"Don't matter if you believe in them or not. If they're there, they're there."
― Joan Lowery Nixon
It sits unopened for days, one week before she begins to count.
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
She wonders if he is letting it rest one day for each of the years he spent by her side.
He hasn't touched it since the day it arrived, since she unknowingly slipped it into his hands in the bundle of mail on her way in from the market.
"It's probably all junk," she remembers telling him laughingly. His eyes had been wide at the bulk. "Just check to see if there are any bills."
Eli's tuition. Lizzie's car insurance. The credit cards.
His shuffling grew quiet and in an instant she knew. Somehow, she knew.
His silences for her have always sounded different.
She whisked her blonde hair over her right shoulder and glanced back to where he stood, stock still at the counter. A thick envelope in his hands, his blue eyes gazing at it, as though it were more than just scraps of paper, as if it were a time-machine.
"What is it?" She asked. She already knew it has something to do with...
"I don't know," he said slowly, shaking his head and gingerly carrying it over to the mantlepiece as if it were something to be placed in such a prized position.
I don't know, he'd said.
But she does.
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven...
The seal of the NYPD has yet to be broken and she wants to slit the flap with her manicured fingernails. She wants to pull the paper from its casing and shred its contents into a million little pieces.
She wants it out of her home, their home. She doesn't want the reminder and she thinks she would just throw it away if he weren't so god damn attached to it.
She has watched him in moments when he thinks she is occupied. He stands before it, rests his palm against the aged wood of the mantle and waits.
For what, she isn't sure, but she knows he is waiting for something.
She thinks he always has been.
"Are you going to open this?" She asks, picking the envelope up from its now dusty shrine and fanning it in front of her.
He moves too quickly for her liking and takes it from her fingers before she can say another word. He nods and she tries to ignore the way he nearly cradles it in his hands. She doesn't want to watch as he does it, as he opens the envelope. She wonders if news of the life he used to live will sting like a paper cut against the callouses on his fingertips.
"What is it?" She asks. She tries to keep her voice light, breezy as if she couldn't care any less.
But she does and she hates herself for it.
He is quiet.
He does nearly everything quietly these days. She can't remember the last time he meaningfully contributed to a conversation. He lives like a widower in mourning as if every day of his life is the day he lost her all over again.
She knows he tries. God, she does know.
But she also knows that he talks to her. He sees her, imagines her, pretends she is around as if she is his patron saint and his imaginary best friend.
She has gone through his phone enough nights over the last decade after he has fallen asleep to temporarily satisfy her brutal curiosity, sate the merciless unease that rears its ugly head over and over.
But it's never enough.
"What is it?" She asks again, leaning over his shoulder to see for herself. She watches the way his fingertips trace her name once, twice, three times before...
"You are cordially invited to an evening in celebration of Captain Olivia Benson..." She reads aloud for them both as though he has been struck dumb by the mere sight of her name and maybe he has been.
"She's a Captain now," she says matter-of-factly. She is baiting, waiting, hating.
She watches him.
She wants a response. She wants a rise from him, something to give her a clue, a momentary peek into what he knows and doesn't. His poker face is as poor as ever and he gives the slightest shake of his head as if to tell her he knows as much as she does.
Maybe even less.
Less.
"They want me to speak," he rumbles. His voice is so low that it gives out and she doesn't miss the irony. He never has been able to talk about her.
There is something akin to both ache and awe in his tone as if he can not fathom a world where after a decade of gone, he could possibly be wanted back home.
No.
This is home.
She has told him time and time again, but she knows he doesn't believe her. The cobblestone streets, ancient architecture, the flowing Italian language she and Eli bask in is home.
They rarely return to the states and she likes it that way. She likes to put the past behind them, close the door, sever the ties. The girls and Rick fly over a few times each year so they can be a family here, but she knows with all of her heart that his is there.
She tells him again. The lies.
It wasn't real.
The ones she tells herself to make herself feel better.
You got in each other's way.
The ones she feeds to him as if he is a starving man. She thinks that's exactly what he is, starving, but not for her and she hates it.
She's better off without you and you're better off, too.
She hates him. She hates her.
"We're not going, are we?" She asks, deliberately including herself, inserting herself into her own life so that she can play the role of the leading lady and not the scorned wife of a man whose soul is inextricably tied to someone else.
She listens to his heavy swallow, waits for the shake of his head to assure her that no, of course we aren't, but it doesn't come.
He simply sits quietly, running his thumb across the heavy paper over and over again. Over her title, her name, her. He must not realize he is doing it.
It's just like everything else about them.
Unconscious, automatic, reflexive, so damn in-synch.
