I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t think.
I couldn’t move.
I was paralyzed by the information overload, my brain threatening to shut down completely while trying to comprehend what Riley had just spent the last two hours telling me.
My father was not dead.
He was very much alive, rotting away in state prison for a crime that he didn’t commit.
I didn’t give a single shit that a judge and jury had found him guilty seventeen years ago. I didn’t care a bit that there was no one else that could have done it. I didn’t want to hear the evidence against him.
I knew my daddy. I knew that he was not capable of doing what he was accused of.
He just wasn’t.
My Daddy was kind. He was warm. He was gentle. He and my mama never argued, and if they did, it was quiet, behind closed doors, and it never bled out to me. He worked hard, did the best he could to provide for his family without a high school diploma in a small town. He was honest, never once taking something that he couldn’t afford. My mama loved him, she wore her wedding band for years in his absence. How could she love someone that wasn’t good?
So, the story that Riley fed me was horse shit, probably concocted by my spiteful grandmother. It didn’t surprise me in the least that she had enlisted Riley’s help keeping this secret from me. She’d pushed us together, insisting that we would be together. He was from good stock she once said, we would be a great match. As though we were living in the past, where arranged marriages to strengthen alliances were still done. And while a romantic relationship was never in the cards for us, at least as far as I was concerned, we had formed a bond, a friendship.
Whether that was out of desperation on my part or desire on his was not important. She’d seen our connection and had used it, exploiting it to get what she wanted, to keep me in the dark about the man that I longed for every day of my young life.
I was furious. Plain and simple, my blood simmered with pure hatred for the woman that had orchestrated this. I was angry with Riley, too, for keeping it from me. Yet, I didn’t blame him.
He was Nana’s attorney. Bound by law to keep her secrets, he couldn’t really have ever told me. Until now.
“Tell me again,” I plead.
Riley rolled his shoulders, undoubtedly stiff from sitting awkwardly on the end of the chaise for the last two and a half hours.
I’d spent the time pacing, stomping, screaming, crying, but Riley had remained in his seat with a calm that I didn’t know I’d ever feel again, telling me everything he knew, answering my barrage of questions, never once asking for a break.
I have to give it to him, he’d been much more patient than I would have been if the roles were reversed. But he knew that the curses I’d yelled at him weren’t aimed at him. I was in a state of shock, and the emotions I was experiencing were overflowing, desperate to find any way out of me. Even if that meant that I used him as a punching bag in the process.
“He has an appeal hearing this week.” He sighs, pulling his phone out of his pocket. After a brief moment of tapping the screen he looks back up. “It’s at the Lexington County Courthouse. Nine a.m.”
I nod, my fingers laced, my thumbs pressed against my lips. “I’m going,” I announce.
His face registers shock and he opens his mouth, undoubtedly to protest, but I shake my head hard. “Don’t even try to talk me out of it.”
“But, Grace. Listen to me. He’s—“
I hold up my hands. “Shut up!” I shout. “I don’t care what you say, dammit!” My voice cracks. “I want to see my daddy.”
Movement catches my attention, and I realize it’s my hands shaking. I cross my arms over my chest, hoping that he didn’t notice.
The thought of seeing him terrifies me. More than that day that I saw him lying in a pool of his own blood. I have a million worries.
Will he recognize me?
Will I recognize him?
What if he doesn’t want to see me?
I suck in a breath and hold it as long as I can, until my lungs begin to burn and my eyes water before releasing it with a loud whoosh. With the release of air, I let the questions go.
It doesn’t matter.
I’m going to see him, to let him know that I’m there, that I support him, and that I’m going to do whatever the hell it takes to get him out of the nightmare he’s been living.
The rest we can figure out later.
I spent the rest of the night reading through the letters in the folder, alternating between hysterical sobbing and laughing until my sides hurt.
Daddy had sent me a letter a week for the entire first year after his “death.” They remained positive, optimistic that he would see me soon, something that I’m sure he had begun to realize wouldn’t be coming to fruition.
But, the following year, the letters cut back to once a month. There was a change in his writing. Gone was the promises to see me again, in its place, sadness and despair. Most of them were short, a few sentences about how much he loved and missed me. Reassurance that he was doing fine. Questions about school.
