Elan had read four hundred and twelve letters that were not her own.
This was the number she kept in a private document, updated the same afternoon as each reading. Not because she was required to, but because it seemed important that the number exist somewhere. Four hundred and twelve people who had come to her office, the small one above the pharmacy, the one with the two chairs angled toward each other and the window that looked out at the street, and handed her an envelope and sat while she read it.
She had been doing this for nineteen years. She had started after her grandmother, who was eighty-four and couldn't bring herself to open it alone, had asked Elan to help. Elan had read it aloud. Two sentences. Her grandmother had sat very still and asked her to read it again. When Elan finished the second reading her grandmother had said: “Yes, that's right,” and nothing else. The following year Elan had placed a small notice in the community paper. She had not expected anything to come of it.
Her own letter was at home. In the drawer of the nightstand on the left side, under a notebook and a receipt she had never thrown away. She had put it there eleven years ago when she moved into the apartment, and she had not moved it since.
She had not opened it. She told clients, when they asked (some did ask), that it was a conflict of interest. This was not precisely true. The closer truth was that she had read enough letters now to know the range of what they contained, and she understood that knowledge as a kind of contamination. She could not read her own letter without placing it in that range, without saying to herself: this is the kind of letter that does X, or this one follows the pattern of Y. She could not have the experience cleanly.
She was not sure, when she examined this honestly, whether she was protecting the experience or postponing it. She had not examined it honestly in some time.
The woman who came in on a Tuesday in March was forty-two and had been carrying her letter since she was seven, which was when her mother had given it to her during an argument, not as a kindness. Elan read the letter. It was three sentences. When she finished reading, the woman looked out the window at the street for a long time.
“I thought it would be worse,” the woman said.
“Most people do,” Elan said.
After she left, Elan sat in her chair for a while before seeing the next appointment. Outside, the pharmacy had put a new sign in the window. She looked at it without reading it.