He gave her the bear first, because Junie's priorities were the correct ones and he had learned to sequence a ceremony by them. She received it with both arms and a moment of silent, total appraisal — ear asymmetry noted and approved, bow inspected, face consulted — and then she crushed it against the unicorn shirt and informed the yard, "His name is Captain Two. Because the first Captain lives at Everett's house and guards the kitchen. This one guards here. They're brothers." She set Captain Two on the porch rail in a position of command, and only then, her administration complete, did she permit the afternoon to continue.
"What's this?" Claire said, at the top of the steps, because Everett had taken the envelope from his vest — the worn, cream envelope, FOR DADDY in tall pencil capitals — and was holding it out to her with a steadiness that cost him more than the walk had.
"My daughter's last letter," he said. "I found it that night—" He corrected himself, because accuracy had become a discipline in him that summer, a way of honoring the facts that had saved him. "No. It found me that night after the hospital, if I'm honest about the direction of travel. It was in her memory box. I hadn't opened the box in years. Hadn't read it in— ever. She wrote it when she was seven, for a school thing. For if I ever got lost." He looked at the envelope in his hand as if it weighed what it weighed. "I read it last Sunday. Three times. And I sat in my kitchen and understood that it wasn't mine to keep in a box, Claire. It's got your name on it too, in a manner of speaking. It's got hers." He nodded at Junie, who had gone uncharacteristically still, listening with her whole face. "Open it. Read it out loud. She always liked hearing how things sounded."
Claire read it on the porch steps, in the late light, with Junie pressed against her side and Everett standing in the yard below like a man at the rail of a church, and this — at last, in its hour — is what it said, in tall pencil letters, exactly as written:
Dear Daddy,
If you ever get lost, find the girl with unicorns. She will bring you home.
Do not be scared of the dark parts of the road. Bears are not scared. And if you are a little bit scared that is okay too becauze Mommy says even bears get scared and they just keep walking.
I am leaving this with Teacher so it will be safe. When you find the girl with unicorns you will know it is from me becauze she will know the bear game.
Love, your little bear,
LILY
There was a silence on the porch of the quality that follows bells. Claire read it again, silently, the way Everett had — she would tell him later she'd needed the second pass because the first had been conducted through weather — and then she lowered the letter, and looked down at her daughter, and saw what he had seen in his kitchen, in the bar of sunlight: that the child pressed against her side, in the two-dollar shirt off the clearance rack, glitter in her braids and a stuffed bear on the rail behind her, was the girl in the letter. Not a symbol of her. Not a reminder of her. The addressee, identified by name and uniform, in advance, by a seven-year-old writing a school exercise twelve years before the shirt was sewn.
"I bought that shirt that morning," Claire said quietly. "By chance. Out of a bin. She wouldn't take it off." Her hand rose, slowly, and covered her mouth, and her eyes filled, and she laughed once through the tears at the sheer administrative audacity of the universe. "Everett. She dressed herself for it. She said it was waiting for her."
Junie, during all of this, had been studying the second sheet with the narrow, professional attention she brought to menus and warning labels. "There's more," she announced. "On the back of that one. Words that lean. That's the P.S. part. P.S. parts are the importantest part, my teacher says so, they're where people say the thing they mean." She looked up at Everett with the air of an executor identifying a codicil. "It's for the committee. I can tell by how it looks at me."
Claire laughed — she could not help it; the universe had staged its most solemn homecoming and stationed her daughter in the middle of it like a small, glittering usher — and looked a question at Everett over the letter. He nodded, once, and there was the ghost of the growl at the bottom of the nod.
"Read it, Claire," he said. "She always saved the orders for the end."