Love Letters to the Dead (18 page)

When he offered help, I said, “Sure,” laughing. “It’s sorta harder than it looks.”

So together, we strung up the lights, not having to talk about much other than how to get them in place on the hooks and where to run the extension cord.

When we finally climbed down from the roof, it was starting to get dark out.

“So,” I asked, “how’s college?”

“It’s good.” He smiled. “Harder than I thought. But no parents, so that’s nice. You’ll like it.” He looked me up and down. “Crazy,” he said. “You’re all grown-up.”

“Yeah,” I said with a smile. “I guess.”

I was really hoping that he wouldn’t say anything about May and how he was sorry, and, thank goodness, he didn’t. Instead, he said, “How’s your dad?”

“He’s all right. At work.” I gestured to the lights. “I’m going to surprise him with this. Thanks for the help.”

“Well,” he said, “come by if you want some cookies. Mom’s got the oven running twenty-four/seven.”

I nodded, although I knew I wouldn’t.

When Dad came home and saw the lights, he said that I’d put him in the Christmas spirit, so we went out and got a tree from the lot where we always go, in a rural neighborhood in the middle of the South Valley. The thing about traditions is that they hold up the shape of your memory. I saw May and me running up and down the aisles with our hands in our mittens, looking for the sort of tree that we thought would be left behind if we didn’t take it. I picked out the scrawniest tree again, and Dad and I laughed about it.

Then we took it home and started to decorate it. Dad put on Bing Crosby’s Christmas record—the one with “Mele Kalikimaka” on it—but as he sat down on the couch and watched me put up the ornaments, it might as well have been silent. Each one seemed to carry the whole weight of our family and what had become of it. The bells I made in first grade, with glittered foil over egg cartons and unraveling red yarn to hang them by. The Play-Doh stars, the animals, the pinecones. My favorite, which is a glass angel with May’s name etched on it. I hung that in front.

When I was putting the tinsel on, Mom called. I heard Dad’s voice strained as he carried the phone into the other room to talk to her. Then he brought it to me.

Mom said it’s strange to see it sunny and still warm at Christmastime. She said the light is bright and clear in California. I tried to picture where she was at the ranch and imagined horses with sleigh bells running around a field of palm trees. It didn’t make any sense. I told her I thought maybe I’d bake moon cookies. I thought that might make her wish she was home, because she always baked them every Christmas. The powdered sugar sounds like pushing clouds through the sifter and sticks to the cookies when they’re hot. I remember stealing them off the cooling rack with May.

“That’s great, honey. The recipe is in the brown box.”

“I know.” Then I blurted out, “When are you coming home?”

“I don’t know, sweetie.” She sounded tense. “This is good for me, okay?”

I was just quiet. I guess Mom decided to change the subject. “Dad says that you have a boyfriend now?”

“Yeah.”

Her voice turned excited, like a gossipy girlfriend. “So, tell me! What’s his name?”

“Sky.”

“Is he cute?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you being careful, Laurel?”

“Yep.”

Mom sighed a long sigh. “I mailed some presents. They should get there tomorrow.”

“Okay, thanks.” Then I asked, “Have you been to the ocean?”

“Not yet,” Mom said. And then, “Merry Christmas, Laurel.”

“Merry Christmas, Mom,” I said, and I hung up the phone.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear River Phoenix,

Have you ever heard of luminarias? They are a tradition in New Mexico for Christmas Eve. You fill lunch-size paper bags with sand from the sandbox, or if you don’t have a sandbox, you get some from one of the sand banks that are in parking lots around town for the holidays. You set up the bags outside your house, put candles in, and pull the wicks up to a flame.

I think they are most beautiful at the cemetery, where people leave them on graves. I went there alone tonight to see the ocean of light, which makes the quiet so much quieter. Each bag in the night was made by someone’s hands. Left for someone that they loved.

I brought a luminaria for May and found a place to leave it under a tree. I wanted to do something to show that she’s still glowing. We cremated her body. That feels so strange to say. We haven’t scattered the ash. I don’t want to see it. Honestly, it still feels sometimes like I’ll wake up one day and there she’ll be. That night plays in the back of my head like a movie where everything is out of focus on the screen so you can’t see what’s happening. The road races by. The river rushes on. I try to turn down the volume and just focus on the ocean of light.

Above me, the stars twinkle like they want to be as bright as the candles, but distance dims them. I bet your brother and sisters miss you tonight. I guess I just wanted to write to say hi. Or Merry Christmas. Or maybe to see if you are up there, in the sky with the stars, and if from where you are, they look brighter than a flame or a bonfire or the dawn.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear E. E. Cummings,

Christmas night is practically the most silent time that could exist. Like the whole world is made up of memory. After Dad went to bed with the tree lights still on, Sky came and I crawled out my window. We opened the presents we got each other in the dark of my driveway.

