"I wish his letter had been longer," said Peter. "It was obviously just a last-minute thought."
"It was perfect," said Petra.
"He didn't even sign it."
"Doesn't matter."
"But he was thinking of you and the children. Making sure you and he would think of all the children by the same names."
She nodded, afraid of starting again.
"I'm going to go now," said Peter. "I won't come back till you invite me."
"Come back when you usually do," she said. "I don't want my homecoming to cost the children somebody they love."
"Thanks," he said.
She nodded. She wanted to thank him for reading it to her and being so decent about her crying all over his shirt, but she didn't trust herself to speak so she just sort of waved.
It was a good thing she had cried herself out. When she went into the kitchen and washed her face and listened to little Petra--to Poke--say, "Lady crying" again, she was able to be very calm and say, "I was crying because I'm so happy to see you. I've missed you. You don't remember me, but I'm your mama."
"We show them your picture every morning and night," said Mrs. Delphiki, "and they kiss the picture."
"Thank you."
"The nurses started it before I came," she said.
"Now I get to kiss my boys and girls myself," she said. "Will that be all right? No more kissing the picture?"
It was too much for them to understand. And if they wanted to keep kissing the picture for a while, that would be fine with her, too. Just like Ramon's envelope. No reason to take away from them something that they valued.
By your father's age, Petra said silently, he was on his own, trying not to starve to death in Rotterdam.
But you're all going to catch up with him and pass him by. When you're in your twenties and out of college and getting married, he'll still be sixteen years old, crawling through time as his starship races through space. When you bury me, he'll not have turned seventeen yet. And your brothers and sister will still be babies. Not as old as you are. It will be as if they never change.
Which means it's exactly as if they had died. Loved ones who die never change, either. They're always the same age in memory.
So what I'm going through isn't something so different. How many women became widows in the war? How many mothers have buried babies that they hardly had time to hold? I'm just part of the same sentimental comedy as everyone else, the sad parts always followed by laughter, the laughter always by tears.
It wasn't until later, when she was alone in her bed, the children asleep for the night, Mrs. Delphiki gone next door--or, rather, to the other wing of the same house--that she was able to bring herself to read Bean's note again. It was in his handwriting. He had done it in a hurry and in spots it was barely legible. And the paper was stained--Peter hadn't been joking about Ramon peeing on the envelope a couple of times.
She turned the light out and meant to go to sleep.
And then something occurred to her and she switched on the light again and fumbled for the paper and her eyes were so bleary she could hardly read, so maybe she had actually fallen asleep, and this thought had woken her out of a sound slumber.
The letter began, "There's one thing we forgot to decide."
But when Peter read it, he had started with "I love you."
He must have scanned over the letter and realized that Bean never said it. That it was just a note that Bean had jotted at the last moment, and Peter worried that she might be hurt by the omission.
He couldn't have known that Bean just didn't put that kind of thing in writing. Except obliquely. Because the whole note said "I love you," didn't it?
She turned the light off again, but still held the letter. Bean's last message to her.
As she drifted off again, the thought passed briefly through her mind: When Peter said it, he wasn't reading at all.
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