The same photo appeared again and again in the newspapers: Marian and Eddie standing beside the Peregrine before they left Auckland, smiling, almost bashful, both with their arms folded across their chests. Later, after the reporters had dug around in Marian’s past, they ran the old photo of Addison Graves carrying the twins down the gangway of the SS Manaus. There was one of Marian in her ATA uniform, climbing into a Spitfire. And there was her wedding photo next to some fluff piece about her “colorful” life.
I closed the folder. Underneath it in the box was a certificate of appreciation from the library where Caleb had worked and a program from his memorial service. Then came a magazine with a slip of paper marking an article about the ranch that included the photo of Caleb riding in the ocean.
At the very bottom of the box was a white envelope addressed to Caleb and bearing several foreign stamps. The return address was a post office box in New Zealand. “Mind if I…”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ve never been able to make any sense of it. For some reason it was in the lockbox where he kept his birth certificate and important stuff like that. I don’t even know why I kept it.”
* * *
—
It was just a little bit of paper, another yellowed newspaper clipping, folded up small. I peeled its layers apart, pressed it flat. Bits flaked off around the edges. It was a photo from a newspaper called the Queenstown Courier. April 28, 1954. Four men in hats sat and sprawled on a grassy rise, each holding a beer bottle. In the background, sheep grazed. “High country shepherds enjoying well-earned refreshment after the muster,” read the caption. In black pen, someone had drawn an arrow to one of the men and written something in the margin. The handwriting was nearly illegible, but the specific style of its illegibility was so familiar my insides fizzed like I’d swallowed a sparkler. I squinted at the words. Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly. When I set it down, the paper lifted up and curled slowly closed along its fold lines as though alive. I smoothed it out again.
“Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly,” I said to Joey. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“No clue,” he said. “I looked it up on the internet once, and all I got was some stuff about an Indian woman who lived as a man. I don’t really remember specifics.”
The man under the arrow was reclining on one elbow with his long thin legs stretched out, his face angled away from the camera and hidden by the shadow of his hat. I didn’t know if I should tell Joey anything, but I couldn’t help it. I took out my phone and zoomed in on a photo I’d taken of one of the letters Marian had written to Ruth. I turned it so Marian’s rows of crabbed and spiky words lined up with the scribbled note. “Check this out,” I said.
Joey came around to stand behind me, leaned down to study my phone. “What is it?”
“It’s a letter Marian Graves wrote.”
“No way,” he said, getting it. “No way.”
“It’s the same handwriting, right?” I said. “I’m not imagining things?”
“It really looks like it.”
“Did he get any more letters from New Zealand? Do you know?”
“Man, he went there! He went a bunch of times! I didn’t mention it before because I thought he just liked New Zealand. People get really into that place.” Joey flopped back onto the love seat, his hands gripping the top of his head. “No way,” he said again.
The sparks in my gut spread outward. I felt like my skeleton should be visible, glowing through my skin. “When did he go there?”
“I don’t remember specific dates or anything, but he’d kind of usually go after breakups? Not after all of them, but like maybe every five years or so? I know he’d been a couple of times before I moved in. He never took anyone with him. He said it was his thing he liked to do alone, and, yeah, he got other letters, too, but he didn’t keep them. I think he might have actually burned them. I remember seeing bits in the coffee can he used as an ashtray and thinking it was sort of dramatic. It’s not like he burned all the mail.”
“Did you ever ask him who was writing to him or why he kept going?”
“He just said he had a buddy from the war down there.”
“Do you remember anything else? Did he bring back photos?”
“No, no photos. Let me think for a second, though.” He closed his eyes. I waited. The sun was white on the ocean. Kalani peeped at me from the playhouse window, retreated when she saw me looking back. Finally Joey opened his eyes and shook his head. “No. Sorry. Nothing else is coming to mind. I went through all his stuff when he died, and you’ve seen pretty much everything I saved. That was more than twenty years ago, anyway. Do you really think he might have been going to see her?”