Free Aerogrammes by Tania James

the time to listen to what I’ve noticed about his checkbook, because in all those signatures, his
B
’s are turning into lemniscates, which, according to the literature, suggest dizziness and lack of pause or breath.”
    My mom removed her hand from mine. “What were you doing with his checkbook?”
    “I found it in his desk. Last time I was there.” I hesitated. My mom’s nostrils were flaring: a bad sign. “I needed to know something about him.”
    “Then just talk to him! Did you ever think of that?” She frowned at the counter and shook her head, as if refusing to envision what I’d done. “You should not go snooping around, Viju. Kirk will tell you what you want to know. He’s very open. He doesn’t just”—she searched for a word—“disappear for a whole day.”
    She was referring to my dad. True, he had had a tendency to seclude himself from time to time, though we always knew he was in the guest room. He would lock himself in and answer to no one, not when I crouched down to speak through the crack, not when my mom set a cup of chai by the threshold. The mug sat there, cooling. Sometimes I stood with my ear pressed to the door, but he always told me, coldly, to leave him alone. The next morning, I would find him brewing coffee or whistling at his desk. When asked what he had been doing in the guest room, he always gave the same perky excuse: “Just lying down.”
    A few months ago, my mom went snooping through my dad’s study, alarmed by the number of hours I was spending down there. In my dad’s desk, she discovered a mission statement—five pages, handwritten, erudite but sloppy in places—in which I detailed my earliest theories on
i
dots and
t
strokes. Somewhere in there, I may have mentioned the resemblance between my dad’s writing and my own. I may have written along a margin:
Do certain types of
t
’s, like certain disorders, run in the family?
    Soon after, my mom made my first appointment with Dr. Fountain. (Before her, it was Dr. Dan, and before him, Dr. Golden, whom I actually liked, in spite of the halitosis.) As far as my studies were concerned, Dr. Fountain showed a condescendinginterest. I could never read what was going on behind her eyes; they were the sharp, devoid blue of an antique doll.
    She tried to diagnose me with trauma-related stress disorders. Unfortunately for Dr. Fountain, I didn’t hear voices. I never considered cutting myself. I didn’t wash my hands two hundred times per day with two hundred packaged bars of soap. Over and over, Dr. Fountain asked me about my dad, how I found him, what I saw, how I felt. I gave clear answers. When our time was up, she scribbled a prescription for a drug whose company rep had probably wined and dined and plied her with samples the week before. (I tried the little pills, oblong and caution-tape yellow, but they doused every bright idea I had. My brain went to putty, stretching in all different directions at once, slackening. I had deadlines to meet, articles to write. I went off the pills immediately.)
    Dr. Fountain showed specific interest in the one item I offered her—a postcard of a koala bear wreathed in white fur, beside the words “G’day mate!” On the back, my dad had penned a note to my third-grade teacher, Sister Lorraine, which I’ve reproduced here.
    Exhibit C:
Koala Postcard from Prateep J. Pachikara to Sister Lorraine

    This is the last known record of his writing, dated March 3, a week before his death. Luckily, I saved the postcard in my binder’s plastic sleeve, charmed by the koala but oblivious to the signals within the writing itself—viz., the clockwise curl at the beginning of my
V
, which unravels to a straight and sterile line in his notes to others, but here, so much emotion is clutched in that tiny rose before the plummeting fall, the confident pivot, and the upward rise and arch that hangs over the
i
like a protective branch.
    Sister Lorraine had called the meeting because of my fresh interest