But I was still unable to sit quietly, and I got up and began walking round and round the apartment. Then I started opening doors, which is something I did when I was young, too, and I was looking for something I couldn’t describe. “What are you looking for, little cat?” Grandfather used to ask me, but I was never able to respond. When I was small, he had tried to stop me, pulling me onto his lap and holding my wrists, whispering into my ear. “It’s okay, little cat,” he would say, “it’s okay,” and I would scream and thrash because I didn’t like being held, I liked my freedom, I liked to roam. Then, when I was a little older, he would simply get up from whatever he was doing and start looking with me. I’d open a cupboard beneath the sink, and close it, and he would do the same, very serious, until I had opened and shut all the doors in the house, on every floor, and he had, too. By then I would be very tired, and I still wouldn’t have found what I needed, and Grandfather would pick me up and carry me to bed. “We’ll find it next time, little cat,” he would tell me. “Don’t worry. We’ll find it.”
Now, though, everything was where it was supposed to be: In the kitchen, there were the tins of beans and fish and the jars of pickled cucumbers and radishes and the containers of oats and dried tofu skin and the glass ampoules with artificial honey. In the front closet were our umbrellas and raincoats and our cooling suits and shrouds and masks and our emergency bag stocked with four-liter bottles of water and antibiotics and flashlights and batteries and sunscreen and cooling gels and socks and sneakers and underwear and protein bricks and fruit and nuts; in the hallway closet were our shirts and pants and underwear and extra shoes, and our fourteen-day supply of drinking water, and on the ground there was a box with our birth certificates and our citizenship and residence papers and copies of our security clearances and our most recent health records and a few pictures of Grandfather I had managed to keep; in the bathroom cupboard were our vitamins and backup supply of antibiotics, our extra sun cream and sunburn gel and shampoo and soap and hygiene wipes and toilet paper. In the drawer beneath my bed, there were our gold coins and paper chits. Our grade of state employee got paid enough allowance so we could buy two extra treats a week, like ice milk, or some combination of between three and six extra food coupons. But because neither of us bought anything extra, we had a lot saved, which we could use for something bigger, like new clothes or a new radio. But we didn’t need anything else: Along with our uniforms, the state gave us each two new outfits a year, and a new radio every five years, so it was silly to spend our coins and chits on those. We didn’t spend them on anything, even on things we wanted, like extra dairy coupons—I don’t know why.
I went back to the hallway and pulled out the box, because I wanted to look at the pictures of Grandfather. But as I was removing the envelope with our birth certificates, the papers inside slid out and fell to the floor, and so did another envelope, one I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t an old envelope, but it had clearly been used before, and I opened it, and inside were six pieces of paper. Actually, they weren’t so much pieces as scraps, and they had been torn from different sheets: some were lined and others were obviously ripped from books, and none of them were dated or addressed to anyone or signed, and all of them had very little written on them, just a few words each, in black ink, and in a hurried, jagged hand. “I miss you,” one read. Another read, “22:00, the usual spot.” “20:00,” read the third. The fourth and fifth said the same thing: “Am thinking of you.” And then there was the sixth, which contained only one word: “Someday.”
For a while, I sat there, looking at the pieces of paper, and wondering where they came from. But I knew they must have been my husband’s, because they weren’t mine, and no one else ever entered the apartment. Someone had written these notes to my husband, and he had kept them. I knew I wasn’t supposed to ever see them, because they had been stored with our papers, and it was my husband, not me, who took care of our paperwork, who renewed our citizenship certificates every year.
It would be many hours still until my husband came home, and yet, after I finished reading the notes, I hurriedly shoved them back into the envelope and then replaced the box without even looking at the pictures I’d wanted to see, as if at any moment I might hear my husband’s knock at the door. And then I went to our bedroom and lay down on my bed fully clothed, and stared at the ceiling.
“Grandfather,” I said.
But of course there was no one to answer me.
I lay there, trying to think of something other than those torn pieces of paper with their statements and instructions, so complicated because they were so simple: I thought of the pinkies, Grandfather, the things I’d seen at the Square. But the entire time, all I could hear was the word on that final note, which someone had written to my husband, and which he had kept. Someday, someone had written, and he had saved it, and the left-hand edge of the paper was softer than the other, as if it had been rubbed between someone’s fingers, as if it had been held many times as it was read again and again and again. Someday, someday, someday.
PART II
Autumn, fifty years earlier
Dear Peter, September 1, 2043
Thanks so much for the flowers, which arrived yesterday and which you really didn’t need to send. But they’re gorgeous, and we love them—thank you.
Speaking of flowers, the florist messed up. I told them we wanted white or purple Miltonias, and what did they order? Bunches and bunches of chartreuse Cattleyas. The shop looked like it’d been hosed down in bile. How do things like this happen? As you know, I don’t care that much, but Nathaniel is apoplectic, which means I must project sympathetic apoplexy if I’m to keep the household calm: peace over chaos, and all that.
Less than forty-eight hours until the big day. I still can’t believe I agreed to this. Nor can I believe you’re not going to be here with us. I forgive you, of course, but it won’t be the same without you.
Nathaniel and the baby send their love. And so do I.
Dear P, September 5, 2043
Well, I’m still alive. Barely. But alive.
Where to start? It rained the night before, and it never rains on the north side of the island. All night I had to listen to Nathaniel fretting—What about the mud? What if the rain didn’t stop? （We didn’t have a contingency plan.） What about the pit we’d dug for the pig? What if it was too damp for the kiawe branches to dry out? Should we ask John and Matthew to move them indoors?—until I finally had to tell him to shut up. When that didn’t work, I made him take a pill, and he eventually fell asleep.
Naturally, once he did, I couldn’t sleep myself, and at around three in the morning, I went outside to find that the rain had stopped and the moon was huge and silver and that the few shreds of clouds that remained were sailing north out to sea, and that John and Matthew had moved the cords of wood under the porch and had covered the pit with monstera leaves, and that everything smelled sweet and green, and I felt—not for the first time, and not the last—a sense of what can only be called wonder: that I was getting to live in this beautiful place, at least for a little while longer, and that I was having a wedding.