The Unsent Postcard

The tape on the last box came away with a rip. The box had been standing behind the door for three weeks, waiting to be opened. Nell held the cardboard on her knees and looked inside. On the side of the box, in Mom's thick marker, it said "NELL — BEDROOM — UNBREAKABLE." The word unbreakable was underlined twice, as if the movers would never believe it otherwise.

Books were on top. They leaned against each other, spines touching, a little bent from the journey. Nell lifted them out one by one and lined them up on the floor. Each cover had a thin gray film of dust from her old room. She wiped it off with her finger, and then wished she hadn't.

Underneath were her pencil case, a tangle of cables and a half-finished notebook. On the last page of the notebook was Ivy's handwriting. It was a list they had written together at recess: ten things to do over summer vacation. Number three was "ride our bikes all the way to the bridge." None of them had a check mark next to it.

Nell closed the notebook and slid it in among the books, somewhere in the middle. She didn't want to throw it away. She didn't want to look at it either. The middle was a good place for it, halfway between the two.

At the very bottom, wedged between the books, she found a postcard. She had bought it on the ferry, from the spinning rack beside the snack bar. On the front were a blue sea and a white lighthouse. The back was completely blank, and even the address lines were a faded gray.

She was going to write to Ivy. She had promised before the move, on the pier, just before the ferry left. That day Ivy had held Nell's arm with both hands and said, "Every week. Not on the phone, though. Something real, something written by hand."

Ivy had cried then. Nell hadn't. She hadn't cried while the ropes were untied, or while she waved. Later, out on the ferry's deck, when Mom had gone to get tea and nobody could see her, she had. The wind had pushed the tears sideways across her cheeks toward her ears. The card had been in her pocket the whole time, and that was why one corner was bent.

Nell set the card on the corner of her desk. Exactly in the corner, its edges lined up with the edges of the desk.

The room still smelled faintly of paint. The walls were white, too white, as if nobody had ever lived here. In her old room there had been a nail hole in the wall, and a felt-tip mark she had made when she was seven. Mom had tried to scrub that mark off for years, and then she had given up. There was no mark like that here.

Out in the hallway Mom was wrestling with the pieces of a bookcase. Every time the Allen key bit into a screw, there was a small squeak. At one point she called, "Nell, can you hold this board for me?"

Nell went and held it. Mom had a stripe of dust across her forehead, and a strand of hair had escaped from her clip. For a while they worked without talking. While she tightened a screw, Mom glanced at her once. She looked as if she were about to say something, then changed her mind and kept turning the key.

"The window looks out at the sea," she said at last. "I'm still not used to it."

"Mm."

"In the old place you could see the balcony across the street. The laundry, the air conditioner humming."

Nell shrugged. On the balcony across the street there had been a man who smoked out there every evening. Nell had never waved to him, and he had never waved to her. Still, she had liked knowing he was there. Now there was only the sea outside the window, and the sea didn't belong to anybody.

"I know," Nell said. Her voice came out harder than she meant it to.

Mom didn't say anything. She put in the last screw and pushed the bookcase back against the wall. Nell heard her own voice again inside her ears, and her face went hot. She knew Mom hadn't exactly wanted to come either. Mom's job had moved here, to the little hospital in town. The evening she had first heard about it, Nell had shut herself in her room and slammed the door.

She wanted to say sorry. When she opened her mouth, all that came out was, "Which box are my old pillowcases in?"

"The blue one," Mom said. Her voice hadn't changed. She put the Allen key in her pocket and walked toward the boxes at the far end of the hallway.

Nell ran her hand along the side panel of the bookcase. It was solid and didn't wobble at all. Mom had always been good at things like this.

She opened the blue box. The pillowcases were right on top, and they still carried the smell of the detergent from the old house. Nell pressed one against her face and stood like that for a moment. Then she pulled it over her pillow and tugged the corners straight. It was the only familiar smell in the room now, apart from her own skin.

The first week, Ivy had written every day. In the morning a photo would arrive: the school gate, a grilled cheese from the cafeteria, a face drawn on the fogged-up window of the bus. At lunch, a joke, usually an impression of someone in their class. And at night, a long voice message.

Nell had listened to every voice message twice. The first time she listened to what Ivy was saying. The second time she listened to the sounds behind her. The school hallway was in there, the clatter of the cafeteria, the hiss of the brakes on the bus from their old neighborhood. Once she had even recognized the math teacher coughing in the background. She had heard that cough for a whole year, and hearing it through the phone's speaker had made her strangely happy.

In the second week the messages got shorter. Photos still came, but without any words under them. The jokes shrank to one line. The voice messages were never longer than thirty seconds, and the sounds behind them had faded.

Nell pretended not to notice. She kept her own messages long. She told Ivy about the town's bakery, the gulls, the smell of her room. Then one day she looked at a paragraph she had written and saw that Ivy's whole answer was a single smiley face.

In the third week, one evening, Ivy wrote "I'll text you later." She had added a sleepy face.

And then nothing came.

For three days Nell checked her phone in the morning, and again at lunch. Tonight at dinner she set the phone beside her plate, screen up. Mom looked at the phone, then at Nell, and said nothing. She only pushed the salad bowl a little closer to Nell.

The empty space at the top of the screen looked a little bigger every time. There was no notification, but the lack of one was something too. It was a heavy thing, like a stone carried around in a pocket.

Has she forgotten, Nell wondered. Or is she just busy with new things? She couldn't decide which was worse. Forgetting was at least an accident. Being busy was a choice.

