It seems to me now that after the funeral entire weeks must have passed like that, a score of Jessica’s widowed hours dissolved in my staring at the wall. In reality, however, the interval was brief, no more than the two or three days required for a letter to make its way across town, to appear among the other bills and statements on a hall table. It was an ordinary letter, in a plain envelope, addressed to me at home. Maybe I had overlooked it or had neglected the mail for a few days. In any event, it was Clementine—no doubt looking for something else—who brought it to my attention.
“Who’s sending you a key?” she asked, holding the envelope up to the light.
It was unmistakably that, a little lopsided weight in the corner of the letter, its shape shadowed on the outside of the envelope by the pressure and grime of the post office sorting belts. Inside, there was nothing else, no note, no letter, just a key affixed to a tag bearing my name, spelled out in neat capitals: ABEND, D. The key itself was stamped with the letters USPS and what looked like a serial number: a post office key. It was my own post office key, I concluded, sent to me in the mail. Like many analysts, I have always kept a post office box for patients who send checks in the mail, to preserve analytic anonymity. Clementine would tease me about this postal box, calling it my love nest, my trysting bower, but in fact I checked it only infrequently, no more than once a week. Surely I had lost the key somewhere without noticing that it was gone. Anyone could have turned it in to any post office, and the post office, identifying it from the numbers, must have sent it to me. Why not? Nor did I think to verify that my postal key had in fact gone missing. How couldn’t it have, if this was it?
So that was when it began, the awareness, the first flush of it, like motion caught in the corner of the eye—an intimation prior to thought. It was there and gone even before it occurred to me to check my key chain. The awareness began as a kind of puzzled befuddlement (what is this thing? where is it from?) but turned suddenly into something else—not dread exactly, not yet, rather the solution from which dread would precipitate, a solution odorless and colorless yet permeated by an equally clear not-quite-rightness. When Clementine asked me about the key later that evening, and I reported that it was a post-box key I’d lost, that colorless, odorless wrongness was the reason I knew instantly I was lying—not just mistaken but lying. That wrongness was why I avoided checking my key chain, and why, when I finally did, I was not surprised to find my own mailbox key still there on the ring. That sense of wrongness must have been why I waited through the weekend until Monday, until after Clementine had left for school, to walk down to the post office to make my inquiry. That wrongness knew already that the key would not fit the lock on my box. A clerical error, I said to myself: someone has misread a column of names or numbers.
“Doesn’t open your box,” said the clerk.
“I’ve tried it in the lock—” I began to explain, but he had sighed off to retrieve a green ledger from somewhere behind the counter.
“Daniel Abend, you say? You have ID?”
“Yes, and when I tried the key—”
“That’s your key. Box 5504, to be renewed—not until next year.”
“But that’s not my number,” I began again, but he had vanished once more, only to emerge, at least a foot taller than I’d imagined, from a door giving onto the lobby.
“Box 5500, 5502, here we go—” he said, turning the key in the box directly below my own, withdrawing a large envelope. “Daniel Abend, box 5504,” he said, reading the address. “You might want to write that down somewhere.” It did not seem important anymore, or even possible, to say that this was not my box, not the mailbox to which my patients sent their checks, and anyway, the clerk must have sighed his way back through the lobby door because his graveled voice called, “Next!” from behind his window.
Suddenly I understood, standing there in the post office, holding the envelope the clerk had just handed me, that she had sent it, that Jessica Burke herself had addressed it to me, writing out the painstaking capitals that spelled out my name. Like the envelope in which the key had arrived, this larger envelope lacked a return address, and yet now I knew that both it and the key were from her. I stood there staring stupidly at the envelope, as one might stare at a car in a parking lot, a car similar to one’s own and in a
