What You Owe Me

Chapter six: Unclaimed

On Sunday morning, the county records annex was a low gray building behind the courthouse, with a flagpole and no flag and a parking lot that held three cars.

Miriam Osei had called in a favor to get it opened. She was a small, composed woman in a charcoal coat, and she walked beside Jonah as if she had been born in front of a judge. In the car, she had told him what she needed from him. His release papers, his signature, and as few words as possible.

She had also photographed every page of every letter before they arrived. Nora's deckhand had found the shoebox under a bench at the pier and brought it to the clinic. Jonah carried it under his arm now. He had not looked inside since the stairwell.

Fluorescent lights buzzed over a long counter. A clerk with a lanyard and a tired face took Miriam's papers, typed for a minute, and frowned at his screen.

"Pruitt, Ruth. That's in deep storage. Give me a few minutes."

He disappeared between rows of shelves stacked with numbered boxes. Jonah stood at the counter and stared at a laminated sign about holiday hours. He counted his breaths. Four in, four out.

The clerk came back carrying a plain brown carton no bigger than a bread box. A typed label ran along its side. Pruitt, Ruth. Unclaimed.

Jonah held out both hands.

The carton was heavier than he expected. Then he realized he had expected it to weigh nothing. His mother had never weighed nothing in her life.

"There's something on the account you should know," the clerk said, scrolling. "The storage f*e has been paid every year since she was placed here. Always in cash, always in person, always in the winter." He turned the screen slightly. "The depositor only signed with initials."

C.D.

Jonah did not need the clerk to say them aloud.

While he signed the release form, the clerk stepped into the back office and spoke quietly into a phone. Jonah barely noticed. His eyes were on the carton, and on his own hands, which would not stop shaking.

They walked out into the cold bright morning. Jonah was halfway to the car when a white sedan swung into the lot far too fast and stopped across two spaces.

Corinne got out.

Her gray coat was buttoned wrong. Her hair had come loose from its clip, and her face was the color of paper. She stood with one hand on the car door as if she might fall without it. She looked at Jonah the way you look at something that has stepped out of a grave.

"They said you drowned," she whispered.

"They were wrong."

"I'm sorry." Her voice broke on the word. "I'm so sorry. I paid the f*e because I couldn't bear to scatter her. Every winter I came in myself. I told myself one day I would find the courage to give her back to you."

Jonah said nothing. The carton was warm from his arms.

"I wrote the letters because my father swore you wouldn't survive the truth." She was crying now, openly, without wiping her face. "He said you were alone in that place, and she was already gone, and the letters were the only thing that would keep you alive. I believed him. I wanted to believe him."

She pressed her fingers to her mouth.

"I have never stopped being sorry. Not for one day."

Jonah tried to think what his mother would say to her.

He knew her well enough to guess the words. She would have said something firm and kind. She would have told Corinne to wash her face. But when he reached for the sound of it, there was nothing there. Only the clean, smooth silence where her voice had been.

And into that silence came Corinne.

It came softly, in his own head, in the patient cadence of the letters. Be patient, it said. Corinne is waiting. It was the voice that had read him to sleep through every winter in Crane Hill, and it was the only one he had left.

He stood very still until it passed.

Then he did something she did not expect.

He lifted the shoebox from under his arm and held it out to her. "Every one of them is in here," he said. "Take them."

Her hands closed around it automatically. She looked down at the soft, worn cardboard, then up at him, bewildered.

"Keep them," Jonah said. "You write her better than I remember."

The words landed like a slap. Corinne flinched, and he let her. He could not tell her what they cost him to say.

"I gave six years for your brother," he said. His voice was steady and quiet. "I gave them gladly, because I thought I was giving them for you. I will not give one more day."

"Jonah, please."

"And if you ever write my mother's voice again, I will make sure the world reads every word."

For a long moment, neither of them moved. A wind pushed a few dead leaves across the lot. Corinne held the box against her chest with both arms, the way you hold something you have just been handed to carry for the rest of your life.

Jonah turned and walked to Miriam's car. He did not look back. He sat in the passenger seat with the carton on his lap and pulled the door shut.

Miriam had been waiting beside the driver's door the whole time, her hands folded, giving them space. She got in now and sat for a moment without starting the engine.

"That was well done," she said. Then her expression changed. "I'm sorry, Mr. Pruitt. I have worse news."

He waited.

"A friend at the parole office called while we were inside. The Danforths have friends there too." She turned to face him. "They flagged you as missing the night of the pier."

"Missing."

"If you have not reported in by Monday morning, the flag becomes a warrant." She held up a second finger. "If you do report, Walter Danforth learns you are alive."

Jonah looked down at the carton in his lap. The label had begun to curl at one corner.

"So I lose either way," he said.

"Either way," said Miriam, "the Danforths will know by Monday."