The Moth (29 page)

My coworkers were a bunch of guys who had been working sorting plankton for much too long. They were bored, and they were rather bright, so they came up with some wonderful practical jokes, like nailing my lab drawers shut. And I had no idea how to handle this, all these little practical jokes that were played, or talking in codes that I didn’t understand. But there was one guy in the lab. He was an elderly man—he was twenty-eight. He started defending me against my tormenters. My dad had been in the army, and he’d introduced me to cryptograms. I just loved the idea of these secret messages, so I wrote secret messages, as cryptograms, to Howie, on these paper towels.

Now he’d kept them for sixty-two years.

Well, I have a group of young women in my Wednesday writers’ group, and I said to them, “What do you think of all this?” They all said, “You’ve got to get in touch with this guy. You just have to. This is wonderful.”

And so I thought about it, and I thought,
Well, how am I gonna get in touch with him?
This was latitude and longitude. So I Googled it. I found… there was sort of a circle right around Baja California. Now, I knew that Howie had a dental degree, so that was kind of a clue. I figured, okay, there was a golf resort somewhere within that latitude and longitude, so I called this golf resort on their toll-free number, and I said, “Is there a Dr. A. registered there?” No, there wasn’t.

Then I figured, okay, that circle could include the coast of Baja California. So I thought,
Aha! He’s on a cruise ship.
So I found a cruise ship tracking site on Google. This is all true. But there were no cruise ships in the area at that time. So then I was sure I had it—he had a private yacht. He was a retired dentist after all. I figured the captain had come up to Dr. A. and said, “Dr. A., sir, this is your latitude and longitude.” But that was kind of a dead end.

By the way, I’m sort of diverting, but at the time I happened to be writing a book called
Blood Root
, which was based on a murder in a dentist’s office.

The next thing I figured, okay, I’ll go to the California Dental Association. And I found him! I found him, and I found an address. Now, he’d been a public health dentist for one of the counties in California, which sorta shot the idea of the yacht.

So I went back to my Wednesday writers, and I said, “Now what?”

And they said, “You’ve got to get in touch with this guy. You
just have to.” Well, I figured I could write him maybe sort of a noncommittal note. So I did that. I said, “Well, I just got that packet that you sent, and I’ve decoded the message.” And that was it.

In the meantime the Wednesday writers, representatives of which are here tonight, had formed sort of a cheering section, and it was going something like this: “This is every woman’s fantasy. This man has spent a lifetime loving you and searching for you.”

Now, you need to know a little something about my background. I wasn’t totally off on men, but I was a little uncomfortable because I’d been married for twenty-five years to a very brilliant but a very abusive husband. We’d been divorced for thirty-five years, and he’d stalked me for twenty of them. So I was not comfortable opening any doors to any kind of intimacy. And these paper towels were things that could lead to intimacy.

Well, I sent this letter off to what might or might not have been his current address, and, by golly, I got a postcard back, and it said, “Nicer than nice to hear from you.” So I knew I had the address right.

The next thing I did was to send him a book of poetry. I had a daughter who had died about five years before, and this was a book of her poetry. And he wrote back, and he said, “I had a son who died at the same time your daughter died, about the same age.”

As you can imagine, this broke down a lot of barriers in a hurry. If you think of the worst thing that can happen to parents, it is to have a child die. And to have two of us sharing this painful experience…

So we started corresponding. And we started finding out about more coincidences. It wasn’t just me writing
Blood Root
.
And it wasn’t just the kids’ deaths. It was also the Manganese nodules.

Since I’m speaking to a group that is near the ocean, probably many of you know what Manganese nodules are, but most people don’t. They’re knobby little lumps of black/gray-looking mineral deposits that are found only in the deep sea. Few museums have these Manganese nodules, and very, very few individuals have them. Howie happened to have one that came from the Marianas Trench, which is the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, and he sent it to me.

