Letters on the Long Road: Letters to The Hollow House

The third mailbox on Hollow Lane had rusted into a single solid lump, its little flag frozen at an angle that reminded Tammit of a man trying to wave while drowning. Maren Yarrow stopped before it, the sack of letters heavy on her hip, and ran her thumb along the envelope she held as if reading the paper by feel alone.

"Are we doing this for every house?" Tammit asked. His voice came out smaller than he meant it to. The street was too quiet, and quiet streets made him nervous in a way he could never quite explain to Pim.

Maren did not look up. "Every one that has a mailbox," she said. "And a few that don't."

The Hollow stretched before them in a long curve of weed-cracked paving stones and paintless facades. Windows stared out like the empty sockets of old skulls. Somewhere a shutter knocked in a wind that had nothing to push it, and the sound came back from the empty houses as if the street itself were thinking about answering.

Tammit shifted the smaller pack on his shoulders. He had grown used to the road in the three weeks since Pim had pressed him into Maren's company with a wink and a whispered promise that letter-runs were easy coin and gentler company than the city. Pim had been right about the gentler company. He had failed to mention the parts of the road that looked like this.

They had come down into the Hollow at first light, following a track that used to be a coach road. Vines had pulled the signpost sideways, so the carved letters read HALLOW from one angle and BLAME from another, depending on how you walked. Maren had laughed at that, a small sound, and told him the sign had been that way since before she was born.

"Before you were born," Tammit had said. "How old is this place?"

"Old enough to forget its own name," she had said, and walked on ahead.

Now she stood at the third mailbox, and Tammit could see her working the letters between her fingers. She sorted them by handwriting, by the weight of the ink, by something only she knew. Her lips moved without sound, counting or perhaps saying the names to herself.

"What are you looking for?" he asked.

"I'm looking for the ones that belong here," she said. "And the ones that don't."

She drew a letter from the top of the little stack. It was yellowed at the edges, the kind of yellow that comes from years of waiting in the dark of a metal box. The wax seal had cracked but held. Maren turned it over once, twice, and then nodded to herself as if it had told her something true.

"This one is for the Danvers house," she said. "End of the lane, the one with the blue trim. There was a Danvers there when I was a girl. Two sisters and a brother who mended clocks."

She started walking.

Tammit hesitated. The third mailbox stood behind them, fat with years of undelivered post, and he thought of all the letters still inside it. He thought of Pim, who would have lifted the whole box onto a cart and sold the contents by weight to a paper-buyer down the way. He thought of Pim, and then he stopped thinking of Pim, because Pim was three weeks behind them and the Hollow was a different country.

He followed Maren.

The Danvers house stood at the bend where the lane began to curve back on itself. The blue trim had faded to a sort of bruised grey, and the porch had sunk on its left corner so the front door hung at a slant. A climbing rose had taken the chimney and was working its slow way down the bricks, thorns catching in the mortar. The smell of it came to them sharp and sweet in the cold air, the kind of sweetness that makes you think of someone who is not there anymore.

Maren stopped at the foot of the three wooden steps. She looked up at the door.

Tammit watched her. In the three weeks he had traveled with her, he had learned to read the small movements of her shoulders. When they drew up tight like that, she was thinking of the road, of someone she had lost on it. When they settled low, she was tired. When they rolled forward, she was about to say something kind and would pretend she had not.

Her shoulders drew up tight.

She climbed the steps. The wood gave a little under her weight, a sound like a held breath let out. She raised her knuckles and knocked on the door, three slow raps, the way you knock when you are not sure anyone will hear you and have decided to do it anyway.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Nothing answered.

She waited a full count, the way he had seen her wait at the other doors that morning. The wind moved in the climbing rose. Somewhere inside the house, something small shifted, settling, and then the silence came back thicker than before.

"Mr. Danvers," Maren said to the wood. "Miss Danvers. Miss Clara Danvers. I have a letter for you from your cousin Edik, and one from the tax office at Brenn, and a wedding invitation from the Fenns up the hill."

She spoke each name the way you speak a name to a person in the room. Tammit felt something move in his chest, small and uncomfortable, like a stone shifting under a stream.

