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All you have to do is wait!
Your letter arrived this morning. We were in the dayroom for morning activities. Everyone was asleep.
I stared at the postmark. Kingsbridge. Straight away I could picture the muddy blue of the estuary, the little boats moored to the quay. I heard the slapping of water against the plastic buoys and the clack of rigging against the masts. I didn’t dare open the envelope. I just kept looking and looking and remembering.
Sister Lucy folded the letter carefully and tucked it back inside the envelope. Then she placed my post in my lap, as if that were the end of it. A warm tear slipped down the side of my nose. I hadn’t heard your name spoken for twenty years. I had held the words only inside my head.
“Aw,” said Sister Lucy. “Don’t be upset, Queenie. It’s all right.” She pulled a tissue from the family-­size box on the coffee table and carefully wiped the corner of my closed-­up eye, my stretched mouth, even the thing that is on the side of my face. She held my hand, and all I could think of was my hand in yours, long ago, in a stationery cupboard.
“Maybe Harold Fry will come tomorrow,” said Sister Lucy.
At the coffee table, Finty still scratched away at the foil window on her letter. “Come on, you little bugger,” she grunted.
“Did you say ‘Harold Fry’?” Sister Catherine jumped to her feet and clapped her hands as if she was trapping an insect. It was the loudest thing that had happened all morning, and everyone murmured “Oh, oh, oh” again. “How could I have forgotten? He rang yesterday. Yes. He rang from a phone box.” She spoke in small broken sentences, the way you do when you’re trying to make sense of something that essentially doesn’t. “The line was bad and he kept laughing. I couldn’t understand a word. Now I think about it, he was saying the same thing. About waiting. He said to tell you he was walking.” She slipped a yellow Post-­it note from her pocket and quickly unfolded it.
“Walking?” said Sister Lucy, suggesting this was not something she’d tried before.
A few of the volunteers laughed, and I nodded as if they were right, they were right to laugh, because it was too much, you see, to show the consternation inside me. My body felt both weak and hot.
“South Devon?” Sister Catherine paled. “Do you think he meant he’s walking to Northumberland from all the way down there?” She was not laughing anymore, and neither was anyone else. They were only looking at me and looking at your letter and seeming rather anxious and lost. Sister Catherine folded her Post-­it note and disappeared it into the side pocket of her robe.
I closed my eyes. A little later I felt the sisters hook their arms beneath me and lift my body into the wheelchair. It was like the way my father carried me when I was a girl and I had fallen asleep in front of the range. “Stille, stille,” my mother would say. I held tight on to your envelope, along with my notebook. I saw the dancing of crimson light beyond my eyelids as we moved from the dayroom to the corridor and then past the windows. I kept my eyes shut all the way, even as I was lowered onto the bed, even as the curtains were drawn with a whoosh against the pole, even as I heard the click of the door, afraid that if I opened my eyes the wash of tears would never stop.
Harold Fry is coming, I thought. I have waited twenty years, and now he is coming.