All at once, she hates this little rectangular piece of paper and all it encompasses. She could kick herself for not looking at the mail outside in the chill of the February morning before bringing it inside. She would have thrown it away, gotten rid of it, disposed of it the same way she has with the other letters throughout the years.
Letters from Fin Tutuola, Donald Cragen, from a detective she'd never heard of by the name of Nick Amaro.
She received them.
She meant to throw them away right away, but her interest got the best of her and she read them. She read them and then placed them delicately, discretely into the fireplace and let them burn. She knows what they contain, what they detail, and how the words would have taken her husband away.
[Forever]
She can't let that happen again.
He was gone for more than a decade, while he was with her, and damn it if she will give him up now without a fight.
There is a quote she remembers from a book she read as a teenager in middle school, before high school, before she met the man she calls her husband. She has lived the last decade believing it to be true.
"The ghosts of the things that never happened are worse than the ghosts of things that did." - [L.M. Montgomery]
She wonders what never happened between them.
She wonders how she is supposed to fight a ghost.
She is haunted and she thinks he is, too. Haunted by what could have been.
She doesn't like to think that way and tells him as often as she can.
Looking at the past isn't helpful. It isn't healthy. It isn't right. We live here now in this moment.
He should be present here instead of there.
For all the years, differences, and oceans between them, she still knows that when he stands on the terrace in the dark, overlooking the fifteenth century palazzo, he watches the stars and he knows which ones could lead him back.
Back to her, back to a place where his presence wouldn't need to be forced because he could simply be.
With her.
She shakes her head. She won't lose him again [but she knows she can't lose what hasn't been found].
She has a say. He is her husband, after all.
He may belong to her, but he longs for her.
She knows.
For the longest time she felt like she was married to them both, both he and his partner. He carried her with him long after he left her, long after she should have been gone.
He carried her. She thinks he still does.
She knows.
She has found a tenuous sort of acceptance over the last ten years, but she doesn't have to like it. She doesn't like it.
It wasn't real.
She hates it and she works on it every single day.
You got in each other's way.
She works on cutting her out, excising, and exorcising her from him.
She's better off without you and you're better off, too.
In a way, she is grateful for this letter because it gives her more information, more ammunition. Olivia is a captain. She has moved up the ranks, she has her own unit, and she did all of that without him.
She tells him so. She tells him how she must be married, she must have settled down, settled for someone other than him, other than her husband.
Her husband.
She wonders if he believes her, if she believes herself.
A week passes, then two.
The R.S.V.P. sits on the counter and she hates it.
She hates what it stands for, what it means. She hates the uncertainty it brings. She hates the way he told her he'll think about it, think about going because there is no solid ground in consideration.
She waits and then he comes home with news of the court dates for his testimony.
They coincide perfectly as if fate has turned the page of her calendar book and penciled in a trip across the sea. A trip back to where they used to be.
A trip home, he tells her.
A slip of the tongue, she is sure.
A mandatory testimony on one hand and an invitation to the past in the other.
They are going. This, she knows.
She makes up her mind and starts to wonder what to wear, what to do, what to say. She wonders what she should say to the woman who still holds her husband after a decade, while she will be the one on his arm, holding onto him.
There are moments she feels pathetic, juvenile, irrational. Moments she is sure that she is losing her mind because he hasn't spoken to her for more than a decade.
Has he?
But she has to be sure.
She has to do everything she can to make sure this is the last time. She wants them to have an understanding, a meeting of the minds. She wants her to know where he stands, where she, herself, stands, in her rightful place beside him.
She wants her to know there isn't room for her. There never was.
Lies.
She lies to him.
It wasn't real.
She lies to her.
You got in each other's way.
She lies to herself.
She's better off without you and you're better off, too.
She lies in bed at night and wonders what it is that is true.
"You should write her a letter," she says one morning. She says it off-handedly, as if it means nothing for her levelheaded husband to put pen to paper and pour out his heart and soul to someone other than his wife. She doesn't think he has ever written a letter in his life and he isn't about to start now.
He looks up suddenly from his newspaper page. Startled, confused, intrigued.
"You should write her a letter," she says again, this time because she wants to make sure he understands.
"It'll help explain things after so many years apart."
He nods wordlessly, carefully contemplates.
It is days before he even begins.
He carries the pen and stationary around the apartment as if they are a security blanket. She watches when he thinks she doesn't see. He sits and tries and tries again.
Each time he only gets so far before he balls the paper in the strength of his fist and tosses it to the floor.
Over and over and over again.
She wonders what is so reverent, so sacred about her, his memories of her, that he can't even touch.
When he leaves for some air, she goes to find out.
