped in red, three words in a slanting machine font.

RETURN TO SENDER.

I turned it over. The flap was still sealed.

I flipped through the stack with my thumb, and the dates went by on the postmarks, one a year. Fourteen of them. October every time, the second week. The envelopes had gone soft at the corners from handling, and the stamps changed with the years. A flag, a heart, a bird.

“You wrote to her,” I said.

Every year. Maggie’s voice had gone very small. On her birthday. I never put the return address. I thought if she saw it was from me she’d throw it out. A breath. She got it anyway. I used to think that was the worst part. That she knew exactly who it was from and sent it back without opening it.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the stack in my lap. A radiator ticked somewhere in the wall.

“So she’s the one who refuses.”

That’s what I let everyone believe.

“But it isn’t the whole story.”

No.

I waited. The old lungs worked, in and out.

I don’t know what I did, Cal. It was the first time she’d used my name, and I wasn’t sure when she’d learned it. That’s the awful part. I know there was a fight. I know I said something. I’ve gone over it a hundred thousand times, and I can’t find the sentence. I can find the room, and the dress she was wearing, and what time it was. The words are just gone.

“Maybe they were never as bad as you think.”

Or worse. A dry little laugh. That’s why I stopped looking.

I turned the stack over to square it up. Something shifted near the bottom, and the rubber band slipped, and the last envelope slid out sideways and landed on the blanket.

It was different from the others.

It was cream-colored, heavier paper, addressed in loose, looping handwriting, nothing like Maggie’s. The return address in the corner read Saguaro Lane. There was no red stamp. The postmark read three weeks ago, early September.

The flap had been neatly slit with a letter opener.

“Maggie,” I said, slowly.

Put it back.

“This one’s open.”

I said put it back.

“This is from Colleen.”

The whole room seemed to tighten. I felt Maggie go rigid, felt her hold back something that rose in her like water in a dam. I turned the envelope over, and my thumb found the edge of a folded page just inside. I could see the top line of a single sheet. A date. A greeting. And three words that had been written very hard, so the pen had bitten into the paper:

Dear Mom. Please.

I stopped.

The pump clicked. A cart rattled past in the hall. Neither of us said a word.

I’ve had that for three weeks, Maggie whispered. I’ve read the first line every night.

“And the rest?”

I can’t.