The third year he’d started dating the letters, so it was easier to follow in chronological order. These letters were much more sporadic, but not nearly as devastating as the previous. In the letters that he sent he talked about his favorite memories of me, of us.
He would recount the time we borrowed a neighbor’s golf cart and then got it stuck in the marsh. He’d looked like a pig in mud that day, having to dig the wheels out and getting filthy in the process. I’d thought it was a great adventure, he’d made it that way, pretending to be a pirate digging for treasure while I laughed and squealed from the safety of the driver’s seat.
I’d belly laughed when I’d read that letter, remembering that day so clearly. There were quite a few more just like it.
But then I’d gotten to the letter he wrote to me on my eighteenth birthday. It had been the worst birthday I’d ever had. I’d just graduated high school, the valedictorian. I’d walked across the stage and looked out at the crowd, longing to have my parents there cheering me on. Instead, I’d seen my papa, smiling timidly, my nana beside him, her face pinched, looking impossibly bored.
My friends’ parents were throwing epic parties to honor them. Giving them lavish gifts, taking them to fancy dinners. My grandparents had given me a pat on the back and then excused themselves to the club.
My birthday had been just two days later.
My Dearest Grace,
You’re officially an adult today. Sometimes when I sleep I see your face, but not the chubby little child’s face that I’d last seen. No, I see you as you probably look today. And it takes my breath away how beautiful you are, how much like your mother you look. And I think to myself, God, how did I create something so perfect, so beautiful like you? The answer is that your mother probably had a lot more to do with that than I did, but nevertheless, I’ll take some credit.
You’ve probably graduated high school, doing something even your dear old dad never was able to do. I can’t begin to tell you how proud I am of you. I wonder what you’ll study in college. I know that you’re destined for great things, how could you not be?
I’ve had a lot of time to think, to reflect, to try to understand life and the whys of it all. In all the time that I’ve had, I still can’t come up with an answer, a reason for why our lives go the way they do.
But I know that you’re safe, I hope that you’re happy, and I think that maybe, just maybe, my life took this terrible turn of events so that you could have the life you have. So that you would never want or need for anything.
And Bear, if that’s the case, then I would do it all over again. I would gladly stay here, for a hundred years, if it meant that you would get everything out of life that you deserve.
I love you so much, my saving Grace. Happy 18th Birthday.
Your Daddy.
The tears stream down my face, the sobs wracking my already exhausted body. How could a man that would gladly spend his entire life in prison possibly be able to commit the crime he was accused of?
I’d sent Riley home hours earlier amid protests that he would stay with me as long as I needed him. I appreciated his offer, knowing that it was genuine and without ulterior motives, but I just needed to be alone, to immerse myself in the letters, to read every one of them twice, to hear my father’s voice again, even if just in my head, the way I imagined it would sound.
I’d long since forgotten the rich timbre of his voice, the heavy southern accent that my mother had found so charming, and it had crushed me when I realized that I couldn’t call it to memory anymore. But reading his letters, seeing the poor penmanship scrawled on dingy notebook paper, brought the sound back, and had given me a comfort that I didn’t know I would ever have again.
I’d nearly reached the bottom of the stack when an envelope catches my eye.
It isn’t like the others, there is no address on it, no postage stamp. Just my name printed on the front in my mama’s pretty script.
I flip it over to see that it is sealed, evidently not having been opened by my nana.
Tearing into it, I pull the single sheet of paper out and unfold it, hesitating.
Do I even want to know what my mother had to say?
Swallowing hard, I decide that I do.
Grace,
If you’re reading this letter, it means that you know about your father and about the letters that he sent you.
I have no excuse. There’s nothing that I can say that will change what I’ve done, what I’ve allowed Nana to do.
I can only hope that you’ll forgive me for this one day.
I love you.
Mama
I crumple the letter in my hand, tears rolling down my face. I’m not sure that I can forgive her, and if I did, would she even know?
One thing I know for sure, I would have gladly lived my entire life in a shack, with pathetic Christmases and threadbare clothes, if it meant that I was able to have some sort of relationship with my father.
Even if it was through the steel bars of a jail cell.