Then she remembered.
Now, standing in the open doorway of Norman’s empty house, she fought the reflexive urge to call out “You decent?” and set about her gloomy business. She went first to his bedroom and scanned the few books on his night table, but none of them seemed appropriate. The couple stacks on the floor near the bed were likewise unpromising, so she headed for his study, which was where she’d thought she would find it anyway. She glanced at her phone and cursed; she was already late and getting later. She never should have put it off this long, but, really, there had been no reason to think she wouldn’t have been able to find the quote on the internet that morning unless, of course, the internet chose today, of all days, to go down again. The massive infrastructure of the web was still a rickety, unstable thing, and she should have known better than to count on it in a situation like this.
Norman’s memorial, postponed until mid-November, figured to be well attended, as befit a man who seemed to know everybody and had always behaved as if he had time for them all. Norman had chosen his own eulogists, and Aubrey had been mortified to hear that she was to be one of them. He hadn’t left many instructions regarding his service, but who was to speak and how long they were allotted had been important to him, and Aubrey knew he would expect wit, depth, and, above all else, brevity. She’d written and torn up half a dozen efforts over the past week, none of her words seeming good enough to her, until she remembered what he’d said about human meaning. She didn’t want to paraphrase the quote. She wanted to get it exactly right—Norman deserved that—and if she couldn’t find it on the internet, she’d have to find the book he pulled it from in his extensive stacks.
Now, in the study, she ran her hand over one shelf after another, searching and not finding, and, really, this was hopeless. She didn’t even know the title of the damn thing, much less where in God’s name the quote would be found even if she did come up with it. She was about to give up when her eyes fell on his desk, covered in a sheet she’d thrown there the day after she’d found his body, because she didn’t want his things to go to ruin from dust and disuse. In her upset, she realized she’d never properly gone through the papers and effluvia on top of the desk, and maybe it would be there, on a Post-it or in a stack of well-thumbed texts. She threw the sheet aside, revealing a time capsule of the last days of Norman’s life.
There were no books on top of the desk, but Aubrey noticed something she hadn’t seen that day, in her sorrow and upset. Underneath the desk was a large cardboard box, about two feet square, heavily trussed and wrapped, with a pile of eight or nine manila envelopes neatly stacked atop it. The box had been pushed back a bit, so Norman still had legroom, and the effect was to have kept it just out of sight to a person standing beside the desk.
Aubrey bent down, closed her hands around the side of the box, and slid it out from under the desk, careful not to spill the stack of envelopes. They were addressed, each of them, in his careful hand—names, addresses, and the right amount of postage for each. The box itself had no address, just a neatly lettered name. Aubrey teared up when she read it.
She covered her mouth, upset with herself. Here were Norman’s last communications, his postmortem wishes and goodbyes, all carefully chosen and set aside, put in a place where someone—he must have figured it would be her—would be sure to discover them and see them safely on their way, once life as we knew it resumed. Except she hadn’t seen them at all. They were the proverbial letters lost in the storm.
She thumbed through the stack of envelopes. The first few names were unfamiliar to her, but she stopped when she reached the fourth one. It was addressed to her. She tore the manila envelope open with a shaking hand, reached inside, and pulled out a weathered paperback. It happened—it just so fucking happened, as Norman would have said—that it was the very book she’d come here to find. There was a three-by-five note card paper-clipped to the cover, its few neat lines typed on a real typewriter, his 1967 turquoise Olivetti Lettera:
To my Star Student,
No long goodbye letter for you, because we got to say it all. Is anyone ever so lucky?
Here’s seventy-five years of underlining and dog-earing instead.
Yours always,
Norman
She wiped away a tear as she flipped through the book. Man’s Search for Meaning was written in 1946, and it looked to Aubrey like this one had been bought that very year. It was yellowed, cracked, and smelled faintly of mildew. She flipped through the book and, as promised, found page after page of dog-ears, underlines, and exclamation points. She would be able to quote the very book she’d hoped to reference at Norman’s memorial, and the choice of quotes wouldn’t even be hers. It would be his.