Letters Written in White by Kathryn Perez Page B

plays with Riley. He resents her. I had to beg and plead for him to agree to adoption, yet he still looks at me as the woman who can’t give him a child of our own.
    I wonder if women like Riah know how lucky they are to be mothers, to have carried life inside them. I wonder if they know what a gift they were given to be able to give birth to their babies.
     
    She stops writing and I’m sobbing. Darcy, my neighbor, the woman I have envied for years, is not at all the person I thought she was. I have avoided her on so many occasions, and the guilt of that is overwhelming right now. Seeing into her life, behind closed doors, I realize I’ve never known who Darcy really is. The perfect husband I thought she had, who was home by five o’ clock every evening, wasn’t perfect at all. I would watch him pull into their driveway each evening and feel a tinge of jealousy because Grayson never got home by five. I would always think how nice it would be to have my husband at the dinner table each and every night. Little did I know, Roger may have been home for dinner every night, but he also hit his wife and, from what I can tell, isn’t someone she looks forward to seeing each night.
    I step back from the opening in the wall and drop my head. I shake it from side to side.
    “Nothing is what it seems,” I say.
    “Very true,” I hear someone from behind me say.
    I turn and see the short, balding man again. I wipe the tears from my eyes and say, “I was so wrong, so very wrong about Darcy. I was awful to her. I avoided her every chance I had, and she probably needed a friend, a real friend.”
    “You see, Riah, in life we never know the battles others are facing. We don’t know the demons they are hiding. Everyone you have ever met is fighting something. You may have thought no one could’ve had the kind of raw deal you were dealt in life, being ailed with a mental illness, yet the truth is, many have the same or worse problems than that of your own. You judged Darcy and you shunned her. You labeled her. So you see, Riah, no one is perfect regardless of how perfect the surface of who they are might be. Her façade annoyed you, and now her reality saddens you.”
    I scan the wall and all of the labels.
    “I’m scared,” I cry. “What if I’ve been wrong about everything, everyone. I’m a dreadful person.”
    “No, you’re not. You’re human. It’s the human condition to judge, to make mistakes, but now you must see the error of your ways, acknowledge them and make peace with them.”
    I nod and scan the wall further. My gaze immediately falls upon the word unforgiving . Forgiveness is something I was never able to give Grayson. It was almost as if every tiny wrong move he ever made was a tally mark in a book in the back of my mind where I kept score. Every argument we ever had, I would open that book and hurl past mistakes at him. With every one I threw his way, it was like a verbal stoning, and I never once felt regret for it. He deserved it, I believed. I was the victim, I thought. Now, I’m not so sure. Nothing is as it seemed now that I’m here seeing things from a different perspective.
    With a shaky hand, I reach out and place it against the cold, unforgiving brick. Just as the brick before fell away, this one does the same, but the brick above it that reads loving and the one below it that reads sad fall away too. Like a series of commercials on fast forward, images flash before me. I see my mother crying, Grayson doing Desiree’s hair, Devin crying, Desiree holding hands with a boy. She’s all grown up. I see Devin hugging Grayson. Grayson is older with gray hair. Devin is a man. I can’t hear them or make out what any of it means, and then I see Desiree standing at a podium on a stage and everything slows down. She’s all grown up. Breathtakingly beautiful. She’s a woman. Her hair falls far below her shoulders in big loose curls.
    There’s a large crowd of people, an audience, standing down in front