Chapter 10 - THE ENVELOPESix months later, on a clear morning in late September, I stood in front of a crowd of two hundred people and cut a red ribbon with a pair of oversized scissors.
The building behind me had once been a vacant dry cleaner on Halsted Street. Now it had skylights, a library, a recording studio, and a sign above the front door in bright blue letters.
EVAN’S HANDS: A CENTER FOR DEAF YOUTH.
Mrs. Okafor wept openly in the front row. Daniel, in a brand-new red jacket, stood beside her and interpreted the ceremony for the three hundred children seated on the grass, flashing signs so fast his grandmother could barely keep up. He had asked to be the first student. He had also asked to be the first teacher. We were still negotiating.
The money had come from the Vale family. Legal money, every dollar of it, from a trucking company that now had a federal monitor, an honest accountant, and a chief executive named Caleb who read every contract twice. He sat in the second row in a dark suit, his hands folded in his lap, and when I turned to look at him, he lifted two fingers to his chin and flicked them outward, with a crooked bend at the end.
Thank you.
I signed it back. My hands were shaking.
Dominic was not there.
He had pleaded guilty in April to thirty-one counts of racketeering, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. He had testified for six days against Martin Halloran, whom a jury convicted in July. The judge, who had listened carefully to everything the defendant had given the government, sentenced Dominic to four years in a federal facility in Wisconsin, with a recommendation for early release.
He wrote to Caleb every week. In sign.
He sent the letters as video recordings, recorded on a tablet by a bored prison guard, and every single one began the same way. A heavy, gray-haired man in a prison jumpsuit, sitting very straight in a metal chair, painstakingly signing the same sentence.
I am learning.
That afternoon, after the crowd had gone home and the children had been herded onto buses, Caleb and I sat on the roof of the new center with our legs dangling over the edge, watching the sun slide behind the city.
He took my hand.
There is something I have been meaning to say, he signed with his free hand.
I think I know.
Let me do it properly. He turned to face me, and in the amber light, he looked so young and so afraid that I almost laughed. He lifted his hand, made a fist with the thumb, index finger, and pinky extended, and held it between us. Then he bent the little finger, crooked, the way my brother had, on purpose.
I love you, he signed. In his dialect.
I had no breath left.
I answered with the same sign, in the same crooked shape, and kissed him, and somewhere in the sky above us I swear I felt something that felt very much like my brother laughing.
When we finally broke apart, Caleb reached into his jacket.
He held out a sealed white envelope, worn at the edges from six months in his pocket, with a single line of block capitals across the front.
FOR CALEB. NOT UNTIL IT’S SAFE.
I think it is, he signed. But I do not want to open it alone.
I took his hand.
He broke the seal.
Inside was a single Polaroid photograph, faded at the edges, and a folded note in my brother’s untidy handwriting.
The photograph showed a woman on the porch of a small white farmhouse. She had gray streaking her dark hair and a thin scar across her forehead, and she was smiling at the camera with an expression of tired, nervous joy. She was holding a newspaper in one hand.
In the other, she was signing.
It was not a gesture I had ever seen before. But I recognized it immediately, because I had spent six months learning how to read it from the hands of the man sitting next to me.
It was Caleb’s name sign.
He made a sound I will never forget.
The date printed on the corner of the newspaper was seven years old.
Seven years after the explosion at the lake house.
Seven years after the closed-casket funeral of Isabelle Vale.
Caleb’s hands were shaking so hard that I had to unfold the note myself. I read it aloud in sign, one sentence at a time, so that he could follow.
Caleb. I found her. She is alive. She asked me not to tell anyone until she says it is safe, because someone inside your father’s house helped her disappear, and she does not know who she can trust. I promised her I would keep it secret. I don’t think I can. If something happens to me, please forgive me. And Hannah, if you are the one reading this over his shoulder, you are going to be so angry at me. I love you anyway. — E.
The wind moved over the rooftop.
Caleb stared at the photograph. At the porch. At the stranger’s face that was also, somehow, the most familiar face he had ever known.
He turned the Polaroid over.
On the back, in faded blue ink, someone had written a single line. The handwriting was neat, slanted, and unmistakably feminine.
Tell my son I never stopped signing.
Beneath it was an address in a town in rural Montana, and a date, only six weeks before my brother died.
Caleb’s hands rose. They trembled. They spelled out four slow words against the dying light.
Someone in my father’s house.
I looked at the photograph, at the smiling woman on the porch, at the one question my brother had died before he could answer.
If Isabelle Vale had survived the fire, then who had been buried in her grave?
May you like
And who had spent fourteen years making sure she stayed gone?
END OF BOOK ONE.
