I made myself keep going.
By the time you read this, I will be gone, and I will not be able to explain any of it to your face, which is a cowardice I have decided to allow myself. It is easier to write these words than to have watched you hear them. Please forgive me for that, and for everything else.
My name was not always Carl. Or rather, it was, but there was more to it than I ever told you. Thirty-one years ago, in a city you do not remember because you were too young, I did something that I have spent the rest of my life trying to make right, and never could.
I was driving home late on a winter night. I had been drinking. I want to be honest with you about that, even now, even though the honesty costs me the last of your good opinion. I was young and stupid and I believed, the way the young and stupid always do, that nothing bad could happen to me. I ran a red light on an empty street, or a street I thought was empty. It was not empty.
There was a car. A young couple and their small daughter, coming home from somewhere, the way people do. I hit them. The father died at the scene. The mother lived, though she was never fully well again. And the little girl in the back seat, who was three years old, survived without a scratch, protected by some miracle I have never understood and never deserved to benefit from.
That little girl was you.
I set the letter down. I could not see the words anymore. Something enormous and terrible was rising up through me, a memory that was not a memory, only a shape, the shape of a father I could not remember, a mother who had been sick and sad my whole childhood and had never told me why, a childhood spent in a poverty I had always assumed was simply the way things were. My mother had never spoken of the accident. She had never spoken of my father at all, except to say that he had died when I was small and that it hurt too much to talk about. I had grown up in the shadow of a grief I could not name, and I had never known its source.
