"To Mrs. Wisniewski on Sobieski Street," Lucian said, in that voice, as if it were the most important message ever delivered over the air. "From your son in car eleven, at the Greyhound station: he'll be home for breakfast, and he asks you to please save him the kiełbasa." He let a beat go by. "I'd save it, Mrs. Wisniewski. It's been a long night."
They came in after that, slow and then faster. Lenihan to his wife, who was a nurse on the night shift at Buffalo General: I'm thinking about you, get off your feet when you can. The Cholewa kid to his girl in Rochester, which he knew she couldn't hear, and he said it anyway: I'm gonna ask your old man again in the spring, and I'm gonna wear a tie. Dziedzic to his brother in Erie, Pennsylvania, whom he had not spoken to in four years because of a fight over their father's boat: Okay. You were right. Call me. Sobczak, after a long while, to nobody in particular: Merry Christmas, I guess, to anybody else up at the Your Host at two in the morning eating eggs alone, I see you, buddy, I'm in the booth by the pie case. And Lucian read every one of them back, word for word, without changing anything, so that they hung in the air of the little office and went out over the snowbound city, and Harper sat on the edge of the desk with her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes stinging.
The office telephone rang at 2:04. She grabbed it, thinking it was a fare.
"Is this the cab company?" A woman's voice, old, a little frightened. "On Niagara? I'm sorry to call so late. My husband has one of those scanners, you know, he listens to the police and the fire trucks, and he's asleep, and I couldn't sleep, and I was fiddling with it and I—is that him? Is that the man from the Harbor Light? That's his voice, isn't it? I'd know it anywhere."
"Yes, ma'am," Harper said. "It's him."
"Oh," the woman said, and started to cry. "Oh, I'm sorry. My boy was on the Charles Tewksbury. In '66. You know. It went down in that storm on Huron, the November after they took that program off. I used to send him messages through that man. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for calling. Could you—would you tell him Mrs. Kubiak from Cheektowaga says thank you? He'll remember my boy, maybe. Eddie. Eddie Kubiak. Just say thank you, that's all."
The phone rang four more times before 2:30. A retired lineman in Tonawanda with a police scanner. A night nurse at Children's Hospital whose orderly had a scanner in his locker. A man who did not give his name, who said only that he'd been a deckhand on the Bethlehem boats, and asked if Harper would please tell Harper that the old man was still listening. She wrote them all down on the back of the trip sheets in her stubby pencil, and handed them, one by one, across the console to Lucian, and he read each one, and his hand shook harder every time.
At 2:40 he said, "I'm going to read one more message, and then I'm going to give this young lady back her radio. This one's an old one. I've been carrying it for a while." He reached into the inside pocket of his overcoat, which he had never taken off, and brought out a packet of envelopes wrapped in a piece of oilcloth and tied with a length of butcher's string. He untied the string. His fingers fumbled. He went through the envelopes, a dozen or so, all of them old, soft as cloth, the stamps on them four cents and three cents and one six-cent airmail from the time when that was a lot. He took out the top one. It was a small envelope, the kind that came with greeting cards, and the address on it was written in pencil, in large, careful, round letters, a child's letters, slanting downhill.
Harper saw it, and something in her knew before the rest of her did.
Lucian unfolded the letter. It was one sheet of lined paper torn out of a school notebook, with the ragged edge still on it. He put on his glasses. He did not look at her.
"This came to the station at WNIA on the twentieth of December, 1960," he said into the microphone. "I read it on the air that Christmas Eve. I've always hoped the young lady who wrote it was listening. I've never known if she was. So I'm going to read it again."