The Letter Under the Barn Floor

A Phone Call to Oregon

In the end, Lorraine asked Marisol to make the call.

“I can’t,” she said, when Marisol looked at her in surprise. “If I hear his voice and he doesn’t remember me, or if he does and he’s still angry, I’ll fall to pieces before I can explain any of it. You start. Tell him who you are. Tell him what you found. Then, if he wants to, he can talk to me.”

So Marisol sat on the couch in apartment 214 with her phone in her hand and dialed the number from the fuel receipt while Lorraine sat across from her in the recliner, gripping the arms of it so tightly her knuckles had gone white.

It rang four times. Then a woman answered, sounding busy and a little out of breath. “Albrecht residence.”

“Hi,” Marisol said. “My name is Marisol Ortega. I’m calling from Nebraska. I’m trying to reach Daniel Albrecht. I think he used to live near Ashby Creek.”

There was a pause. “This is his daughter, Jenna,” the woman said, more carefully now. “Dad’s here. Can I ask what this is about? He’s seventy-eight. We get a lot of scam calls.”

“I understand,” Marisol said. “It isn’t anything like that. I take apart old barns for a living. I’m working on the old Sauer farm, outside Ashby Creek, and I found something under the floor of the barn that I think your dad left there a long time ago. A letter. From 1967.”

The silence on the other end of the line went on for so long that Marisol thought the call had dropped.

“Hold on,” Jenna said finally. Her voice had changed completely. “Just hold on.”

Marisol heard muffled sounds. A door. Voices. Then the line clicked as someone picked up an extension, and an old man’s voice came on, deep and gravelly and very careful.

“This is Dan Albrecht.”

“Mr. Albrecht, my name is Marisol. I’m sorry to call out of the blue like this. I’m taking down the Sauer barn. I found a tobacco tin and a letter under the floor of the tack room, under the old saddle rack.”

She heard him breathe in. It was a long, ragged breath, as though something had struck him in the chest.

“The post office,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“She never…” He stopped. Started again. “The letter was still there?”

“Yes, sir. It was still there. Somebody had nailed the board down over it.”

Silence. Then, very low: “Somebody.”

“Mr. Albrecht,” Marisol said gently, “I need to tell you something important, and then there’s someone here who wants to talk to you, if you’re willing. Lorraine never got your letter. She never knew to go to the post office. She went out to that barn every day for a month after you left, and the board was nailed shut. She thought you had gone without a word.”

On the other end of the line, an old man began to cry. It was not loud. It was the sound of something that had been held down for a very long time coming loose all at once, and Marisol had to look away from the phone, out at the river, because she could not stand to hear it and watch Lorraine’s face at the same time.

When Dan Albrecht could speak again, his voice was barely a whisper.

“I wrote her eleven letters,” he said. “From basic. From Fort Polk. From Vietnam. Every one came back. Return to sender. I kept them. I still have every one of them in a shoebox in my closet. I thought…” He broke off. “I thought she sent them back.”

Marisol looked across the coffee table. Lorraine was holding out her hand for the phone.

“She’s here, Mr. Albrecht,” Marisol said. “She’s right here.”