She did not wait again. She crouched, set the letters on the threshold one at a time, and slid each one under the door with two fingers. The first caught on a warped floorboard and she coaxed it through. The second followed. The third, the wedding invitation, she held for a moment longer.

"Fenns up the hill," she repeated, softer. "Married in spring. They wanted you to know."

She slid it under.

When she stood, her hand rested on the doorframe for a breath. Her thumb traced the place where a nameplate had been nailed and removed, leaving four small holes in the wood like a row of dropped stitches.

She came back down the steps.

Tammit had not moved. He stood with his hands in his pockets, and his right hand, the one Pim had taught to be quick and clever, was curled into a knot he could not undo.

"Do you do that at every house?" he asked. His voice sounded strange to him, too old for his throat.

"Every house that has someone who might come home," Maren said. "Or someone who might want to know they were remembered, even if they never do come home."

She walked on to the next mailbox.

Tammit looked back at the Danvers porch. The three letters were gone under the door, and the wind moved the rose against the bricks, and nothing else happened. He wanted to say something to the house. He did not know what. In the city, in the alleys Pim had shown him, there were words for doors that did not open, and most of them were not kind.

He turned and followed Maren.

The fourth mailbox was dented at the side and leaned five degrees off the post, the way a man leans when he has been standing too long in one place. Its flag was missing. Maren sorted through the bundle she carried and came up with two letters and a small square card.

"This one is for old Mrs. Pol," she said. "Or it was. I remember her keeping canaries. The whole lane used to wake up to them."

She handed him the square card. It was heavier than the letters, printed in a clean city hand. Tammit turned it over. On the back, in smaller letters, were the words: In memory of Pelagia Pol, 1841 to 1907. The service will be held at the chapel on Wren Street.

"It's a funeral notice," Tammit said.

"A memorial," Maren said. "She died nine years ago. The notice was sent to her sister in the north, who sent it back here because she did not know what else to do with it."

She took the card from his hand and held it for a moment, looking at the small printed letters. Then she went up the path of the Pol house, knocked three times, said Mrs. Pol's name into the wood, and slid the card under the sill with the same care she had given the Danvers letters.

Tammit counted, this time. She knocked three times at every door. She waited a count of seven. She spoke a name if she knew one. She knelt and she slid the post under with two fingers. At the houses where she knew no name, she said only, "For whoever lives here, or did. I have brought your letters home."

The sun climbed a little higher. The shadows of the empty houses shortened against the paving stones. Tammit's pack grew lighter as Maren emptied hers, and his throat grew tight in a way he could not explain and did not want to.

At the seventh house, the smallest on the lane, Maren stopped in the path and did not move.

Tammit came up beside her. "What is it?"

The door of the little house was open. Not broken, not pried, but set ajar the way a door is left when someone has stepped out for a moment and meant to come back. The wood of the threshold was dark with weather, but the dust of the floor inside was disturbed. There were small prints in it, the kind a child might leave, though the dust was too old to hold a clear shape.

Maren stood very still. Her shoulders settled low, and then they did not move at all.

"Maren," Tammit said.

"There was a family here," she said. "Carters, they were called. The mother took in sewing. The father drove the mail coach before they stopped running. They had a girl."

She did not say what had happened to the girl. She did not need to. The lane said it for her, in every empty window and every silent step.

Maren went up to the door. She did not knock. She stood on the threshold with one hand on the frame, the way she had rested her hand on the Danvers door, and looked into the dark of the little house.

"I have a letter," she said, to no one, to the dust, to whoever had stepped out and not come back. "It is from your aunt in Port Selwyn. She writes every year at the turn of the season. I do not know if anyone has read them since you left."

She slid the envelope through the gap of the open door. It disappeared into the dark. There was no sound of it landing.

Maren stood for a moment longer. Then she stepped back, and Tammit saw her press her knuckle hard against her mouth, the way you press against something to keep it from coming out.

She turned and walked past him down the path.

"Maren," he said again.

She did not stop. She did not answer. She went on to the eighth mailbox, and Tammit followed, and the Hollow stretched on before them in its long curve of silent houses, and the wind kept moving the climbing rose against the bricks, and the sun kept climbing, and somewhere inside one of these empty rooms a letter lay on a dusty floor with no one coming to pick it up.

