The Journal

Chapter One: The Find

I've been trying to figure out how to start this for a long time. Longer than you'd think. I'm not a man who has trouble with words usually — I've written enough of them over the years to fill a room — but this particular story has always sat just outside the reach of the right ones. Maybe because it isn't really a story. Stories have a shape you can hold. This is more like something that happened to me the way weather happens, the way grief happens, all at once and then for the rest of your life in smaller ways you don't always recognize.

My name is Jackson. I'm going to tell you about the year I was thirteen.

We moved to Harlow in September of 1984, three weeks after my father died. My mother made the decision quickly, the way she made most decisions that year — with a kind of desperate efficiency, like if she kept moving fast enough the sadness couldn't catch her. I understand that now. I didn't then. Then it just felt like the last solid thing coming loose.

My father had been the kind of man who filled a room without trying. Not loud — he wasn't loud — but present in a way that you only understood when the presence was gone. The house we'd lived in, the one I'd grown up in, was so full of him after he died that every room felt like a held breath. I think my mother couldn't bear it. I think she was right to leave. But I was thirteen and I hadn't learned yet to separate what's right from what hurts, so to me it felt like abandonment. His, then hers, in that order.

The house on Calloway Street was a tall, narrow thing at the end of a quiet road, with a front porch that leaned slightly to the left and a maple tree in the yard that had already given up on its leaves by the time we arrived. My mother said it had character. I thought it looked tired. We were probably both right.

I wasn't doing well in school. I should say that plainly because it matters. I'd always been a decent student — not exceptional, but attentive, the kind of boy teachers liked without particularly remembering — but that autumn I had lost the ability to care about things like algebra and the causes of the First World War. I sat in the back of classrooms in a school where I knew no one and watched the days go by like weather outside a window I couldn't open. I ate lunch alone. I didn't try to change that. I think I had decided somewhere beneath conscious thought that caring about things led to losing them, and that the solution was to stop caring. It seemed logical at thirteen. It seemed like the only sane response to what the year had done.

I don't say any of this for sympathy. I say it because you need to understand who I was before the journal. Before Annie. You need to know what she found when she found me, so you understand what it meant that she stayed.

I was a boy with nowhere to put

himself. And then I found

somewhere.

The smell was what started it.

Something old and papery had been seeping under his bedroom door since the day they moved in, faint enough that he'd almost convinced himself he was imagining it. His mother had painted the room before they arrived — a practical beige that she called neutral and he called the color of giving up — and for the first week the smell of paint was strong enough to cover everything else. But by the second week the paint smell had faded and the other smell was still there, patient and persistent, waiting.

He pulled his desk away from the wall first. Nothing. Then the bookshelf, which was empty because he hadn't unpacked his books yet, hadn't been able to make himself do it, as if unpacking meant staying and staying meant this was real.

Behind the bookshelf was just wall, slightly darker where the paint hadn't quite reached.

Then he tried the radiator.

It was an old cast iron thing, heavy and ornate in the way that radiators used to be, with a valve at the side that ticked and hissed on cold nights like something alive and unhappy. He wrapped both hands around the near edge and pulled. It resisted for a moment — the resistance of something that hadn't moved in a very long time — and then gave suddenly, scraping a long pale scar across the floorboards as it came.

The gap behind it was barely wide enough for his arm.

He knelt down and looked. Dark back there, and dusty, and he could see where the floorboards didn't quite meet the wall, a thin irregular gap that ran the length of the radiator. The smell was stronger here. Definitely coming from here. He pressed his cheek against the cold floor and looked along the gap and saw, just at the edge of where the light reached, something that wasn't wall and wasn't floor.

He reached in.

His fingers found it before his eyes did — the texture of it, cloth and board, slightly rough, slightly soft. He worked it toward him carefully, the way you'd move something fragile, though he didn't know yet why he was being careful. It came free with a small sound like an exhaled breath, trailing a ghost of dust behind it.

He sat back on his heels and looked at what he was holding.

It was a journal. Small, maybe six inches by four, with a dark green cloth cover that had faded unevenly so that the creases were almost black and the raised parts had gone a kind of pale sage. No name on the front. No title, no markings of any kind. Just the cover and a small water stain in the bottom right corner that had dried into the shape of a country he didn't recognize. He turned it over. Nothing on the back either.

He sat down fully on the floor, his back against the displaced radiator, and held the journal in both hands for a moment without opening it. It was the kind of object that had weight beyond its actual weight. He could feel that without being able to explain it. Something about the way it had been kept — not thrown away, not lost accidentally, but placed. Wedged into that gap with deliberateness, with intention. Someone had put it there. Someone had wanted it to stay.

He opened the cover.

The first page had no date, no salutation, nothing to indicate where or when or who. Just handwriting, small and careful, each letter formed with the kind of attention that suggested the writer had thought about penmanship, had maybe even been taught to think about it. The ink was dark blue, slightly faded at the edges of each stroke.

I don't think anyone will ever read this.

He paused there. It felt, as he'd later try to explain to himself, like catching someone in the middle of something private. Like a door opened onto a room where someone was alone in the way people are only alone when they're sure no one is watching. He almost closed it.

