I was 21 and my brother was 28. I was living in England at the time, and I would continue to live there — on and off — for the next four years. In 1978 my father was moving out of the house where, several years earlier, my mother had died.

The winds of chaos were whistling right outside the windows of both of our lives and night was right outside the door but we didn’t know it. Not entirely. We wrote to each other often and I now know for a fact what I only suspected back then: His letters are better than mine.

Here’s one of them.

June 1978 Dear Gina,

It is Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in the living room, in our living room, where the white pictureless walls stand listening and watching. They’ve seen me here before, in this yellow sofa that used to be downstairs which we just brought up here again, years ago where I sat and read mystery stories and did my science homework. God, I loved those mysteries which I used to take out of that old wooden library. I would get so scared I would have to finish the book before I could sleep. I came here for today, hot and humid and disgusting in Manhattan, to taste this pleasure just once more.

I took the car and drove down and up all the old routes. Past Oak School Number Three where the baseball diamond and basketball courts were empty, where you worked that summer with those little girls, teaching them to play volleyball and to play fair, and where a kid named Frankie, I think it was, beat me up in 1965. He blew his brains out with a .45 five years after that. And by every old girlfriend’s house, by M.’s house, N.‘s house, L.‘s, all those nights ago. Then by the huge junior high, so overcrowded it look like a Cecil B. DeMille movie, and then the huger high school with its vast slick lawn and qualified classrooms. Through that old maze of streets that led to E.‘s, the real girlfriend, the first heartbreaker, and by J.‘s old place, who was murdered three years ago. And on to Harbor Isle, lovely, unforgettable, the water too blue to mention, by K.‘s house and that little tennis court, where his father stood shirtless and sweating, the portrait of a homeowner, just about to put in a new air conditioner.

And then back again. Now your Dad’s in the kitchen making steak and chicken, fried chicken, and it’s ready.

So with a full belly I sit in the yard and watch and listen. The squirrel sits on his limb and does not more for one half-hour. The yard is rich and heavy and green. I thought of the old cat, how he would walk so deliberately, deliberately, paw down, next paw down, and come striding out from his jungle, shaggy belly swinging. Mrs MacDonald next door, old, old, sits quietly reading the newspaper, thinking –– I can’t guess how far and long her thoughts must range. It’s dusk, Dad’s on the sofa reading a book I brought on the history of the 14th century, but the lamps are gone and if you dare to look up from the print on the page for a minute when you look down again you realize you can’t see the words anymore.

I hope you are well (I know you are) and that you could be here, but even more I wish I were there.

Love, Hugo