Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

seemed desperate.
    I asked you to read it for me. I said, My eyes are crummy.
    You opened it.
    I'm sorry, you said.
    Why are you sorry?
    No, that's what it says.
    I took it from you and looked at it.
    When your grandfather left me forty years ago, I erased all of his writing. I washed the words from the mirrors and the floors. I painted over the walls. I cleaned the shower curtains. I even refinished the floors. It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.
    I thought he had to look for what he was looking for, and realize it no longer existed, or never existed. I thought he would write. Or send money. Or ask for pictures of the baby, if not me.
    For forty years not a word.
    Only empty envelopes.
    And then, on the day of my son's funeral, two words.
    I'm sorry.
    He had come back.

ALIVE AND ALONE
    We had been searching together for six and a half months when Mr. Black told me he was finished, and then I was all alone again, and I hadn't accomplished anything, and my boots were the heaviest they'd ever been in my life. I couldn't talk to Mom, obviously, and even though Toothpaste and The Minch were my best friends, I couldn't talk to them either. Grandpa could talk to animals, but I couldn't, so Buckmin-ster wasn't going to be helpful. I didn't respect Dr. Fein, and it would have taken too long to explain to Stan everything that needed to be explained just to get to the beginning of the story, and I didn't believe in talking to dead people.
    Farley didn't know if Grandma was home, because his shift had just started. He asked if something was wrong. I told him, “I need her.” “You want I should buzz up?” “It's OK.” As I ran up the seventy-two stairs, I thought, And anyway, he was an incredibly old guy who slowed me down and didn't know anything useful. I was breathing hard when I rang her bell. I'm glad he said he was finished. I don't know why I invited him to come along with me in the first place. She didn't answer, so I rang again. Why isn't she waiting by the door? I'm the only thing that matters to her.
    I let myself in.
    “Grandma? Hello? Grandma?”
    I figured maybe she went to the store or something, so I sat on the sofa and waited. Maybe she went to the park for a walk to help her digest, which I know she sometimes did, even though it made me feel weird. Or maybe she was getting some dehydrated ice cream for me, or dropping something off at the post office. But who would she send letters to?
    Even though I didn't want to, I started inventing.
    She'd been hit by a cab while she was crossing Broadway, and the cab zoomed away, and everybody looked at her from the sidewalk, but no one helped her, because everyone was afraid to do CPR the wrong way.
    She'd fallen from a ladder at the library and cracked her skull. She was bleeding to death there because it was in a section of books that no one ever looked at.
    She was unconscious at the bottom of the swimming pool at the Y. Kids were swimming thirteen feet above her.
    I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.
    She'd had a heart attack.
    Someone had pushed her onto the tracks.
    She'd been raped and murdered.
    I started looking around her apartment for her.
    “Grandma?”
    What I needed to hear was “I'm OK,” but what I heard was nothing.
    I looked in the dining room and the kitchen. I opened the door to the pantry, just in case, but there was only food. I looked in the coat closet and the bathroom. I opened the door of the second bedroom, where Dad used to sleep and dream when he was my age.
    It was my first time being in Grandma's apartment without her, and it felt incredibly weird, like looking at her clothes without her in them, which I did when I went to her bedroom and looked in her closet. I opened the top drawer of the dresser, even though I knew she wouldn't be in there, obviously. So why did I do it?
    It was filled with envelopes. Hundreds of them. They were tied together in bundles. I opened the next drawer down, and it was also filled with envelopes. So was the drawer underneath it. All of them were.
    I saw from the postmarks that the envelopes were organized chronologically, which means by date, and mailed from Dresden, Germany, which is where she came from. There was one for every day, from May 31, 1963, to the worst day. Some were addressed “To my unborn child.” Some were addressed “To my