Maren went to the eighth mailbox. Then the ninth. She walked with her head a little down, the satchel swinging against her hip, and Tammit followed two steps behind with his hands in his pockets and his mouth shut. He did not know her long enough to say the right thing. He knew her well enough to know that saying nothing was the right thing.

The Hollow kept unspooling. More empty houses. More silent windows. More boxes with names that no longer answered to anything. Maren spoke to each one in turn, and her voice carried back to him low and even, the words gone before he could catch them. Once he heard his own name. Once he heard Pim's.

Then she stopped.

At the end of the lane, where the road curved off into a stand of birches that had gone the color of old silver in the climbing sun, the last house stood. It was smaller than the others. The paint on its shutters had weathered to the color of bone left out in the weather. The chimney leaned a little to the left, as if it had been listening for something and had bent closer to hear it. A single window, high and round, watched the lane like an eye that had forgotten how to close.

Maren did not go to the mailbox.

She was looking at the doorway.

There was a woman there.

She sat on the threshold with her back against the frame, her legs folded under her, a book open across her knees. She was young, or near young, with the kind of face that looked like it had been thinking too hard for too long. Her hair was cut short and uneven, the way hair looks when it has been done with a dull blade by someone who did not much care how it came out. Her cuffs were stained dark, ink or berry or something older, and at her hip a satchel bulged with the corners of books poking out like the ears of small animals hiding under a blanket.

She did not look up when they came.

"Excuse me," Maren said. Her voice came out careful. "Are you well?"

The woman turned a page. The sound of it was loud in the quiet of the lane.

"I am well," she said. Her voice was soft and breathy, the kind of voice that sounded like it had been wrapped in cloth. "I am only reading."

"May we come past?"

"You may." She still did not look up. "But the door is shut. I have been sitting here three years and I have not gone in."

Tammit looked at Maren. Maren looked at the woman. The woman read her book. The sun moved a finger's width across the lane, and a petal came loose from the climbing rose on the next house and drifted down and lay on the path between them, pink against the grey.

"Three years," Tammit said, before he could think better of it.

The woman turned another page.

"Give or take," she said. "The seasons blur."

Tammit stepped forward, slow. The silence of the lane had been one kind of silence all morning. This silence was a different kind. It was the silence of someone waiting for something they were not sure would ever come. He knew that silence. He had heard it in his own chest, on the nights Pim had been gone too long on a job and the door at the inn had stayed shut past dark.

"What are you reading?" he asked.

The woman looked up. Her eyes were grey and tired and very kind. She tilted the book so he could see the cover. The title was in a language he did not know, but the illustration was of a flower with too many petals, the way some flowers get when they have been drawn by someone who has seen the real one too many times in a dream.

"It is about the Letterflower," she said. "Have you heard of it?"

"No," Tammit said.

"It is a flower that only grows where a letter has been left unread for a hundred years. The roots feed on the waiting." She said it the way you say the time of day. "The book says there is one in this lane. I have been trying to find it."

"You have been sitting on this doorstep three years to find a flower?"

"No." She closed the book. She ran her thumb along the edge of it, the way Maren ran her thumb along the edge of an envelope. "I have been sitting on this doorstep three years because my grandmother sent me a letter the day before she died, and I have not been able to bring myself to read it."

The lane was very quiet. Somewhere a bird called, and the call was not answered. Tammit heard the wind move through the birches, and under it the dry whisper of the rose canes against the bricks, and under that the even softer sound of Maren breathing.

Maren set her satchel down on the path. She did it slowly, the way she did everything. Then she crouched, the way she had crouched at the Danvers door, until she was eye to eye with the woman on the threshold.

"What is your name?" Maren asked.

"Wren," the woman said. "Wren Pell."

"Wren Pell," Maren said, tasting the name. "I am Maren. This is Tammit."

"Hello," Tammit said.

"Hello," said Wren Pell. She had not moved from the threshold. Her hands were folded over the closed book, and the ink on her cuffs caught the sun. "Are you the letter-carrier?"