The newspaper he wrapped my present with was fragile, so I opened it carefully, not wanting to tear. What I uncovered was a heart that he had carved out of driftwood. It had my name on the back. It was perfect. He had sanded the wood down so it was smooth, but the grains don’t go away. I told him it was my favorite present I’d ever gotten. He looked proud.

I’d gotten him a book of your poetry. I made a bookmark from pretty paper with geese on it and put it in to hold the poem “somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond.” We read it in English class, and I loved it. When Sky unwrapped the book, I read the poem out loud to him.

The line at the end that says, “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” makes perfect sense to me. It means they can go anywhere inside of you, because like the rain, like water, they find places that nothing solid could pass through. It explains the way that Sky gets into me, into places that I never even knew were there. How he touches a part of me no one has ever touched. We both have secret places in us.

“Thank you,” Sky said, like he meant it.

“I got you the book,” I explained, “because the poem reminds me of you. And also because of how you said that you might want to be a writer, that time after homecoming. I know that you’d write something really different from that, but it made me think of how sometimes when you feel so much, you have to find a way to let it out.”

Sky smiled. “I hope we’ll both find the words for it.”

I had taken off my gloves and was running my hands over the heart he made me. I looked at him, and then I said something I think all the time but always swallow back in. I said, “I love you.” I could see my breath hanging on to the air. Or maybe the air was hanging on to my breath, for warmth.

Sky looked back at me, quiet. He took my hand and we started walking. All of the Christmas lights glowed softer and softer down the street, a path of light fading in front of us. We were halfway down the block when he said, “I don’t think you would love me if you knew me.”

I stopped. “I do know you.”

“If you knew everything I’ve done.”

“What do you mean?”

He was silent.

“Tell me. See if I still love you.”

Then he said, “Well, to start with, I beat someone up. That’s why I got kicked out of my old school.”

“That’s okay.”

“I really hurt him. Really bad.”

“Why?”

Sky stopped a moment. “I don’t know … There was this girl, this girl I knew. I thought he took advantage of her. And once I hit him, it’s like everything I was angry at just sorta came out.”

I nodded. This is strange, but in a way, thinking of Sky getting in a fight like that made him seem fragile. “I love you more,” I whispered, and then I was trying just to listen, to see if he wanted to say something else.

We kept walking through the night quiet. Through it and through it. But I couldn’t stop the feeling that was suddenly splitting inside me.

I said, “I’ve done bad things, too.”

“Like what? You forgot your homework?” he teased.

“No,” I said. And I think I sounded suddenly angry then. Because he stopped.

“She’s dead,” I said.

“I know she is, Laurel,” he said gently. “What happened?”

My chest got tight and heavy at once, and I started to feel spinny. I held on to his arm to stay up.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. You can tell me.”

But I couldn’t. We were driving back from the movies. And we stopped by the tracks over the river, off the old highway. And there were flowers growing out of the cracks in it. And now that I was thinking about it, I really couldn’t breathe. The river was very loud.

Sky was holding on to my shoulders. He was saying, “Laurel.” I tried to suck in the air, tried hard to get it into my lungs. Sky told me to watch my breath. So I breathed and watched it hanging on to the air for a while and didn’t think about anything.

“Laurel. Stay here with me.”

His face was clear, and all of the houses with their Christmas lights faded behind him. With his smallest hands he had opened a door in me, and I cried and cried. He held me there until I laughed a little. Like the whole thing was a joke. I wanted to forget all of it. We kept walking. Along the path of light, I saw every bulb come into focus only as we got close to it. And finally he said, he said it to me, “I love you, too.”

Yours,
Laurel

Dear John Keats,

I am looking out the window at the clouds cracking from cold, letting the silent sun in. Today it’s a new year. I bet in California on New Year’s Day, the air is velvet with warmth. I bet everything glows, and the palm trees stretch off the earth in a new morning yawn. Mom must be waking up there right now, in her new life. And I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but I hope that you’ll get it. I hate her for leaving me.

When we were younger, Mom used to have New Year’s Day tea parties for me and May and May’s friends. I never invited my own friends, because I loved belonging in May’s world. I loved how May would smile at me and drop sugars into my tea. Mom made sandwiches cut into perfect triangles and scones that she served with miniature jellies, which she would take from diners and save up for us. There were always more jellies than we needed. We never ran out of any flavor, not even raspberry. I can’t get those jellies out of my head today. Maybe my mind is holding on to them because I don’t want to think about everything else.

Last night, we all went to Kristen’s house for a New Year’s Eve party. Not a big party. A just-for-us party. And it started off perfect. Kristen lives in the foothills, up by the road where Sky and I drove that first time. You can see the city lights from there, spreading out below you like stars on the ground. Her parents are still in Hawaii, so we had the house to ourselves. We made New Year’s punch, with cinnamon After Shock and cinnamon sticks and apple juice and red food dye. It might sound gross, but it was delicious, and we all got blushed from it. Now that we’d done the rest of the break with families and all, New Year’s felt like it was a holiday made just for us.