The letter came in March, almost exactly a year after the culvert, with a Coos Bay postmark. It was addressed to Daniel at the townhouse, though he had never given out the address. He supposed Caleb had gotten it from somebody in the battalion. He sat in the truck in the parking lot with the envelope on the steering wheel for a long time before he opened it.
It was two pages, handwritten in blocky capitals that leaned to the right, the way a man writes when he has had to learn to hold a pen again. Caleb wrote that he was back in Oregon. He was living in a room in his grandfather's old house by the bay, the one with the leaking roof he had grown up in, and he was fixing it one shingle at a time. He had a job at a marine diesel shop on the waterfront rebuilding engines for the fishing boats. It turned out you didn't need all ten fingers to rebuild an engine, only the right ones and a lot of patience. He was seeing a counselor at the VA clinic in North Bend every Wednesday. He had been to Tucson in January to visit Ruiz's mother, which was the hardest thing he had ever done. She had made him dinner and shown him Ruiz's room, still exactly the way he left it. She told him she didn't blame him. He was still trying to believe her.
He wrote that he wasn't asking for anything. He knew he had no right to. He wanted Daniel to know that he was alive, and that he was staying alive, and that the reason was a man who had pulled him out of a ditch twice, the second time with a phone. He wrote that he had thrown away the bottles. He wrote that he would never contact Claire or Owen again unless Daniel told him he could, and that he didn't expect Daniel ever to tell him that, and that it was right. He wrote that he still thought about the words on the back of the photograph, THIS IS WHAT YOU GO HOME TO. He had gotten it wrong, he wrote. He had tried to go home to someone else's door. He was trying now to build his own. He signed it with his full name and rank and the word Respectfully, the way you sign a memorandum. Then, under that, smaller, he had written that he hoped Owen was doing okay, and that he was sorry, again, for everything.