Part 7
Eighteen months after sentencing, Eli worked in the prison maintenance shop rebuilding motors for ventilation fans. The work required patience more than strength. When a bearing began to fail, he could hear the thin metallic complaint before younger men noticed anything wrong.
One afternoon, the mail officer handed him an envelope from Anna.
She wrote that the divorce was final and the Alder Street house had been sold. The blue cabinets were somebody else’s problem now. She had rented a small place where no one else held a key.
She still woke at certain sounds, and some evenings she left every light burning. But the week before writing, she had slept for the first time with her bedroom door completely closed.
Eli read that sentence three times.
Anna did not say she forgave him. She did not promise another letter. At the bottom of the page, she had written:
I wanted you to know I chose the door.
That night, Eli took out the envelope Dolores had given him on his first day home. Ruth’s handwriting had faded slightly where his fingers had handled it through the years.
He opened it.
His mother wrote about ordinary things: the leak beneath her sink, Dolores’s loud television, the sparrows that fought over seed outside the kitchen window. She did not mention how often she had cut her tablets in half or tell him that her chest hurt.
She asked him not to let prison decide what remained of him. She said Anna’s silence probably contained a reason he could not yet see. She told him that coming home would be harder than leaving because no gate could return the man who had entered.
At the end were four words:
Come home as yourself.
A tear struck the paper and softened the edge of the last word. Eli did not wipe it away.
The evening whistle sounded, and doors opened along the tier as men began moving toward dinner. Eli folded Anna’s letter inside Ruth’s and placed them beside the courthouse photograph.
In the picture, Anna’s veil still covered half his laughing face, and Ruth stood behind them with her hand raised against the sun.
Eli closed the locker.
From the maintenance shop below came the faint, uneven rattle of a motor he had not finished repairing. He listened until he located the fault, then joined the line moving down the stairs.