"Yes," Maren said.

"I have heard of you." Wren spoke the way someone speaks when they have been alone a long time and are no longer sure how loud a voice should be. "People say you walk the long road. People say you bring letters to the empty places."

"Some of them are empty," Maren said. "Some of them are not."

"I am not empty," Wren said. "I am full.

"I am not empty," Wren said. "I am full."

Maren did not flinch. She had delivered letters to people who were full of all the wrong things, people who had stuffed themselves so full of grief they could not move, people who had swallowed their anger like stones and sat upon them for years. She knew the look. She had worn it herself.

"What are you full of, Wren Pell?"

The question hung in the birches. Wren's fingers tightened on the book.

"Her," she said. "My grandmother. Every word she ever said to me. Every silence. Every time she reached for my hand and stopped herself. I am full of her, and I cannot put her down."

Tammit shifted on the path. He had been thirteen when his mother died of the swamp fever in the cold season, and he had carried her in his chest like a coal for two years before Pim had come and pulled it out, not gently, but pulled. He knew what it was to be full.

"Will you let us in?" Maren asked. She did not say please. She did not need to. The please was in the angle of her head, in the way she did not rise from her crouch.

Wren looked at the book in her hands. She looked at the lane. She looked at the closed door behind her, as if consulting someone on the other side.

Then she stood, and stepped aside, and the door was open.

The Hollow House smelled of dust and dried apples and something older, something mineral, like the inside of a well. Tammit's boots left prints in the floor's pale skin. There were shapes under the dustcloth on the side table. A clock on the mantle, stopped. A cup with a lipstick mark still on the rim. A pair of spectacles folded on the windowsill, one lens cracked through like a frozen pond.

"Down here," Wren said, and led them through a doorway hung with a curtain of faded blue.

The parlor was smaller than Tammit had expected. A window with a torn curtain. Two chairs, one of them tipped over, as if someone had risen in a hurry and not come back. A rug, rolled to one side. And beneath where the rug had been, the floor.

He saw it at once. A plank near the hearth, darker than the others, the seam around it swollen and split. A crack running through it like a vein.

"I found it this morning," Wren said. She was standing by the window with her hands folded over the book again, as if she did not trust them. "When I was sweeping. I thought it was just the house settling. But it wasn't. It was her hand."

"Your grandmother?" Maren said.

"She must have written it here. She couldn't have written it anywhere else, she was too weak to walk by then. She must have crawled down here at night when I was asleep, and pried up the board, and put the letter underneath, and put the board back, and crawled back upstairs."

Wren's voice was steady in the way a held breath is steady.

"Why didn't she just give it to you?" Tammit asked.

"Because she knew I would open it." Wren looked at the book in her hands. "She knew I would read it while she was still alive. And she could not bear to watch me read it. She wanted me to read it when she was gone. She wanted me to read it as a letter, not as a conversation."

Maren crossed the parlor. She knelt beside the cracked board. She put her hand on it, flat, the way she put her hand on a letter she was about to deliver.

"Will you let me?" she asked.

Wren nodded.

Maren worked her fingers into the seam. The board groaned, then gave. Underneath was a pocket of dust and the faint sweet smell of cedar, and there, in the dust, a square of paper, yellowed at the edges, folded once.

She lifted it out. She held it for a moment, feeling the weight of it. Then she turned and held it out to Wren.

"It's for you," she said. "I cannot be the one."

Wren crossed the room. Her bare feet on the dusty floor made no sound at all.

She took the letter. She unfolded it.

The parlor was very quiet. Through the torn curtain Tammit could see the birches, and the lane, and, at the edge of the lane, two figures he had not noticed before. Pim with his cap in his hands. Rook Stonebrook standing the way Rook Stonebrook always stood, as if he had been planted there.

They must have come up the lane while Wren was talking. Pim caught Tammit's eye through the glass and lifted one shoulder, half a shrug, half an apology. Tammit lifted one back.

Wren read.

"Dearest Bird," she read, and her voice broke on the word.

Pim moved before Tammit did. He came in through the parlor door as if he had been listening at it, which he probably had, and he crossed the room and took Wren's free hand in both of his.

