Their mother had died of a fast and ungenerous cancer in the spring of the previous year, leaving behind a rental apartment they could not afford alone and two children the state had made a series of administrative attempts to assist before those attempts concluded in ways that benefited the administration more than the children. There were forms, hearings, a temporary placement that lasted eleven days before it became clear that the placement was not suited to the placement. Alex had taken Marta and left before anything worse could be arranged.
Their grandmother, Helena, had been the one person they might have turned to, but Helena lived alone in a wooden house somewhere in the mountains near the Slovak border, and she was eighty-one years old and had not been well for the better part of a year. She had died in the district hospital in October without either of them at her side, and Alex had found out from a neighbor who had tracked down his phone number through a chain of calls that no longer mattered to trace. He had sat behind the supermarket that evening with Marta’s head against his shoulder and said nothing for a long time, and Marta had also said nothing, and the compressor unit had run its indifferent cycle, and that was the night they had grieved Helena without ceremony or company.
They had never expected anything from her beyond what she had already given them, which was the memory of her kitchen and the smell of apple jam in late summer and the specific quality of safety that a child feels in the presence of someone who is entirely on their side. That had been enough. That had been, in many ways, more than they had found anywhere else.
So when the envelope appeared on a Tuesday morning in the small pile of mail that occasionally accumulated in the alcove near the supermarket’s service entrance, the alcove where Alex sometimes sat in the early hours when the overnight staff were changing shifts and the door was propped briefly open and the warm air from inside moved outward into the cold, he almost did not look at it. He had learned not to invest attention in mail, which was never addressed to him and which existed in his experience primarily as a vehicle for demands and warnings and notifications of consequences that applied to other people’s lives.
But this envelope was different. He registered the difference before he fully understood why. It was white and thick, with a sealed back and typed text on the front rather than the handwritten scrawl of something forwarded through multiple hands. His name and Marta’s name were printed together on the front, neatly, formally, as though someone had looked them up with care and written it out correctly on the first attempt.
Marta saw him holding it when she emerged from the sleeping bag, still wrapped in it to the shoulders, her dark hair flattened on one side from the night.