She smooths out the crumpled stationary, one piece, then two. Three and then four and they all hold the same thing.
Her name.
Dear Olivia,
Just her name.
He hasn't written anything more. He can't get past her name.
She shreds them into a million tiny pieces.
The pattern continues for another few days.
He starts to write again and again. Starts to write and then abruptly stops.
Severed endings which aren't really endings at all.
She wonders if he knows it shouldn't be this hard to write to a woman he swears he hasn't seen or heard from in a decade of time. She wonders if he knows she considers it his own personal kind of blasphemy, the untouchable precious price he puts on her.
Her name.
Her memory.
She searches his phone for the thousandth time.
She doesn't even know what she is looking for anymore. There has never been anything to find.
Nothing tangible, anyway.
She wonders if what they have, what they had has always been intangible, ethereal, rare.
She hates it even more.
The night before they leave, he sits alone on the terrace while she watches. She watches him try, and try, and try to write to her. She watches him start, and stop, and ponder.
She watches him sit, and breathe, and glance up at the sky. The night is cold, crystal clear, and she wants to see the sunset for herself. She slips the sliding glass door along its track and stops mid-step because something about the colors of the late winter sky have suddenly made him smile.
"You would love it."
She hears him whisper and she knows. He is talking to her.
She wants to scream out into the night.
A blood-curdling, gasping, gaping scream because this is how he renders her, time and time again. Speechless, and shameful, and shattered. She wants him to know that she hears every word he isn't writing.
She has screamed at him before. Screamed for years, but it has always fallen on deaf ears.
He doesn't hear her.
He never has.
Sometimes, she wonders whether they speak the same language or if the melody of her native tongue is the only one he has ever truly understood.
He has assured her over, and over, and over again.
She was his partner.
He doesn't ever add nothing more as though he feels that word, her title, encompasses everything she could ever need to know. It tells her everything and nothing at all.
They live in the holiest city in the Catholic world, Rome. It's the home of the Pope, the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel and yet she knows it is she for whom he prays when he kneels at Mass on Sunday morning.
They are married.
They have been married for almost longer than she can remember and marriage is a sacrament.
[It can also be a strain.]
It's based on faith, trust, and love and she wonders what it means that they haven't renewed their vows in more than ten years.
He seems to have grown tired.
Tired of her questions, her nihilism, her disbelief in the answers he provides. He barely offers a rebuttal anymore. He simply shakes his head and lets her go, spinning and swirling in all she fears she will never understand.
If he is tired, she is bone-weary.
She is ready to put this to rest.
She steps out into the open air of their terrace and feels like she is intruding in her own home.
Intruding on his time alone, his time with her.
She wonders if he is ever truly alone.
She wonders, for the umpteenth time, how she is supposed to fight a ghost.
He glances up at her as though he hadn't realized she was there; on the terrace, in the apartment, in the country.
Pages of stationary are scattered across his lap, across the table. In the dim light from the living room she can just make out his writing, his scribbles, his scratches, her name.
He hasn't gotten far.
Four thousand, five hundred and seventeen miles. Three thousand six hundred and seven days.
He hasn't come far.
"I'll help you," she says. She offers. Insists.
She hears his swallow in the growing darkness. He doesn't resist and his yielding nearly scares her. He must know he can't do this alone. He needs her. He needs her to show him how to write the ending.
This, she can do.
She has had it written inside of her head since the moment she knew they would make the trip. She thinks she has had it written for much longer than she ever realized.
Too long.
This is it.
The opportunity to pen the denouement of her husband's love story.
The irony makes her stomach roll. The next few minutes hold such endless potential. She knows what she has to do, what he has to say.
For him, for her, for them.
She knows.
She perches on the arm of his chair. She doesn't miss the way he adjusts his arm, moves closer to the table.
She starts to speak and watches as he writes the only words he can..."Dear Olivia,"
There are pleasantries and niceties she observes...
Congratulations and hope you are well.
But she can't wait much longer. She has to help him get to the meat of it, the heart of it, the bones. The skeletons in both of their closets.
It's nothing he hasn't heard before. It's nothing he doesn't know.
"What we were to each other was never real."
He jumps at the sound of her words as though she has scalded him. He glances up at her quickly and in his eyes she sees a flash of emotion: agony, abandonment, betrayal...
[She isn't sure who she is possibly betraying by telling the truth. A truth, her truth, the one she has made his. Truth is subjective after all.]
Before she can look again, he has replaced his expression with a look of passive resignation.
As if he has given up the fight and staying here, with her, his consolation prize.
He hesitates and she waits.
She repeats the line again, crafting, rephrasing.