Wren did not look at him. She looked at the letter. She read.

"I am writing this by candlelight because I cannot sleep and because tomorrow you will be twenty-one and I will not see it. I have known this for some months. The doctor in the village told me in the spring, and I have not told you, and that is the first wrong thing I have done, and I am sorry for it, but I could not bear to see your face change. I wanted to keep your face the way it was when you were small and laughed at the cat and would not eat the crusts. I am sorry. I am so sorry.

I am writing this to tell you four things. The first is that the cottage is yours. The deed is in the tin under the loose brick by the stove. The second is that the rose by the door was planted by your grandfather for me on the day you were born, and you must not let it die. The third is that you are braver than you think you are. I know because I have watched you. I have watched you for twenty-one years, and you are braver than you know. The fourth thing is the hardest.

The fourth thing is that you must read this only once. You must read it and then you must put it down. You must not carry it around with you. You must not take it out and read it again at three in the morning when the house is quiet. You must not use it as a reason to stay on the doorstep. You must read it and then you must go and live, my bird, because I did not raise you to sit on a threshold for the rest of your life, however much I would have liked you to stay.

I am not going to say goodbye. I am going to say go. That is what my mother said to me, and I hated her for it at the time, and now I understand. Go. Go and do the things. Go and find the flowers. Go and fall in love with whoever it is going to be. Go and be full of me if you must, but do not let being full of me keep you small.

Your grandmother, Eda"

The room was very still. Wren was weeping. She wept the way some people laugh, in sudden helpless bursts, the tears coming before the sound, and the sound coming before the breath. The letter shook in her hand and Pim held her other hand and the dust motes in the parlor turned slow in the light from the torn curtain.

Through the window, Rook Stonebrook had not moved. He stood at the edge of the lane with his arms folded and his jaw set and his eyes on the road in both directions, and he kept watch the way he had kept watch for years, the way he would keep watch for years to come, because that was what he could do, that was the only thing he had left to give.

Maren sat down on the floor beside the pried-up board. She took off her hat. She put it in her lap. She looked at the dust in the crack and at the faint sweet smell of cedar and at the letter in Wren's shaking hands.

"Read it again," she said quietly.

"No," Wren said. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "She said not to."

"She was wrong," Maren said.

Wren looked at her. Maren looked back. After a moment Wren nodded, and she read it again, slower this time, and when she came to the fourth thing her voice broke and Pim's grip tightened and Maren closed her eyes and Tammit, standing by the door with his cap in his hands, felt something loosen in his own chest that he had not known was tight.

When she finished, Wren folded the letter. She folded it the way Maren folded letters, in three careful folds, and she held it against her heart for a moment, and then she set it down on the floor beside the pried-up board.

"I think," she said, and stopped. She tried again. "I think I would like to go and live now. If that is all right. If she would not mind."

Maren picked up her hat. She put it on. She rose.

"She would not mind," she said. "She spent the whole letter telling you to."

Wren looked at the room. She looked at the tipped chair and the torn curtain and the rolled rug and the cracked board and the dust and the letter on the floor.

"Then I am going to need help," she said. "I am going to need help packing the cups and the clock and the things. I am going to need help deciding which things to bring and which things to leave. I am going to need help with the rose."

"We can help with the rose," Pim said. He had not let go of her hand. "I am very good with roses. I stole one once and it lived for years."

Wren laughed. It was a small laugh, and a surprised one, as if she had not expected the sound to come out of her.

Tammit looked at Maren. Maren looked back at him. There was, in her face, the thing he had seen at the Danvers door and the Garren door and a hundred other doors along the long road, the thing she carried with her, the thing she did not name. It was not a sad thing. It was only a full thing. She was full, the way Wren had been full, the way he himself was full of his mother and the coal in his chest, except that Maren had learned to walk with it, the way a tree walks with a wound in its trunk, slowly, and a little bent, and toward the light.

"Good," she said.

She picked up her satchel from where she had set it down on the path, and she slung it over her shoulder, and she went out into the lane to bring Pim and Rook in, because there was work to do, and the work was not over, and the road went on.