The Golden Years

The photograph tells a story all its own. Two kids—they really were, he at 19 and she at 18—barely had time for the camera shot as they looked into each other’s eyes, their faces aglow with something much sweeter than joy. His hand was clasped in hers as if he wouldn’t even think of letting it go one day.

In the scrapbook Lila’s daughter Melissa had made her for an anniversary years ago, the wedding picture has its own page devoted to it—subtly accented by a gold dust background and the words “Love, Be True to Me.” The phrase nearly brings a tear to Lila’s eye, and her hands begin to shake.

If she were to fall asleep now, she knows she would dream of Henry. There had been no one else, never, not for her. And until his death, she had thought the same of him—until she found the letters tucked in an old shoebox in the back of the closet by the front door. Each letter had been yellowed, unfolded and refolded, the ink hazy and faded on some pages.

Lila hadn’t told Melissa; she would never do that to her daughter, marring the image she held of her father.

But for herself? Lila was 76 years old. Whoever Samantha was, Lila didn’t want to know. Just reading through the letters—intimate things of passion, heartache, longing—had been enough to paint a picture that Lila may not have been the love of Henry’s life as she had believed. She may not have had the letters Henry himself had sent, but ten years of Samantha’s letters sat in that shoebox. Lingering, waiting, despairing.

When it was time to burn leaves for the season, Lila took the shoebox and scattered the letters atop the pile. Lighting the match had been a sad source of bitter glee, and throwing it atop—Lila felt a tiny bit wicked to watch her husband’s affair go up in smoke.

She didn’t need to know Samantha. Henry had known her well enough for the both of them.

Later that same night, Lila falls—exhausted and spent—into the bed that had once been "theirs." But that was no longer. Henry was gone. Burned to ashes just like his beloved letters. When she turns on her side, she inhales what lingers of Henry’s scent in the pillow he had once laid his head upon. Even though she had made a promise to herself, tears still leak from her eyes as she wonders how she had gotten things—her very own marriage of 58 years—so very wrong.

When the dream takes her, it’s a slow thing—as if she is grappling with a viper and losing. But soon enough she finds herself locked in that same photograph her eyes had lingered on, and Henry stands before her as he once did, his crooked smile still having the power to coax a smile out of her.

“Penny for your thoughts?” he asks, all sure and cocky, as the room spins around them in shades of gold and black.

“You wouldn’t be able to afford my thoughts,” she says slyly, and it’s that kind of sass she thinks he might have missed. Once married—with all the chains of a suburban housewife—she had lost a lot of herself to the house, the neighborhood, the baby, the cooking, the cleaning, the gamut of tasks a woman had needed to be worthwhile and essential.

But here, in this moment, they are the world rather than just pieces that move around a gameboard of a lifetime. She doesn’t think of death as she looks into those open brown eyes of his, and he doesn’t look at her as if he’ll carry on a ten-year affair—maybe longer, she doesn’t even know—that only comes to light once she’s cleaning out the house that has suddenly become too big for just her alone.

“Why did you do it?” she asks, and he just continues to smile at her in that carefree way he had—a tactic he had always used to his utmost advantage.

“What are you talking about?” He laughs at her as if she’s just a cute little baby doll that has amused him. “You know I always run my best-laid plans by you first.”

“Not this one,” she says, her voice echoing, and only then does she realize the music, the lights, the glamour, the wedding party—all of it is gone. They’re standing on what looks like a blackbox stage, and she looks down to see her white heels are caked in mud.

This time, she turns her head to see Henry sitting in a seat in the audience, his elbows on his knees and a cigarette hanging from his mouth. She had forgotten that, how he had smoked in his teens and early twenties. How strange. Then he looks up at her and blows out a plume of smoke. “It’s your monologue, doll.”

She faces the empty crowd, the spotlight shining down on her. “Who’s Samantha?”

The words thud down like they are a package thrown to the floor.

“She’s not you,” Henry says, as if that answers anything, and she shakes her head. She wants to cry. She wants to scream.

But Lila looks straight ahead, head held up high. “You weren’t perfect either. I could have had any man I wanted, but I chose you. I thought we had agreed on that. We chose each other.”

But this time Henry laughs, a chuckle that builds into almost a heckle of a sound. “You’re just going to torture yourself the rest of your life, aren’t you? Just because there was someone else. It’s ruined you.”

And she knows those are her words, not Henry’s, because those are her fears given a voice. She shakes her head, her curls bouncing with the movement.

“I loved you with everything I had!”

“And I loved you,” he says. “But sometimes that wasn’t enough.”

Enough. Enough. Enough.

The words cause their own acute echo chamber, worse than any deathly screech.

And it is enough to make Lila break away from the dream and wake up, her breath coming heavy as if she had just run as fast as she could.

The letters from Samantha may have been burned, but they would haunt Lila for the rest of her life.