Love Letters to the Dead (17 page)

Dear River,

I watched
My Own Private Idaho
last night. In the movie, you’d changed, like I have. You weren’t the kid from
Stand by Me
anymore. You’d grown up, and I could see that it hurt. You play Mike, a narcoleptic who lives on the streets as a hustler. The movie opens on an empty open road. You are stuck there, alone, waiting for sleep to take you over. The clouds roll away, so fast through the wide-open sky.

When you fall to sleep by the side of the road, you dream of your mom rubbing your head, telling you everything will be okay. “I know you’re sorry,” she says. In the movie, your mom abandoned you when you were little, and you want more than anything to find her.

My mom went away, too. I know how it feels to be sorry for something you can’t say. If I could have walked through the screen, I would have taken you in my arms. And I knew what you meant when you said, “The road never ends.” I know a road like that. It’s the last road I drove on with May.

It stretches past the cottonwood trees lining the river and the railroad tracks and the bridge. It stretches past when me and May were kids making spells, past climbing trees and picking apples and past the first time I saw her wearing lipstick, past the look on her face when she met Paul, past the movies that we never saw. It goes into a place where none of it ever existed, where it always did, where there is no such thing as time, but just a feeling that goes on forever. A feeling I can’t escape from.
I’m sorry. I made her leave me.

It’s the feeling that I am afraid will make Sky go, too, eventually. And it’s the feeling that was with me all night when Tristan and Kristen took us to a senior’s party before they left for their trip. They said it’s a big holiday party that happens every year, where they like to go to watch the straight-edge kids cut lose. It was at a huge house with a Christmas tree and parents who were out of town and spiked eggnog and lots of kids I’d never seen before, some of them from other schools, I guess. Kristen wore a necklace that lit up with mini Christmas lights. She’s the kind of girl who can do stuff like that and make it seem cool, paired with her long tangled hair and her broomstick skirt.

Kristen had hijacked the iPod, and she and Natalie were dancing together and singing
“Freedom’s just another word…”
at the tops of their lungs. Hannah had brought Kasey along, and the two of them were sitting at the dining room table nearby, doing shots with some other guys. Natalie kept glancing over her shoulder at Hannah as she danced.

I was standing off to the side, thinking of calling Sky. He’d said he was tired and didn’t feel like coming out tonight. I wished I were somewhere with him, instead of there. I was feeling like some kind of strangely shaped balloon whose string he was holding, and if he let go, I’d float off into the ether.

I was thinking about that, how high a balloon could fly before it popped, and what the world would look like from there, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw Janey, my old friend from elementary and middle school. She was with that soccer player she’d been with when I saw her outside the supermarket. I tried to look for somewhere to hide, but it was too late. She’d let go of his hand and was walking over. Her already rosy cheeks were a few shades brighter than usual, and I guessed she’d been drinking.

“Laurel!” she shouted, throwing her arms around me. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but Natalie and Kristen were now dancing to “This Is What Makes Us Girls,” and Hannah was licking salt off Kasey’s wrist.

“Hey,” I said, and smiled weakly. “What are you doing here?”

“Same thing you are, I guess,” she replied, her voice turning suddenly curt. Then she added, “Landon’s older brother is friends with the guy who lives here.”

“Is Landon your boyfriend?” I asked, gesturing to the guy I’d seen her with.

“Yeah,” she said.

“That’s cool. He’s cute.”

“It’s so weird,” she said, “that I haven’t even seen you since … I mean, where have you been?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just, you know. I’ve been busy, I guess. With the new school and stuff.”

“So, you’re here with those girls?” she asked, pointing toward Natalie and Hannah, who she’d seen outside the supermarket.

“Yeah.”

“They seem sort of weird.”

“No, they’re actually, I mean, they’re really nice.”

Natalie and Hannah are obviously different from Janey, who now looked like a popular girl through and through, in her red-for-the-holidays minidress and matching headband. Janey stared at them for a minute. Natalie had stopped dancing and walked over to Hannah and Kasey at the table. She took the shot out of Hannah’s hand.
Hey!
Hannah mouthed. Natalie threw it down and then left and went back to dancing, dancing like if she stopped, she would collapse.

Janey leaned in and said, real soft, “Are they, like, in love or something?”

“Who?” I thought she meant Hannah and Kasey. “Oh, no. He just—I think he makes her feel safe or something.”

“No,
them
. The girls.”

I was really surprised that Janey had noticed this. I was impressed. They did a good job of covering it up. I think what Janey must have recognized is the look of hurt in Natalie’s eyes when she took the shot. I nodded, slightly. I made a
shh
finger over my lips. Janey nodded back, like,
I get it
.

Then she said, “Well, are you going to introduce me?”

“Yeah. Just don’t, um, don’t say anything about my sister or whatever, okay?”

Janey looked back at me, her face falling into a worried frown. Before she could say anything else, I led her over to the table where Hannah was.

“Hey, Hannah,” I said, “this is my friend Janey, from—”

Janey broke in. “From forever. Only she doesn’t talk to me anymore.”

Hannah nodded, studying Janey. “You’re pretty,” she said. “You look like a Disney princess or something.”

I think Hannah meant that as a compliment, but it didn’t quite come out that way. Janey let it roll off. “Thanks,” she replied. “I like your dress.”

Then Janey looked at Kasey next to Hannah, and she looked back at Natalie dancing, and she did something pretty great. She grabbed Hannah’s hand and said, “So, do you want to go dance or what?” and she pulled her away from Kasey and onto the dance floor.

I watched them, Hannah dancing with Natalie and Kristen now, and Janey doing more conservative moves on the edge of the circle. I remembered how actually wonderful Janey is. I felt a pang, watching her bobbing her blond head and remembering how there was a time when there was no secret I couldn’t tell her.