"What we were to each other was never real and we both got in the way of each other being who and where we needed to be."
He writes, she watches.
His right hand is shaking and she wants to touch him, to take it, and hold onto him until he stops.
She doesn't think he has stopped shaking in ten years, not since he left her side.
He writes, she watches.
She skims the words over and over, hearing them in her own voice inside her head and wondering how they would sound in his.
There needs to be something else. One more thing to finish it off, to close, to end.
"If there is a man in your life, I hope he is the kind..."
[You don't get to talk about her]
"faithful..."
[I never touched her]
[God, she knows he wanted to.]
"devoted..."
[She's my partner]
"...man you deserve."
The sky is dark now, all the color has faded away and she watches the movement of the muscles of his back rise and fall and hitch every so slightly as though his breathing has caught in a silent whisper of a whimper.
He keeps his chin tucked close to his chest, but she knows.
He is crying.
For her.
Now, she is the one who is shaking. With fear, with anger, with desperation.
"Sign it," she says, prompts, directs.
He doesn't.
"Seal it," she adds, urges, commands.
He doesn't.
Signed, sealed, delivered.
I'm yours.
Stevie Wonder has a sick sense of poetic timing.
She presses her palm to his back and feels the way the muscle of his shoulder flexes, flinches, recoils.
"It's the right thing to do," she tells him, feeds him, lies to him. "It's been ten years, for God's sake. You can't keep stringing her along like this. It's been ten [fucking] years."
Forever, she hears.
When he raises his eyes, she can see the wound.
"I'll sign it," he rasps as though she is asking him to sign a warrant for a death sentence. She wonders if, in a way, it is.
"Gimme a minute. Wanna read it over."
She does. She leaves.
She gives him one minute, then three, five. When he appears in the doorway, his ocean eyes are rimmed with red and the envelope is sealed in his hand.
Sealed. Finished.
She thinks she has done the right thing. She is bringing them closure, after all. Closure for him, for her, for them.
Albeit, two decades too late, but closure none the less.
Twenty-four hours later, she stands before him on the sidewalk in Manhattan. She knows he hasn't slept a moment and he is still jet-lagged as hell.
Now, in this moment, he is stalling. He is stalling and she knows it. They are minutes away from ending it all and he is stalling. He mutters something about a phone call and he is taking it and they are going to be late.
She grabs the keys from his hand and shakes her head as she walks away. They have traveled four thousand five hundred and seventeen miles, three thousand, six hundred and eight days down to mere minutes until it is finished.
It will be wrapped up neatly in a box with a bow, an affirmative R.S.V.P., a congratulations and a conclusion.
She wants this. She wants this for him. She wants this for her. Most of all, she wants this for herself.
She tugs open the car door, ignoring the strange beeping sound she hears issuing from the unfamiliar NYPD issued vehicle. She smooths out her cocktail dress against her thighs. It's the dress one she picked out to show off her legs, to make him want to look, even though she knows he won't see anyone but her.
Her last thought before she starts fumbles for the ignition in the dark is how far away Rome, home, feels in this moment.
The hospital lights are glaring, the noises are blaring.
She can't seem to catch her breath.
There are people all around, voices from all directions. Her whole body pounds and aches. She can't seem to lift her head.
Her exhaustion is acute. She doesn't know where she is or what happened. She doesn't know anything anymore. She closes her eyes and lets the darkness cover her up.
His hand is on her shoulder. She can feel the warm weight of it.
He hears him whisper her name once, twice. Pulling her back to consciousness. She doesn't open her eyes right away because she knows they aren't alone.
She knows.
She opens her eyes and looks up into his face, but he doesn't meet her gaze.
Because he is looking at her.
Of course, she is here.
In this moment, these moments, these last moments she is here, for him. For them. For their children.
She can feel her cautious careful gaze on her and he must follow it because he speaks. His voice is low and tired and she wants to reach for him. She wants to pull him close and assure him, promise him that it's all going to be okay.
"Liv's here," he whispers and the sound of her name echoes like a prayer from his lips.
Live.
She isn't sure she is going to.
"I'm sorry I ruined your big awards ceremony," she whispers. Her voice is weak, quiet, meek. She apologizes for this. For more.
"Oh, you did my a favor. I hate making speeches," she says lightly.
She nods ever so slightly against the pillowcase. She knows because he hates public speaking, too.
They are two of a kind.
"Kathy, can we - can we go back to last night?"
She swallows hard against her aching throat and tries to listen to her voice, to what she is asking.
"I don't even remember starting the car," she confesses.
"Did you see anything? Or hear anything? It could be the smallest detail."
She is all cop, all professional. She is at once tender, and timely, and beautiful as ever.
