I Kept a Candle Burning for My Son for Twenty Years. Then He Knocked on Christmas Eve

I did not drive him. Dolores drove, because the streets were closed in two directions and Ricardo’s hands were shaking too badly to hold the wheel steady. I sat in the front seat with my rosary wrapped around my fingers. Ricardo sat in the back beside Dolores’s cane, which she had tossed in with a grunt and a remark that she would be needing it again by midnight.

The wipers beat back and forth. The water on the road threw the streetlights back at us in long, broken stripes. For a long time nobody spoke.

“I never opened them,” Ricardo said at last.

I turned around in the seat. He was looking out the window, not at me.

“The letters,” he said. “Every year. I got them at the apartment in Austin, and I would look at the handwriting and put them in a drawer. I told myself I would read them when I was ready. Then it was a year, and then five years, and then I was too ashamed to open something I had already let sit so long.”

“Why?” I asked. I did not say it with any anger.

He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Because you would have forgiven me. And I didn’t think I could stand it.”

Dolores made a small sound, the kind she makes when a child in the school office says something too grown-up. She kept her eyes on the road and said nothing.

Methodist Children’s was bright and too warm inside, the way hospitals are at night. A nurse with a kind, round face led us down a long hallway that smelled of hand soap and coffee. Ricardo walked so fast I had to hold Dolores’s arm to keep up.

Marisa was standing in the doorway of a room on the fourth floor. She had dark hair pulled back tight and a cardigan over her scrubs. When she saw Ricardo, she let out a breath. Then she saw me, and her face softened all at once.

“Señora Teodora,” she said. “I’m so glad you came.”

I took her hands. Her fingers were cold. “You are the one who pushed him to drive down,” I said.

“Yes,” she said simply. “Somebody had to.”

Lucía lay in the bed with a tube taped to the back of her hand and a thin line running to a machine that blinked green. Her face was flushed, and her hair was damp against the pillow. She was so small under the blanket that for one moment I thought she was a much younger child.

I pulled the plastic chair close and sat down beside her. I did not wake her. I put my hand lightly over hers, on the blanket, and I prayed the first decade of the rosary. My lips moved, and no sound came out. My mother taught me that prayer on a bench in Floresville when I was five years old, and I have never found a better one for sitting next to a sick child.

When I looked up, Ricardo was standing at the foot of the bed, watching me the way a man watches a stranger doing something he had always assumed was his job.

Marisa led me out into the hall after a while. She carried a shoebox with a rubber band around it, and I knew it before she opened it. The envelopes were soft at the corners. Some were faded from sitting in a Texas window. Every one was addressed in my handwriting to an apartment in Austin, and every one was stamped returned.

“Ricardo didn’t know I kept them,” she said. “Every time one came back, I took it out of the box he threw in the closet and put it in here. I thought someday he would need them. I wasn’t sure if I should let him read them, or if he would read them on his own.”

“You did right,” I said, and I meant it. “Some things a person has to find for himself.”

We went back to the waiting room, a row of blue chairs under a television with the sound turned off. Ricardo sat down heavily, the shoebox in his lap. He pulled out the top envelope and turned it over several times before he slid his thumb under the flap.

He had just unfolded the first page when the monitor down the hall began to shriek. The sound went up and up, sharp and wrong, and a nurse ran past us so fast her shoes squeaked on the tile.

Marisa was on her feet before anyone spoke. Ricardo stood with the letter still in his hand, the page half open, staring at the door of his daughter’s room.