Dear Charlotte

As a child, Charlie loved spending time in freshwater creeks while her father looked on. In the mudbanks along the Catawba River, she dug through dirty snow to pull out earthworms in winter and hunted for rocks flecked with pyrite in summer. She waded into the streams to look for the black, beady eyes of a crayfish shimmering two inches beneath the surface of the water. From atop moss-covered rocks, she watched the minnows flit around her feet until her legs got numb from cold and her father called from the side to tell her it was time.

Her father left when she was five. After forty years, she had fought hard to find love for him. She had some tender memories of him—going to creeks in the afternoon, sharing fried plantains on the porch, his bushy mustache that tickled when he kissed her. But his absence—so abrupt, so unnecessary—had cut her too deeply to focus long on them. She dwelled instead on how he tied her shoelaces too tightly, or how he barked at her with rage in his black eyes whenever she woke him up in the early morning. On some outings, she begged him to wade into the creek with her, but he would often ignore her, looking straight ahead into the distance, smiling with ghostly vacuity, as if thinking about a different life. Charlie feared this version of him, as if that haunting, permanent stare was evidence of his nerves freezing in place beneath his dark, deeply creased skin.

Her mother simply said he had died. Charlie never got a talk from a school psychologist, never got a gentle allegory about loss, never got ice cream with a sympathetic aunt. He was there, and then he wasn’t. “It was an accident” was all her mother would say. What kind of accident? Where did it happen? Who was involved? Her mother changed the subject each time.

Eventually, Charlie stopped asking, leaving her father’s death to her imagination. Charlie’s memory was no help for clues. She didn’t remember a funeral, but she remembered her mother wailing at night, slow moans punctuated by hiccups loud enough to wake her. And she remembered the terrified look on her father’s face as he told her gently he was going on a long trip and hugged her too tightly. “I promise to write,” he had said. “And I will bring you a gift when I return.” That was shortly before there were no more memories of him.

“My mom said it’s probably a lie,” Saul had told her on the playground in fourth grade. When Charlie had said she didn’t have a father, that he’d died when she was younger, Saul went home and told his own family about the chocolate-skinned girl with an absent dad. In repeating his parents’ words, Saul was merely the messenger of a caustic morsel of truth about the South: it is easy to conjure up and apply a stereotype. The message stayed with Charlie forever: she was the product of a broken home, whether her father had left or died.

After that, she didn’t really want to know the truth. If he’d found another woman or decided fatherhood was too hard, or he got locked up for drugs, the stereotype would be complete. If he’d actually died not in an accident but in a gunfight or from an overdose or during a high-speed chase, Charlie feared her interlocutors’ expressions of sympathy, for underneath the hmms and awws, they would be entertaining sensationalist scenes in their imaginations. After her mother died, carrying her stubborn refusal to talk about Charlie’s father with her, Charlie finally dismissed the idea that one day she’d know the truth about her father.

Then came the package. She had received a thick envelope weeks ago and felt the presence of her father’s ghost. She fingered the corners of the envelope and examined the shaky scrawl, the “C” in “Charlotte” bent, the t’s tangled together haphazardly. Beaten up in international postage, no return address. She had left it on the kitchen table for too long, wondering each morning whether today would be the day she’d actually open it.

Then one day the desire came to her all at once; she decided she wanted to know the truth after all, and this envelope definitely contained it. She slit it open and emptied its contents. Inside, there was a three-page handwritten letter accompanied by a small black book, its cover weathered with age but its pages clean and well-tended.

Dear Charlotte, the letter began. No one she knew called her Charlotte except her father, ages ago. I’m so sorry for everything. She began to cry before reading another line. She didn’t have to skip to the end to know that Saul’s parents were right: the story her mother told her was a lie.

The letter dispelled Charlie’s worst fear, however, that her father had willingly abandoned her. In messy, labored cursive, he explained his absence carefully, honestly.

Before Charlie was born, he wrote, he’d been an activist in a place called Malabo, the capital city of a country on the western coast of central Africa. He had demonstrated ardently but peacefully. He had nevertheless seen his friends and relatives gunned down for mere words of protest. Before they could take his life as well, he fled to the United States. In exile, he had met Charlie’s mother, settled down, and received the blessings of fatherhood. But his visa was temporary, and his asylum case was denied, and after spending all his money on lawyers, they finally told him his time was up; he would be deported. He agreed to leave under a provision the government labeled “voluntary,” although it was anything but.

