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He looks so old.
The words were running through Brock’s head over and over, and the funny thing was, they weren’t even true. He just looked… older. For some reason Brock expected the man to look exactly the same as he did fifteen years ago, sitting next to Andrea on the couch, whining about a little boy kicking his ass in Sonic ‘06.
For some reason Brock expected him to have sat in a room, ageless and timeless for a decade and a half until the little boy he probably barely remembered stumbled into him in a random gas station in Alaska.
Actually, the Alaska thing he definitely didn’t expect. For some reason, he thought Jesse was in Mexico.
The cops said Jesse was in Mexico.
Jesse never said Jesse was in Mexico.
That’s where the letter was shipped from—a green envelope with a single sheet of lined paper inside, double sided and filled with messy scrawl.
The letter was shipped from Mexico, but it didn’t say Jesse was in Mexico. It said a lot of things—most of them not nearly sanitized enough for a seven year old to read—but it didn’t say where he was.
Brock didn’t get to read the letter when he was seven, anyway, or when he was eight, or nine, or ten. His foster mother got to it first, called the police, and the thing went from an evidence locker to a fire safe in his foster parents bedroom, till finally landing in his hands at age thirteen.
He hadn’t been looking for the letter—he didn’t know it existed. He’d been looking for his birth certificate and social security card—they were going to the DMV that afternoon, so he could get a work permit. His foster mom told him where the safe was, she gave him the code, she knew he’d be in there.
She must’ve just… forgot about the letter. Forgot it was in there. Maybe forgot it existed in the first place.
Brock took the letter, stuffed it under his bed, and went off to the DMV.
He read it thirteen times before he confronted his foster parents about it.
The first few paragraphs were a confession. It was mostly stuff Brock already knew, either from the news or the internet or his own fuzzy, disjointed memories.
Walter white was only mentioned in passing—mainly, Jesse Pinkman laid the guilt at his own feet. Jesse sold meth, he cooked meth. He was kidnapped, held hostage, and when he tried to escape, his captors punished him by shooting Andrea Cantillo in the back of the head. These facts were delivered without embellishment or apology. Brock got the feeling Jesse knew he didn’t have the right to say he was sorry.
The rest of the letter was about Brock’s mom.
Not about what happened to her, or the mistakes Jesse made. Just… who she was. The way she spoke, the way she laughed. How she felt about her son.
(“She loved you so much, man,” Jesse had written. Some nights, re-reading the letter by flashlight under the covers, Brock liked to imagine the unspoken confession of “and so did I” was scrawled in the margins.)
It was odd. Many, many people had talked to Brock about his mother since she died. Estranged relatives and old friends came out of the woodworks to speak of poor, dead Andrea. Abuela was there of course; she said Brock’s mother was sweet, naive, got mixed up in something awful the same way her brother did.
They all knew Andrea Cantillo the daughter, the sister, the girl who lost her way.
But Jesse?
Jesse knew Brock’s Mom.
Some part of Brock—the part that was still on that couch, watching Jesse shout at the PlayStation with a grin on his face—took every word in that letter as gospel. Every word was truth.
It was naive at thirteen and it was definitely naive at twenty two. But as he stared at this man in the gas station—shaved head, messy stubble, the only difference the new lines on his face, how much older he looked—all Brock could think was, “he never said he was in Mexico.”
The letter was mailed from Mexico. The cops said he was in Mexico.
But the letter didn’t say where he was. Jesse didn’t say where he was.
Jesse didn’t lie.