Well, I just happened to have been on an Antarctic research cruise. I had a small sack full of Manganese nodules. I sent him four. I made sure they were smaller than his.

The next thing he sent me was a CD, a piece of music that his son had composed called “Cactus on Mars.” Well, my son-in-law, who’s a geophysicist, was evaluating research proposals for Mars.

These coincidences went on and on and on.

Howie found out that I’m an avid gardener, so he sent me seven seed packages. One was hollyhocks—
H
for Howie. And one was catnip—
C
for Cynthia. And in between he had
L
eeks,
O
kra,
V
inca,
E
ggplant, and
S
pinach.

This was a real romance.

By the way, at this time, the young woman in the West Tisbury Post Office got involved. She would say, as she gave me a package, “Another letter from your boyfriend!”

And at this point, the Wednesday writers stepped in again and said, “You have to go see this guy.”

I had no intention of going to see him, but you have no idea what these women are like.

So I have a ticket to California on my desk.

I’m going out to see him. But now, here comes a question: when I appear, is he going to have in his mind this eighteen-year-old that he fell in love with? I mean, I’m eighty-one now, and he’s ninety.

I asked the Wednesday writers, “Well, what can you do?”

And they said, “Oh,
plenty
.”

Howie has actually changed my life. I had been pretty much closed up. But what he did was he gave me some very gentle warmth. He also introduced me to a calm love that I’d never thought of before. And he introduced me to a sweet passion. You’d be surprised at what you can do in letters and codes.

But most of all, the thing that’s really affected me, is he gave me back a sense of great self-worth. And with that, I hope you all can find a Howie, or his equivalent.

Cynthia Riggs
is the author of eleven books in the Martha’s Vineyard mystery series featuring ninety-two-year-old poet Victoria Trumbull. She was born on Martha’s Vineyard and is the eighth generation to live in her family homestead, which she runs as a bed-and-breakfast catering to poets, writers, and other creative people. She has a degree in geology from Antioch College and an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College. For twenty years she held a U.S. Coast Guard Masters License for 100-ton vessels. She has five children and thirteen grandchildren. A few months after she told this story, Cynthia flew to California to meet Howie. He proposed within two hours of seeing her. They were married in the spring of 2013.

OPHIRA EISENBERG

I
t was the summer after third grade, and my mom was looking for activities to keep the kids busy. She took me, my brother, my best friend Adrienne, and her brother to the Jewish Community Center to go for a swim and hopefully tire us out.

On the way back, we were driving home, and my mother took a left turn to drop Adrienne off. And at the same time, an eighteen-year-old ran a red light and hit our car.

My brother was in the front seat, and his knees went into the dashboard, and he was unconscious, but he was okay. My mother broke her wrist trying to crank the steering wheel in a last attempt to avoid an accident, and she was conscious. Adrienne and I were little crumpled messes in the backseat, but her younger brother, who was in the hatchback of the Honda Civic—back when you used to do that and think it was okay—actually walked away without a scratch.

I don’t remember the accident at all. It’s all put together from other people’s accounts, and observations, and interpretations. But I do remember the hospital. I remember waking up in intensive care, and my mom and dad talking to some
doctors. It seemed like there was quite a kerfuffle going on, because my mother kept going, “It’s a step backwards. It’s a step backwards.”

They wanted to give me an operation, and she was afraid that it was going in the wrong direction, and that we were just putting off the inevitable.

But the next thing I knew, my dad was by my side, and I looked at him. He was always a pillar of strength, you know, a real authority figure. And he had this look in his eyes that I’d never seen before—he looked a little scared.

But then it evaporated into a warm smile, and he said, “Listen, you’re gonna go to sleep for a little while, and then when you wake up, I will buy you anything you want. So I want you to think really hard about what you want, and when you wake up, I will buy it for you.”

My dad had never said anything like this to me in my entire life. I was the youngest of six. We lived well, but very modestly. The idea that he would buy me anything—I mean, my brain almost exploded.