When he landed in Malabo, he’d hoped there would be a few hours to arrange a land border crossing, maybe find a basement to hide out in. Instead, government lackeys were waiting for him at the airport. Over the next forty years, he dreamed that he’d be set free when the leader of Equatorial Guinea finally stepped down. But a resignation, a coup, an election that would finally transfer power never came. Charlie’s father spent the remainder of his adult life behind bars because he’d called for true democracy when he was twenty-five.

His imprisonment gave him two valuable skills: patience and gambling. He mastered poker and blackjack over time, playing the other inmates and guards for pebbles at first, then for cigarettes and finally for favors. He acquired a pencil and a few sheets of paper, keeping them tucked inside his shirt pocket and writing only a few words each month, training his memory for what he’d write to Charlie when he was released. And when his poker prowess had earned him the esteem of a grinning, blisteringly corrupt guard, he finally got a little black notebook, just around the time Charlie was graduating high school.

Parkinson’s turned out to be the key to his cell. Months after he’d been diagnosed, his illness slowly poisoning his memory and altering his moods, he’d been granted clemency and released. It was not unknown for the government to change its mind arbitrarily, so he immediately got to work. He begged for spare change and swept storerooms with tremored hands in exchange for food. He bribed the captain of a small commercial ship to take him to the mainland. Then he hitchhiked his way over several days to the best source of infinite, reliable money: a tourist’s casino. He played thousands of hands each day, from the dollar blackjack table up to the professional poker tournaments, his good hand placing the bets and his other under the table so the others wouldn’t spot his weakness. After two years, he’d finally earned enough to send her this envelope, and in it, proof of the promise he’d made to her just before he’d left.

Charlie opened the black notebook and traced her finger over the small dusty words crowding the pages from edge to edge. There was just one entry each year, a few pages each, always on her February birthday. In each entry, he told her his thoughts and experiences, his wishes for her life, his longing to see her again. Everything she’d wished for in long, lonely nights as a child now came rushing forth in a single book, flooding her soul and spilling out onto the kitchen floor. She would need time to read through it, to process his sudden reappearance, but knowing these pages existed was a balm for her aching heart.

I was too ashamed to reach you when I first left Malabo, and now I’m afraid I’m too weak to arrange any visit, her father had written in his letter. What you see on the last page of the book is a gift for you. I know that it will never make up for my many years of absence, but it is all I have. The numbers on the last page momentarily stunned Charlie: digits of a bank account, followed by its latest balance of a few dollars over twenty thousand. He had amassed it in such a short time, but it was his lifetime earnings, and he had spent it on the one thing he found actually valuable: her.

Charlie’s emotions had never been so scattered. The fears of her youth withered in the face of his poignancy: the shoelaces too tight, a sign of how secure he wanted her to be; the morning barks, just the instinct of a fighter; the vacant looks, his trauma from long ago resurfacing. Charlie read the final paragraphs of his letter with urgency, as if it would be too late—too late for what, she didn’t know—by the time she finished.

The water runs by all the time, he wrote, as if lost in his own reverie. He had sensed that his faculties were weakening, his mind blurring bits of magic and history with his bitter, declining reality. Sometimes, when he’d see a cluster of trees, he spotted little five-year-old Charlie crouched among them, dirtying the hem of her red polka dot dress to pick up a ladybug. When he passed a river, he smiled, for he could see Charlie in the middle of it, the cuffs of her pants hiked up and her eyes locked on a school of fish. When he cooked plantains, though the utensils quivered in his hands, Charlie was there next to him, pleading for more.

As his disease progressed, Charlie’s father went back in time. He would soon become more ghost than man. Knowing he would receive visits from Charlie more often in certain natural environments, he decided to remove himself to a plot of land where he could spend the rest of his days with her. He picked out a small spot next to a calm, wooded creek, one he thought Charlie would like if she could be there, one that could be part the Catawba itself if he didn’t know better. That’s where he would be, looking out at the water running by, when she got his letter.

The urgency soared. Without another thought, Charlie fled her house, leaving the door wide open, and ran. There was a small creek less than a mile away, one she’d walked along thousands of times, one similar to the creeks she’d waded into as a child. The trees gathered around her and the stream called out, its baubling song loud in her head. She ran hundreds of yards through soft, spongy earth, pushed through the last of the trees, and waded in.

Charlie stood in the middle of the stream and closed her eyes for a long time. When she opened them, she turned and saw her father on the banks, thirty years old, grinning so broadly that his mustache turned up towards his eyes. She smiled back, and wondered if he was looking at her now from his side of the divide.