Dr. Okonkwo was fifty-three years old and had been researching LAM
since she was a postgraduate student who had watched her own aunt die of
it in 1989. She had the particular quality of person who has spent decades
on a single problem a depth of focus that was both impressive and slightly
unnerving, as though the rest of the world were slightly translucent to her
and only the research was fully solid.
We video-called her on a Tuesday evening. She, Cael, Maya, Priya,
and I were crowded around my kitchen table. Margaret had said she didn't
need to be on the call she had met Dr. Okonkwo years ago, she said, and
the introduction that needed to happen was the other one.
Dr. Okonkwo appeared on screen from what looked like a university
office, surrounded by the organized chaos of a working researcher. She
looked at me for a moment before speaking.
"You have her face,' she said. 'I have photographs of Elena from the
letters and you have her face.'"
"I know,' I said. 'Dr. Okonkwo you said you've been receiving letters.
From E.'"
She nodded. 'For eleven years. The first one arrived when I was in a
particularly difficult period of the research I was about to give up on a
specific genetic hypothesis. The letter told me not to. It told me exactly
where the gap in my methodology was. I am a scientist and I spent
approximately two weeks being very rational about how impossible that was
and then I went back to the research because the methodology note was
correct.' A pause. 'They've been arriving irregularly ever since. Always at
turning points. Always with precisely the right information.'
'Elena,' Cael said.
'Apparently.' She smiled slightly. 'I've had twenty-six years to get
comfortable with the impossible. What I know is that the letters have been
right every time, and the research they pointed me toward has produced the
most promising early-onset LAM treatment in the literature.'
"And Cael's genetic profile' I began."
'Is what we've been looking for,' she said. 'Partial familial match to
Elena's variant, exactly as predicted.' She looked at Cael. 'A simple blood
draw, a cellular contribution nothing invasive, nothing ongoing. Your
participation in the trial would give us the donor component we need to
complete the treatment protocol.'
Cael said: 'What do I need to do?'
Not: do you think it will work. Not: what are the risks, what are the
odds. Just: what do I need to do.
I heard Priya make a small sound beside me that she would later
deny.
Dr. Okonkwo outlined the procedure. Simple. Non-invasive. A few
appointments. The trial itself was six months of treatment, with close
monitoring. The preliminary data from similar cases was, in her careful
scientific language, extremely encouraging.
"In plain language,' I said. 'In terms a seventeen-year-old can work
with.'"
She looked at me directly. 'In plain language: I believe this will work.
Elena believed it would work. Her samples match the hypothesis precisely.
Your case is exactly what this treatment was designed for.' She paused. 'I
have been building toward this for a very long time. I am not in the business
of false hope. But I am telling you that I have hope.'
After the call ended, no one spoke for a moment.
Then Priya said, in the voice of someone reporting a fact: 'A dead
woman spent eleven years of her life building a research program, from
scratch, in a dying woman's mind, delivered through letters from the future,
to cure her great-great-niece of the disease that killed her.' She paused. 'I
just want to acknowledge that out loud.'
"Noted,' I said."
'It's extraordinary.'
"It is.'"
'And it's because she loved someone.' Priya looked at me. 'She loved
Marco, and the love had nowhere to go when she died, so it went
everywhere. It became a research program. It became letters. It became
you and Cael finding each other in a bookshop.'
Maya, who had been quiet for most of the call, said: 'Dad always said
Elena was the kind of person who improved whatever she touched.' She was
looking at her hands. 'I think he meant it more literally than I understood at
the time.'
I went to see Margaret the next day. I walked to Birch Lane alone, in
the cold, with the compass in my coat pocket. She was in the garden
winter, but she was apparently immune to it pruning something with the
focused attention she brought to everything.
She looked up when I came through the gate. Something in her face
settled.
"The call went well,' she said. Not a question."
"The call went well.'"
She nodded. She snipped another branch with her pruning shears.
'She'll be so pleased.'
"Elena?'"
'She always is, when something goes right.' She said it simply, without
elaboration, as though it were not a remarkable thing to say. Perhaps, after
twenty-six years, it wasn't remarkable to her anymore.
'Margaret,' I said. 'The letters she sent Dr. Okonkwo. They were
updated. Current. Elena died in 1997 she couldn't have written them.'
Margaret looked at me.
"I wrote some of them,' she said. 'The ones that needed updating. But
not all of them.' She went back to her pruning. 'Some of them arrived at my
door the same way yours arrived at yours. In cream envelopes. Elena's
handwriting. From no return address.'"
A long silence.
"You're saying some of Elena's letters were still arriving,' I said
slowly. 'After she died. To you.'"
'For twenty-six years,' Margaret said. She didn't look up from her
pruning. 'She writes when something important is happening. Not often I
can go a year without hearing from her. But she writes. She finds a way.'
She paused. 'I stopped being surprised by the second year. I just started
being grateful.'
I stood in the winter garden for a moment, holding this.
'She's still there,' I said.
'In some form. In the form that matters.' Margaret finally looked up.
'She told me once that love, when it's strong enough, becomes structural.
Load-bearing. It holds things up even after the person who generated it is
gone.' She smiled a small, worn, extraordinarily warm smile. 'I think she
was right.'
I walked home with the compass. When I got back to my
apartment, there was one final cream envelope on my doormat. My
name on the front. Elena's handwriting. And in the top left corner,
where a return address might go, two small words: Still here.