She opened the phone and scrolled up through the old messages. The ones from the first week were huge, spilling past the edges of the screen. As she scrolled down they got shorter and shorter, like going down a staircase. At the very bottom, the very last thing, was the sleepy face. Nell locked the screen and dropped the phone at the far end of the bed.

That night she sat at her desk and pulled the card toward her. From her pencil case she picked her favorite pen, the black one with the fine tip. She and Ivy had bought the same pen, at the stationery store, on the same day. She pulled off the cap.

She held the pen over the card. The tip stopped a millimeter above the paper.

"Dear Ivy," she thought of starting. That was too formal, as if she were writing a letter to the principal. "Hi Ivy," she thought next. That sounded like the messages they sent every day, and a card deserved more than that. A card needed a stamp, a mailbox, a journey of several days. Traveling all that way just to say "hi" would be strange.

The hard part was what came after. Should she write that she didn't know anyone here? That her room was too white? That Ivy hadn't written in three days? If she wrote those things, the card would read like a complaint. If she wrote none of them, it would read like a lie.

And there was something else: a card traveled slowly. Whatever Nell wrote today, Ivy would read it a week from now. A week from now Nell might be a different Nell. Maybe less lonely, maybe more. But the Nell inside the card would stay exactly as she was, tonight's Nell.

Nell didn't like that idea. Then she liked it a little. A message went stale the moment you sent it, and a new one piled on top. A card, though, stayed on its road, and nobody could touch it. Nell couldn't take it back, and Ivy couldn't read it any sooner.

She put the cap back on the pen. Then she took it off again. Then she put it back on. Each time the cap went on, it made a small click.

She glanced at the phone one more time. The screen was dark. She reached out her hand but didn't turn it on.

She slid the card back to the corner of the desk, lined up just as before. On the front the lighthouse stood white and straight. The back was still blank. But now the blankness seemed to mean something, like a kind of waiting.

Nell got up and went to the window. The glass was cool, and she rested her forehead against it. Her breath left a small cloud on the pane that faded away again.

A motorbike went by below, its sound rising and falling as it climbed the hill. Then there was only the wind again. In the old house, the night had never been quiet. There were buses, a car alarm going off somewhere, the upstairs neighbor's television. Nell had learned to sleep through all of it without even noticing. Here the silence was so big that her ears kept searching for something to fill it.

The town was small. There was a pier, a bakery, a pharmacy, and at the end of the street a shop with its metal shutter pulled down. Houses with red roofs climbed the hillside in rows, and the ones at the top looked out at the sea the most. All day a salty wind had been blowing. Now it had died down a little, leaving only a thin whistle in the window frame.

During the day she had watched the gulls. In the mornings they shrieked on the rooftops, as if each one were boasting about having woken up before the others. At midday they flew down to the pier and wheeled around the fishermen's buckets. An old fisherman had shaken his head at them, but he had still left the lid of his bucket open. Nell had almost laughed when she saw that. Nobody was looking at her, but she hadn't laughed anyway.

Now the pier was empty. The masts of the boats swayed gently. The ropes creaked on the water, like a door far away.

Under the lamp at the start of the pier, a cat was sitting with its tail wrapped around its paws. It watched the water for a while, then got up and walked slowly into the dark. Nell wondered where the cat was going. In this town everyone, even the cats, had somewhere to go.

Out on the point, the lighthouse came on. A white beam swept across the sea and disappeared. Nell started counting. One, two, three. At nine the light came back.

She counted again, and again it was nine. The lighthouse had a rhythm of its own. It wasn't waiting for anybody, and it didn't want an answer from anyone. It shone, went dark and shone again.

The tenth time, Nell stopped counting. She knew when the light would come even without counting now. Her body had learned it on its own.

She tried to remember whether the shutter of the shop at the end of the street had been open that morning. She thought there had been a sound from there during the day, like metal knocking on metal. She wasn't sure. The sounds of the town didn't separate from one another yet; they were all one big hum of wind, gull, engine and wave.

Mom knocked on the door. She was holding two mugs, and one of them smelled of chamomile.

"Kitchen boxes tomorrow," she said. "Tonight I found the mugs, and that's all. The plates are still missing."

Nell took the mug. The warmth spread into her palms. Mom sat down on the edge of the bed and looked out the window, at the lighthouse. The lighthouse shone, then went dark.

"Nine seconds," Nell said.

"So you counted."

"Ten times."

Mom nodded. For a while they counted together, not out loud, just in their heads. Nell saw Mom's lips moving very slightly. This time she really did laugh, short and quiet. Mom laughed too, but neither of them said what they were laughing about.

"I was snappy before," Nell said. "In the hallway."

"I know," Mom said. "And I brought you here without asking you first."

Nell looked down at her mug. A thin curl of steam rose from the tea. As Mom stood up, she touched Nell's hair, once.

"Tell me about the hospital," Nell said.

"It's small," Mom said. "Everybody knows everybody. Today a nurse called me by my name, and I didn't know hers." She shrugged. "I'll learn it tomorrow."

"The pillowcases were in the blue box," she said from the doorway. "You found them."

"I found them."

The door stayed open a crack. The light from the hallway drew a thin line across the floor.

Nell sat cross-legged on the bed for a while. The edges of the new comforter were stiff, as if they had been starched; it wasn't used to anybody's body yet. She smoothed it with her hand. Tomorrow she would put the books on the shelf, and maybe the notebook too.

Nell finished her tea and set the mug on the desk, beside the card. The card was still there, its corner still a little bent. Maybe she would write it tomorrow. Maybe she wouldn't. She didn't need to know tonight.

The lighthouse beam passed the window one more time. It left a pale streak on the white wall of the room and was gone. Nine seconds later it came back.