I needed some air, so I went out to the balcony. I was standing there, looking at the tangled fingers of the tree branches reaching for the winter-clear sky, when Tristan came out and lit a cigarette with his giant kitchen lighter.

“Laurel. What are you doing alone out here? Wait, let me guess. You are ‘thinking about things,’” he teased.

“Shut up.” I smiled.

With Tristan around, the sad I felt changed from sad like watching a balloon drift out of sight to sad in an it’s-good-to-know-your-soul-works way.

“How are you doing, Buttercup?” he asked.

“All right.” I shrugged. “I guess.” And then I asked him, because for some reason it’s easy to talk to him, “When you first thought you were falling in love with Kristen, did you ever get scared? Because I get that way with Sky, and I think that I might have sort of screwed stuff up.”

Tristan looked at me, and he said something I’ll always remember. “Let me tell you something, Buttercup,” he said. “There are two most important things in the world—being in danger, and being saved.”

I thought for a moment of May. I asked him, “Do you think we go into danger on purpose, so we can get saved?”

“Yes, sometimes. But sometimes the wolf comes down out of the mountains, and you didn’t ask for it. You were just trying to take a nap in the foothills.”

Then I asked him, “But if those are the two most important things, what about being in love?”

“Why do you think that’s the most profound thing for a person? It’s both at once. When we are in love, we are both completely in danger and completely saved.”

When he said that, it made sudden sense. “Thank you,” I said.

He stomped out his cigarette and ruffled my hair before he went back inside.

I took out my phone and dialed Sky’s number. His voice was soft with the edges of sleep creeping around it.

“Sky?” I asked.

“Yeah? Where are you?”

“I’m at this party. Could you come and take me home? I really want to see you.”

He agreed, so I said bye to my friends and blew a kiss to Janey, who was sitting on Landon’s lap by then. I waited outside until Sky’s truck pulled up. When I got in, I put my hands against the heater. He took them in his and rubbed them to warm them up. I leaned over and kissed the part of his shoulder that pushed against the threads of his sweatshirt.

When we pulled up outside my house, I asked, “Do you think I’m too messed up?”

“For what?” Sky replied.

“For you.”

“No.”

He said it so plainly that a flood of relief rushed into me. All I wanted was to lose myself in his body. I crawled onto him across the seat and felt his hands on me. I don’t mean we had sex, but we got closer than we have yet. As the neighborhood Christmas lights on their timers started to shut off, one by one the houses went quiet. The windows in the truck turned foggy, with patterns like icy feathers cracking across them. I let him keep me warm, and I promised myself I would be brave this time.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear Judy Garland,

Today is the second day of break, and tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Luckily I got permission from Aunt Amy to stay with Dad the whole vacation. I know how much she’ll be all about Christ’s birth and salvation and stuff this time of year, and I’m not really up for it at the moment. It’s depressing at Dad’s, but the ghosts in the house are ours, and I just want to be with them. Even though Aunt Amy and Dad are not exactly best friends, Aunt Amy will still come over on Christmas, because I don’t want her to be alone. I got her a super fancy advent calendar that you can use every year, all with Jesus-type pictures in it. Dad was harder, but I got him a basket of joke things to remind him of how he used to like that kind of stuff—whoopee cushions and plastic spiders and chewing gum that turns your mouth blue.

I watched
Meet Me in St. Louis
twice already this morning. I cried both times when you sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” with your voice full of longing. I wonder if when you had to sing the song for the movie you were remembering how Christmas was when you were little, singing “Jingle Bells” on the stage in your daddy’s theater. He died when you were only thirteen, just after you signed with MGM. He was so proud of you, driving you to the studio every morning, walking you into its one-room schoolhouse. While he was dying in the hospital, you were on the radio, singing to him. You never got to say goodbye. This will be my first Christmas without May.

After the credits rolled for the second time, I figured that at some point I should get out of my pajamas. Since Dad’s been too depressed, I think, to do anything Christmassy so far, I decided to try to cheer him up. I pulled the Christmas box out of the attic, and then I pulled Dad’s ladder out of the shed, and I was going to put the lights up outside the house so they could be glowing for Dad when he came home from work.

I was topsy-turvy on the ladder, trying to carry the bundle of lights up to the rooftop, when Mark, the neighbor boy, walked up.

I’ve known him and his twin brother, Carl, since I was born, because our parents would trade us for babysitting. When they were younger, their mom dressed them in different colors of plaid and kept their sandy hair swept across their foreheads. They smelled of chlorine from their pool, where we would all swim every summer, even after we got old enough not to need babysitting anymore. While they called “Marco Polo” or tried to dunk May under, I would tread water and try not to notice Mark in his swimsuit. I knew they were twins and supposed to look the same, but to me, Mark looked like nobody I’d ever seen. He was my first crush. But he and Carl were both in love with May. I was too young for him. Kid, they called me.

Carl and Mark went away to college this year, and I hadn’t seen them since May’s memorial. I remember them both dressed in suits, standing around our house with their parents. I kept staring, because for the first time I couldn’t tell them apart.

But now, I knew it was Mark. He called up, “Hey! Do you need some help?”

I climbed off the ladder. I could see his house down the street, where his parents were out with Carl, putting the final touches on their usual winner-of-the-block decorations, complete with a blow-up Santa Claus. Next to them, our old man neighbor, Mr. Lopez, was fiddling with his glow-in-the-dark manger scene, behind the bars of his wrought iron fence. “Jesus in jail,” May used to joke.

I wondered if I still had a crush on Mark, but I guessed that I didn’t anymore, now that there’s Sky. Still, it was comforting to see him, as if he were proof of a life that used to exist.