PART 4
The third box was from Ray. Germany.
And on top, before any letter, before any keepsake, was a note in shaky handwriting that was clearly fresh — not written years ago and stored, but written recently.
“Harold. Don’t open the rest yet. Call the number on this card first. Right now. I’m waiting.”
There was a phone number. And my hands shook so badly it took me three tries to dial.
It rang twice.
And then a voice — old, frail, but unmistakable, the same voice that had dared me to swim across the lake in April when we were fifteen — said:
“Harold? Harold, is that you? Are you at the bench?”
“Ray,” I said, and my voice broke completely. “Ray, you’re alive.”
“Barely,” he laughed, and then coughed, and then laughed again. “I’m in a hospital in Munich, you old fool. My lungs are finished. They wouldn’t let me fly. I fought them for a month. But I’m alive, Harold. I’m the only other one. I found out about Tommy and Nick this year — we’d reconnected, the three of us, a few years ago, once we all realized the date was coming. We knew we might not all make it. So we made a plan.
The boxes were the plan. So that no matter which of us lived, whoever made it to that bench wouldn’t sit there alone.
And I’m on the phone because I lived, barely, and I wanted to hear your voice one more time, on our day, at our lake, keeping the promise four boys made fifty-five years ago.
Tell me about the lake, Harold. Tell me it still looks the same. I’ve been dreaming about that water for fifty-five years.”
So I did. I sat on our bench and I described the lake to a dying man in Munich — the way the light came off the water, the reeds where we used to hide, the exact spot we’d launch the boats. And Ray listened, and sometimes he cried, and sometimes he laughed, and for an hour, on that bench, two seventeen-year-old boys who happened to now be seventy-two talked the way we used to, like no time had passed at all, like the whole world was still a summer afternoon with nothing to do but be young and be friends.
“We were something, weren’t we,” Ray said, near the end. “The four of us.”
“We were everything,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “We were.”
