The Everlasting Read Free Page A

trust: trust that there would not be a deep hole in the road around the next bend; trust that the sun would rise when one awoke after a night’s sleep; trust that there was not a madman hiding in the garden, staring, watching, biding his time until he visited once again.
    â€œWhat the hell is this?” Helen said.
    Scott blinked rapidly a few times, trying to dispel the ambiguous shapes he had started to see beyond the window. He looked up at his wife, not liking the uncertainty and nervousness in her expression. “I’ve read it three times,” he said. “And I think it’s nothing more and nothing less than what it says: the truth. A set of directions toward eternal life.”
    â€œ ‘Everlasting’?” she quoted.
    Scott shrugged. “That’s what it says.”
    â€œYou didn’t tell me your grandfather was religious.”
    â€œHe wasn’t.”
    â€œBut this is . . .”
    Scott waited, but Helen could not say what it was.In her hands she held a letter, and in that letter Scott’s dying grandfather had written instructions to what he claimed to be one of the great secrets of life and death.
I know the truth
, he had said. And eventually, after thirty years, he had kept his promise to tell Scott what that elusive goal might be.
    â€œIt’s what he believed,” Scott said. “It’s what made him happy, content, and unafraid at the end.”
    â€œBut he killed his friend,” Helen said. “And then himself. How could he have been happy or content? This letter reads to me as though he was scared. And these signs, these shapes, what are they? They make me feel . . .” She trailed off, dropped the letter on his desk, and walked to the window.
    Scott had never told her about being attacked by Lewis’s ghost. He had not even told his parents. He always hoped that keeping it to himself would make it vanish, the memory rotting and fading. His secrecy had encouraged the opposite effect, but the more time passed by, the more difficult it had become to tell anyone.
    Now, perhaps the time was right.
    â€œI think maybe the two of them were looking for something,” Scott said. “And right at the end, Papa didn’t want it found.” He took the letter from the desk, folded it, and placed it back in the envelope. He looked from the window and made out crouched shapes in the bushes, an old man in the clouds. Helen seemed not to notice.
    â€œStrange that a ghost from thirty years ago should convince me that this is true.” He told Helen everything.
    Helen went to work that morning confused, and angry at her confusion. She had called Scott foolish, gullible, an old romantic, but he knew that it was because she was scared. She had seen something in his eyes that frightened her. After she left he looked in the mirror, and he saw it too.
    Something had changed. The realization dawned that he was not seeing or feeling things quite the same as ever before. The memory of the attack in that field had stayed with him and somehow become one of the defining moments of his life. And receiving this letter had given that memory a brighter sheen of truth than ever before.
    â€œPapa,” he said, “why didn’t you tell me sooner?” If he and Helen had been able to have children he may have well been a grandfather himself by now, but still he felt like a young boy when he even glanced at that letter. He felt like the teenager he’d been when his grandfather had died. It had opened up his mind and fogged his horizons, dimming truths he thought he relied upon and turning them into ambiguous things at best, ideas subject to pressures he still did not understand.
    How the hell did that letter get here?
Helen had asked. Scott had spoken of redirected mail, told her tales he had heard of letters stuck to the bottoms of sorting trays, finding their destination decades late, and mail that for unknown reasons just became lost. But