I went in for this operation, and I woke up. I had a tracheotomy with a metal plate in my neck.

My twenty-year-old sister came to visit me, and we were playing this game where she would pretend to see steak and scrambled eggs going through my feeding tube, and I would pretend to taste them. And I told her that I had this dilemma with the present that I wanted Dad to buy me. It was between a TV and a phone for my room, or the Barbie Dreamhouse.

And my sister said, “Listen, you’re gonna have a lot of TVs and phones in your life. You should go for the Barbie Dreamhouse.”

My mother was there every day, from the second I woke up,
all through the months when I was in the children’s ward. Every second, she was by my side. And when I was well enough to start eating solid food, and I would complain about the hospital food, she brought home-cooked meals to me in Tupperware containers. When I didn’t like the hospital gowns and the weird pajamas, she brought me clothes from home, and new clothes, and toys, and games. She was always there.

Everyone kept telling me how strong I was, what a strong, brave girl. And I relished this attention. I
loved
it. It was like I had accomplished something, but I didn’t really know what exactly I was doing. I felt like I wasn’t doing anything.

Adrienne’s mother would visit me a lot too. And I would always ask her, “Why aren’t you bringing Adrienne? I want to see Adrienne.” But somehow, she would just change the subject, and I would go with it.

But one day I just wouldn’t let it go. I kept pushing, “Why won’t you bring her to play with me?”

And she and my mother looked at each other, and they said, “We think that you’re healthy enough to hear this now, but remember when you described being unconscious? It felt like you were sleeping for a really, really long time? Well Adrienne never woke up.”

I heard what they were saying, but I don’t think I got it. I don’t think my eight-year-old brain could comprehend that. I didn’t cry, because I didn’t know what that meant. I just knew that I should stop asking for Adrienne.

Time moved on, and soon I was well enough to finally leave the hospital. I couldn’t wait to get home to my bedroom and my dog. And I walked in the house after all these months, and there, waiting for me, was the Barbie Dreamhouse. And it was
more beautiful and bigger than I’d ever imagined. And my mom said I could set it up in the living room.

I wasn’t even
allowed
in the living room.

I loved it so much. I really wished that Adrienne could play with it with me, because she would have loved it too. And, I mean, I played with it
a lot
. I would wake up in the morning before school and play with it at breakfast. I would come home at lunch and play with it. I would play with it after school. Then I would play with it after dinner. And I played with it for years—in some people’s opinion, too many. But I loved that Barbie Dreamhouse.

And life, you know, continued to move on. I went back to school, and Adrienne wasn’t there. They put me in a different class, with different classmates than I had been with in former years. It wasn’t actually like continuing my old life; it was like someone gave me a new life.

And my parents pretended like everything was normal. They didn’t treat me special. They didn’t pander to me. They didn’t tell me I couldn’t do certain things. Everything was normal. They both survived World War II, my dad in Israel and my mother in Holland, so they were very versed in moving on.

And all that special attention just evaporated, and I kind of missed it, even resented not having it anymore.

When I was about sixteen years old, my favorite pastime was snooping around the house, because it had occurred to me that adults hide their secret lives from children, and now that I was sixteen, I wanted to know
everything
. We had this beautiful antique dining room buffet that had all these tiny cupboards and drawers with tiny old keys. I used to love playing with the keys when I was a kid, but now I realized I could use them to unlock all of the cupboards.

So I unlocked one of the drawers and found all this cool stuff. There was an old pocket watch from my grandfather, and my mother’s first passport photo, and all these letters.

One letter caught my eye. It was from Adrienne’s dad to my mother. It was written about a week after the car accident, just after the funeral.

It had never even occurred to me that there was a funeral, because the whole time I was in operations, and there was all this attention on me. It was the first time I’d ever thought of that.

He wrote that he would never blame my mom for what happened, that day was when God wanted to take Adrienne, and that his family prayed for us and my recovery.