"Elliot was on the phone," she whispers, glancing at him. He had been distracted, his focus not on her.
"It was dark. I - I didn't see anything."
"Sorry," she whispers, atoning again.
She feels his palm brush against her forehead.
"It's okay."
"You're fine. It's fine."
They speak nearly in unison, soothing her.
If she closes her eyes, she can remember so clearly, rewind more than two decades of time.
Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.
She lets herself smile.
"It's like the old days," she whispers, mustering what she knows is an appearance of the knowing expression she used to wear.
She eyes him.
She eyes her.
"The two of you together. Always so in-synch."
She can feel his gaze leave her face and travel across the bed, across the room, across four thousand five hundred and seventeen miles, across three thousand, six hundred and nine days to look at her again.
"You really didn't talk for ten years?" She whispers incredulously. She needs to know. She wonders if they will trust her on her deathbed to take their secret to the grave.
"I didn't even know that he was back on the job," she whispers. Her velvet voice is watery.
She nods, glances at him and his ocean eyes fill, too.
"That's what Elliot told me," she chokes. She can feel her tears welling up despite her attempts to will them away. "I didn't believe him."
"It's true, Kathy," she whispers and something inside of her loosens, eases, and she feels herself start to sink.
She thinks the truth may be objective, after all.
Here in this moment, these last moments, she wants to believe. She is sure she is going to die. They have no reason to lie.
She closes her eyes, fades for an instant before he pulls her back again. "Kathy, hey Kathy? You all right?" He is anxious, he is hurting.
All because of her.
"I'm okay," she chokes. "I'm just so tired."
She is.
She is weary, weakened, wistful.
"Okay. Why don't we let you get some sleep then?" He whispers. She feels his hand in her hair. His kiss against her forehead before closes her eyes and lets him go. She knows he thinks she is asleep by the way his breathing evens out in the chair beside her.
She knows he won't stay long, not when she is waiting for him.
She wonders if this is her penance, her reparation for her wrongs.
If she is supposed to atone with her life for what she has done to him. To her. To them.
She hears a verse from the Bible in her head, from the Gospel of Mark.
What God hath put together, let no man part.
They are fated.
Destined.
Preordained.
[She is dying, so she is allowed to think of such crazy things]
They are soulmates in every sense of the word.
She knew the moment she met her. There was something about her, something familiar, almost as if she were already a part of him, a part he was missing until she arrived.
She wonders if she can make things right, right here, right now.
Two decades worth of insecurity, suspicion, and hurt are not easily atoned for, but she has to try.
The letter, she thinks. She wants to tell him not to give it to her. The letter he wrote, the letter she wrote.
She wants to tell him it doesn't matter anymore, none of it matters when life and death are the cards you have been dealt.
She wants to tell him, but she can't. She can't seem to speak. She can't seem to move. She is debilitated by her own body.
She wonders if it hurts to die or if it's like falling asleep.
Tomorrow, she thinks. She will tell him tomorrow.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned...
She prays for a chance that never comes.
When her spleen ruptures, in the darkness behind her eyelids, she prays for forgiveness. She lets go, lets him go, and closes the door.
Six months later, in the dead of night he pounds on her door and she opens it.
He is unsteady, unstable, and she doesn't think he is in his right mind.
"I didn't write the letter," he says and she stops dead on her feet.
"What?"
"I didn't write the letter," he repeats.
"The letter that you gave me when you came back from Rome?"
"Kathy," he says. One word. Her name. An explanation. Long-overdue.
Amends.
It falls into place.
Her final act to write the very vessel that gave them a chance, an innocuous letter with a life of its own.
"Kathy, your wife, wrote the letter that you told me that you wrote," she says carefully.
"Yes. It was her idea," he tells her slowly. "It'll be easier to talk when we see each other after so much time. I tried, I tried, and Kathy helped dictate."
"That what we were to each other was never real and that we got in the way of each other being who and where we needed to be."
She has it memorized.
"That was Kathy."
"And if there was a man in my life, you hope that he's the kind, faithful, devoted man that I deserved."
"Kathy."
"But in a parallel universe," she whispers.
"It will always be you and I," he finishes. "I wrote that. I slipped it in there before sealing the envelope."
"Liv."
Her name. Her precious name on his lips. He reaches for her, falls to his knees at her feet. She holds him, he holds her, they hold each other in the truth.
She knows.
Now that she knows, she wonders how she is supposed to fight a ghost.
She can't.
She won't.
She will be the better woman.
She'll put it to rest here tonight, in peace, because she finally knows.
Author's note: My humble addition to the letter saga. Thank you for reading.