Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Sometimes at night I would get on my knees and pull them out, so no one would know. I did a terrible thing. I believe in the afterlife. I know that you can't take anything back. I wish that my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.
    I have tried to become a good person. I help the other inmates with their chores. I am patient now.
    It might not matter to you, but my brother was having an affair with my wife. I didn't kill my wife. I want to go back to her, because I forgive her.
    If you release me I will be a good person, quiet, out of the way.
    Please consider my appeal.
    Kurt Schluter, Inmate 24922
    My uncle later told me that the inmate had been in prison for more than forty years. He had gone in as a young man. When he wrote the letter to me he was old and broken. His wife had remarried. She had children and grandchildren. Although he never said it, I could tell that my uncle had befriended the inmate. He had also lost a wife, and was also in a prison. He never said it, but I heard in his voice that he cared for the inmate. They guarded each other. And when I asked my uncle, several years later, what became of the inmate, my uncle told me that he was still there. He continued to write letters to the board. He continued to blame himself and forgive his wife, not knowing that there was no one on the other end. My uncle took each letter and promised the inmate that they would be delivered. But instead he kept them all. They filled all of the drawers in his dresser. I remember thinking it's enough to drive someone to kill himself. I was right. My uncle, your great-great-uncle, killed himself. Of course it's possible that the inmate had nothing to do with it.
    With those three samples I could make comparisons. I could at least see that the forced laborer's handwriting was more like my father's than the murderer's. But I knew that I would need more letters. As many as I could get.
    So I went to my piano teacher. I always wanted to kiss him, but was afraid he would laugh at me. I asked him to write a letter. And then I asked my mother's sister. She loved dance but hated dancing.
    I asked my schoolmate Mary to write a letter to me. She was funny and full of life. She liked to run around her empty house without any clothes on, even once she was too old for that. Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and that hurt me. She loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?
    I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.
    What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.
    I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.
    You want a letter from me? she asked.
    I told her yes.
    Oh, God bless you, she said.
    The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me.
    I learned so much. She sang in her youth. She had been to America as a girl. I never knew that. She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary. I learned that she never learned to swim, and for that reason she always loved rivers and lakes. She asked her father, my great-grandfather, your great-great-great-grandfather, to buy her a dove. Instead he bought her a silk scarf. So she thought of the scarf as a dove. She even convinced herself that it contained flight, but did not fly, because it did not want to show anyone what it really was. That was how much she loved her father.
    The letter was destroyed, but its final paragraph is inside of me.
    She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with the chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently. When I was your age, my grandfather bought me a ruby bracelet. It was too big for me and would slide up and down my arm. It was almost a necklace. He later told me that he had asked