The Last Postcard

The postcard is forty years late, which is unusual even for the postal service. On the front: a hand-tinted photograph of a glacier that, according to every map Sira ever drew, has no name. On the back, in pencil gone silver with age: "Day 112. The pass is real. Tell Sira the blue valley sings. — B." Her father's handwriting. Her father's initial. Her father, who was declared dead with the rest of the Aydin Expedition in a crevasse field a lifetime ago, when Sira was nine and learned to read maps because the search parties wouldn't let her hold anything else. She is sixty now. She has spent a career drawing other people's discoveries, retired with a bad knee, a paid-off flat, and the precise, quiet anger of someone who was never given a grave to visit. The postmark is the strange part. Not the date — dates smudge. The place. The card was franked three weeks ago, at a station in the high country that has been automated and unmanned since 2009. Sira lays the postcard on her kitchen table, next to her knee brace and her pension book. Then she gets down the old expedition map, the one with her father's route in red, and begins, with a steady hand, to draw past the point where the red line ends.