But I like pretending someone might.

He kept reading.

The entries were undated and unaddressed. Some filled whole pages, front and back, in that same careful hand. Others were just a sentence or two, as if she — he knew almost immediately it was a she, something in the cadence of it, the particular way she circled around feelings rather than naming them directly — had sat down with something to say and then thought better of how to say it and settled for less. She wrote about small things mostly. The way afternoon light came through a particular window and made the dust in the air look like something worth looking at. A song she'd heard on the radio that she couldn't stop hearing. The specific quality of silence in an empty house, which she seemed to know well. A dream she'd had twice now and didn't know what to do with.

She didn't explain herself. She didn't provide context or background, didn't say where she was or who she was beyond the fact of her thoughts on the page. She wrote like someone who had stopped expecting to be understood and found, in that surrender, a kind of freedom. There was no performance in it. That was what kept him reading. Every word felt true in the way that most words didn't.

The room darkened around him and he didn't notice.

He was perhaps two thirds of the way through when he found the entry that changed the quality of the whole thing. It was shorter than most of the others, the handwriting slightly less composed, as if written faster or with more feeling than usual:

*I've been thinking about who might find this someday. I know that's a strange thing to think about. I know it probably means no one will, that the universe has a sense of humor about that sort of thing. But I find myself thinking about it anyway. Wondering what kind of person you'd have to be to find something like this and actually read it. I think you'd have to be a little bit lonely. I think you'd have to be the kind of person who understands that some things are too real for regular conversation.*

*If I'm right about you — if you're who I think you might be — then I want you to know something before you get to the last page. I put instructions there. Please don't skip ahead. Read all of this first. I wanted someone to know me a little before they did. I think that's not too much to ask.*

He read the entry twice. Then he looked up at the dark window across the room and sat with the particular feeling the words had produced in him, which was something close to being known, which was something he hadn't felt in a long time.

He turned back to the beginning and started again.

She asked me not to skip ahead and

I didn't. I want to be clear about

that. Some part of me understood

even then that it mattered — that it

was the first thing she'd asked of me

and that how I responded to it

would mean something, even if only

to myself. So I went back to the first

page and I read every word she'd

written, all of it, slowly. It took a

long time. My mother knocked on

the door at some point and asked

about dinner and I said I wasn't

hungry, which wasn't true, and she

went away, and I kept reading.

By the time I finished the room was

completely dark. I was reading by

the light from the hallway, the journal tilted toward the strip of yellow under the door.

I've thought about her a lot over the years — about who she was when she wrote those pages, about what her life looked like, about whether she ever imagined someone like me finding them. I think she did. I think that's why she wrote the way she wrote. Not for herself, not really, whatever she told herself. She was writing for the person who would come after. She was writing for me, in whatever way it's possible to write for someone you'll never meet.

She was writing to be found.

And I found her.

He turned to the last page.

The instructions were written in the same hand as everything else but darker, the pen pressed harder into the paper as if she'd wanted to make absolutely certain these particular words would last. They were simple. Three lines only, centered on the page, with space around them that made them feel more serious than three lines had any right to feel.

Write to me.

Close the journal when you're done.

Come back tomorrow.

He read them once. Then again. Then a third time, though by the third time he had already memorized them, was already turning them over in his mind the way you turn over something you've decided to keep.

They should have seemed strange. He was aware of that. Instructions written in a journal found behind a radiator in a house he'd lived in for eleven days, left by someone he didn't know, asking him to write to them as if that were a normal thing to ask. He was thirteen and even at thirteen he understood that this was not a normal thing. Some part of him held that knowledge at a careful distance and examined it.

But there was another part, quieter and more honest, that was thinking something else entirely. That part was thinking about the entry he'd read, the one that said I think you'd have to be a little bit lonely. That part was thinking about how she'd asked him to read everything first, to know her a little, and how he had, and how he did — how he felt, sitting on the cold floor in the dark with the journal open in his lap, that he knew something real about whoever had held this book before him. That part was thinking: someone wanted to be written to.

And so did he. He just hadn't known it until now.

He sat there a long time. The house settled around him, making its nighttime sounds, the particular creaks and exhalations of an old building that had been standing through many winters and many families and had its own opinion about both. He thought about his father, which he tried not to do at night because at night it was worse. He thought about the word somewhere, which he hadn't used in a while because he hadn't had one.

Then he got up, turned on the lamp, found a pen in the box on his desk that he still hadn't fully unpacked, and sat back down on the floor with the journal open to the first blank page he could find.

He held the pen over the paper for a long moment.

Then he wrote:

Hello. Are you there?

He stared at the words. They seemed both too small and exactly right. He didn't write anything else. He closed the journal, the way she'd asked. He put it on his desk, not in a drawer, not back behind the radiator — on the desk where he could see it from his bed.

Then he pushed the radiator back against the wall, turned off the lamp, and lay in the dark listening to the house.

He didn't sleep for a long time. But it was a different kind of awake than usual. It had something in it he hadn't felt in months.

It had something that felt, cautiously, like tomorrow.