If I close my eyes, I can see you walking along the beach on our first night together. With lightning flickering on your face, you were absolutely beautiful, and I think that’s part of the reason I was able to open up to you in a way I never had with anyone else. But it wasn’t just your beauty that moved me. It was everything you are—your courage and your passion, the commonsense wisdom with which you view the world. I think I sensed these things about you the first time we had coffee, and if anything, the more I got to know you, the more I realized how much I’d missed these qualities in my own life. You are a rare find, Adrienne, and I’m a lucky man for having had the chance to come to know you.
I hope that you’re doing okay. As I write this letter, I know that I’m not. Saying good-bye to you today is the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do, and when I get back, I can honestly swear that I’ll never do it again. I love you now for what we’ve already shared, and I love you now in anticipation of all that’s to come. You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I miss you already, but I’m sure in my heart that you’ll be with me always. In the few days I spent with you, you became my dream.
Paul
The year following Paul’s departure was unlike any year in Adrienne’s life. On the surface, things went on as usual. She was active in her children’s lives, she visited with her father once a day, she worked at the library as she always had. But she carried with her a new zest, fueled by the secret she kept inside, and the change in her attitude wasn’t lost on people around her. She smiled more, they sometimes commented, and even her children occasionally noticed that she took walks after dinner or spent an hour now and then lingering in the tub, ignoring the mayhem around her.
She thought of Paul always in those moments, but his image was most real whenever she saw the mail truck coming up the road, stopping and starting with each delivery on the route.
The mail usually arrived between ten and eleven in the morning, and Adrienne would stand by the window, watching as the truck paused in front of her house. Once it was gone, she would walk to the box and sort through the bundle, looking for the telltale signs of his letters: the beige airmail envelopes he favored, postage stamps that depicted a world she knew nothing about, his name scrawled in the upper-left-hand corner.
When his first letter arrived, she read it on the back porch. As soon as she was finished, she started from the beginning and read it a second time more slowly, pausing and lingering over his words. She did the same with each subsequent letter, and as they began to arrive regularly, she realized that the message in Paul’s note had been true. Though it wasn’t as gratifying as seeing him or feeling his arms around her, the passion in his words somehow made the distance between them seem that much less.
She loved to imagine how he looked as he wrote the letters. She pictured him at a battered desk, a single bulb illuminating the weary expression on his face. She wondered if he wrote quickly, the words flowing uninterrupted, or whether he would stop now and then to stare into space, collecting his thoughts. Sometimes her images took one form; with the next letter they might take another, depending on what he’d written, and Adrienne would close her eyes as she held it, trying to divine his spirit.
She wrote to him as well, answering questions that he’d asked and telling him what was going on in her life. On those days, she could almost see him beside her; if the breeze moved her hair, it was as if Paul were gently running a finger over her skin; if she heard the faint ticking of a clock, it was the sound of Paul’s heart as she rested her head on his chest. But when she set the pen down, her thoughts always returned to their final moments together, holding each other on the graveled drive, the soft brush of his lips, the promise of a single year apart, then a lifetime together.
Paul also called every so often, when he had an opportunity to head into the city, and hearing the tenderness in his voice always made her throat constrict. So did the sound of his laughter or the ache in his tone as he told her how much he missed her. He called during the day, when the kids were at school, and whenever she heard the phone ringing, she found herself pausing before she answered it, hoping it was Paul. The conversations didn’t last long, usually less than twenty minutes, but coupled with the letters, it was enough to get her through the next few months.
At the library, she began photocopying pages from a variety of books on Ecuador, everything from geography to history, anything that caught her eye. Once, when one of the travel magazines did a piece on the culture there, she bought the magazine and sat for hours studying the pictures and practically memorizing the article, trying to learn as much as she could about the people he was working with. Sometimes, despite herself, she wondered whether any of the women there ever looked at him with the same desire she had.
She also scanned the microfiched pages of newspapers and medical journals, looking for information on Paul’s life in Raleigh. She never wrote or mentioned that she was doing this—as he often said in his letters, that was a person he never wanted to be again—but she was curious. She found the piece that had run in The Wall Street Journal, with a drawing of him at the top of the article. The article said he was thirty-eight, and when she stared at the face, she saw for the first time what he’d looked like when he was younger. Though she recognized his picture immediately, there were some differences that caught her eye—the darker hair parted at the side, the unlined face, the too serious, almost hard expression—that felt unfamiliar. She remembered wondering what he would think of the article now or whether he would care about it at all.