Look Closely by Laura Caldwell Page A

this morning. I’m real y, real y sorry I was such an ass.”
    He grinned as though he might make fun of me for my drunken state, but he only said, “You weren’t. Ready for dinner?”
    “One second. I just need to throw some things in my purse.”
    I walked to the desk and began col ecting my wal et, my compact, my cel phone.
    “What did you do today?” Ty asked.
    “Oh, not much.” I would tel him eventual y. I would tel him what I’d learned, but right now, my siblings’ letters were too vivid and raw.
    I hadn’t stopped thinking about Caroline al afternoon. Had she run away? Or had she disappeared against her wil ? And what did my father know about it?
    I had picked up the phone at least five times, wanting to cal my dad. I knew that on a Sunday afternoon, the one day he didn’t work, he would be in his home in Manhasset, reading his three Sunday papers and drinking coffee from a pot in the middle of the kitchen table. He would spend hours like that, absorbing everything he read, making notes on a smal yel ow legal pad by his side whenever he came across something that could affect one of his cases. I knew he would be happy to hear from me, that he would ask me about the arbitration, and he would hear in my voice that something was wrong. I would have to ask him then what he knew about Caroline, about my mother’s death.
    And so I’d put the phone gently back on the cradle, wanting to pretend I hadn’t picked it up, because I couldn’t confront him yet. I couldn’t risk being wrong. If I lost him, I lost my whole family.
    “Damn,”IheardTysayfromthedoorway.“Ijust remembered I have to cal a guest who’s checking inthisweek.I’l meetyouatthefrontdesk,okay?”
    Iglancedathimovermyshoulder.“Noproblem.”
    I turned around again, and my eyes fel on the pile of Dan’s letters I had arranged after reading them this afternoon. I picked them up and flipped through them once more, turning over the envelopes to look for some writing on the back, some scribble of a phrase that might tel me more than the letters had. There were only four of them, and although Dan chatted about his surroundings and his activities, he didn’t let his emotions seep out the way Caroline had. The letters seemed to have been written out of a sense of duty, as if Dan was writing to a distant grandmother who sent money occasional y.
    The oldest letter had been postmarked from East Lansing, Michigan, where Dan was attending Michigan State University. He talked about footbal games and late nights and the crisp fal campus, but not much else.
    The next letter was written a few years later, postmarked from Detroit:
    Dear Del a,
    I graduated a few months ago, and I’ve
    landed a sales job. I’m sharing an apartment
    with a few friends from school.
    He wrote a few anecdotes about people at work and the slovenliness of his roommates. He closed with,
    I don’t like Detroit that much. How’s everything with you?
    The letter was devoid of real details. Nothing there that I could fol ow up on.
    The next two letters were similar in their descriptions, as wel as their lack of emotional substance. The first was postmarked from Santa Fe, a place I’d never been. Dan reported that his company had transferred him, that he was finding he liked the open brown plains of the Southwest. The last letter was also postmarked from Santa Fe and had been written over six years ago. I figured that Dan would have been thirty-two at that time.
    I tried to imagine my brother, who was permanently seventeen in my mind, in his late thirties now. I imagined that his sandy blond hair, which he had worn long during high school, was now clipped short. Maybe he was even balding. Maybe he wore glasses over his light blue eyes. I tried to envision him in a distinguished suit, but I couldn’t seem to get him out of the faded jeans and black T-shirts that had been his teenage uniform. I wondered if he stil wrote stories, if he carried around smal notebooks that he fil ed