Love Letters to the Dead (24 page)

The truth is, I don’t know how to forgive my sister. I don’t know how to forgive her, because I don’t deserve to be angry at her. And I’m afraid that if I am, I will lose her forever.

Yours anyway,
Laurel

Dear Heath Ledger,

The Dark Knight
was on TV tonight. I watched it with Dad. One thing that we can still do together is watch movies. Those and baseball, but the season doesn’t start again for another few weeks. When the movie ended and the credits came on, Dad said, “The world has changed, hasn’t it?” before he got up to go to bed. That sentence seemed to carry the weight of everything we can’t talk about.

Dad used to be happy. A man with a family. Superheroes used to be indestructible. They didn’t lose the loves of their lives, or let good people die, or give up on their morals, or have to grieve. And storybook villains used to be simply evil. Not humans twisted into something terrifying. But
The Dark Knight
is like a grown-up version of a superhero story. Batman is broken, too—he loses the woman he loves, and he has to frame himself for murder in order to save hope for the city. You play the Joker, the evil figure, and you are brilliant at it.

The movie scared me, to tell the truth. You scared me. I want to say what I could take from it, but I can’t. All there is is this deep-in-my-stomach feeling of terror, and this fear that there is no really happy ending anymore.

It’s the second week of March. Spring should almost be here, but the air has held on to its cold, wind coming in gusts to scare off the buds that might want to start blooming. It’s been a long time since I’ve written one of these letters—almost a month. I guess after I tore up Kurt’s poster, I didn’t feel like it anymore. Until I watched
The Dark Knight
and started thinking about you. I first got to know you from that movie
10 Things I Hate About You
, and I always remember that scene where you jump up on the bleachers and sing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” to the whole girls’ soccer team to capture the heart of the girl you like. But after that, even though you got a lot of offers, you wouldn’t do any more teen movies. Instead, you ate ramen noodles in your apartment and waited. You didn’t just want to be famous, you wanted to be true to yourself. And eventually you got more roles, better ones, and you became the kind of grownup that made growing up seem okay, like you don’t have to lose your spirit in order to get older. You became the kind of father that any daughter would have wanted to have. When they found you in your apartment, dead from too many pills, I really did think it was an accident. I don’t think you meant to go.

I read about how you were planning to buy a garage for your daughter in Brooklyn so that you could make it into your own private drive-in theater together. When I think about that, it almost makes me cry. How you would have parked there with her, the two of you in the front seat passing popcorn and eating Red Vines and laughing at a cartoon flickering on the screen—the sort of story that ends like it’s supposed to, unlike the ones that haunt us as we grow up.

This month has passed by in a blur, but I guess there are a few new things to tell you about. One thing is that Hannah decided that she thinks bruises are pretty. She’s started painting them onto her cheekbone with eye shadow. They look real, too. Natalie tells her not to, but she loves her so much that she only kisses them and tells Hannah she’ll make it better. Sometimes we want our bodies to do a better job of showing the things that hurt us, the stories we keep hidden inside of us.

The other thing is that Hannah got her provisional license, and on Saturday we drove through the mountain roads to this guy Blake’s house. Hannah met him at her new job at the Macaroni Grill. He’s a busboy there, and she’s a hostess. She got a new job because Natalie got so angry every time she talked about Neung that finally she swore she’d never see him again and quit Japanese Kitchen. But she still has Kasey, and now Blake, too. She doesn’t like taking Natalie over to the boyfriends’ houses anymore, but she still doesn’t like to go alone, so I went with her.

When we parked in front of Blake’s little mountain shack, I felt immediately nervous. It wasn’t locked, so we walked right in. It smelled like cherry-flavored cigars, and all the windowsills were lined with glass bottles covered in dust.

When he came out of the bedroom, I froze. Hannah says he’s twenty-two, but to me he looked even older. And not older-in-college like Kasey. Older like Paul was, May’s boyfriend, and Paul’s friend. His black hair was grown long into his face, and he had a midnight shadow, much darker than five o’clock.

He moved right past us and opened the fridge. He pulled out some Tecates and tossed them to us. I didn’t catch mine. It flew past me and onto the carpeted floor, which I felt that I was sinking into. I tried to move my feet, but they wouldn’t budge.

Hannah bent over and picked up my beer. I felt my fingers close around it.

“Laurel, are you all right?”

“What? Um, yeah. Sorry.”

I watched Blake put his arm around Hannah, and all I could see was May, walking up to Paul. Watching her smooth hair swinging behind her. His eyes devouring her.

Blake’s roommate was sitting on the couch, which was upholstered in brown velvet and looked like it had been there since the seventies. The roommate doesn’t speak. Not because he can’t, but because he took a vow of silence a year and nine days ago. He hasn’t said a word since. After Blake explained this, he pulled Hannah off and they disappeared into his room, leaving me alone with the roommate, who was reading a book called
The Birth of Tragedy
. I guess Blake must have told me the roommate’s name, but I forgot.

I forced my nail under the tab of the beer and popped it open with a crack that sounded as loud as an explosion. I sipped it. The roommate’s eyes kept glancing up over the top of the page at me. I tried to count all of the little bottles sitting on the windowsill, but I kept losing track. My feet stayed just where they were, glued to the rug.

I wondered if where we were was like the places where May would go with Paul when he’d take her away those nights. It was so different than I’d thought when I pictured her driving off somewhere magical. I imagined her now in the room with the curtains drawn and fluorescent lights on, lying on the dingy cream-colored rug and smoking cigarettes, letting the smoke trail out of her dark lips.

The roommate moved his legs over, I guess to make room on the couch, and I got a sinking feeling, as if the carpet were quicksand. He patted the place on the couch beside him. All I could think was,
It will just hurt worse if you fight it
. As if my body were moving without me, I saw myself walk over. The world went quiet. Like we were being recorded on silent film. The roommate and the room and me. And I started just watching us in the movie. I watched his hand reach out and start to touch me.

My head was pounding. His hand—his hand was on my thigh. All of a sudden I was somewhere else. All I could think was
no
.
Please no. Make it stop.
I slammed my head against the wooden arm of the couch.

I felt the shock of the hurt and I let the colors start to come in at the edges of my eyes.

I don’t know how long it was, but when I opened them, the roommate was staring at me, confused.

And then Hannah was standing over me in her bra. She looked alarmed as I opened my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“What’s wrong?” Hannah asked.

“Can we go?”

Hannah nodded and went to get her shirt. She promised to make it up to Blake later, because he was annoyed that I’d interrupted their hookup.

On the way to the car, I picked up some snow and rubbed it on my face to try to wake up. Hannah looked at me worriedly and asked, “Laurel, what happened?”

I could feel the bump growing on the back of my head. I started to cry. “Please, just drive,” I said. So she did.

When we were partway down the mountain, she asked again. “What happened?”

“I never want to go back there,” I said.

“Okay, you don’t have to,” she said gently.

“But I don’t like Blake. I don’t want you to see him again.”

“Not you, too,” she groaned. “That’s Natalie’s line.”

“Please, Hannah, promise?”

“Why?”

I couldn’t let anything happen to Hannah. “He just—he reminds me of this guy my sister used to date. Just don’t see him again, okay?”

Hannah paused a moment and stared out at the road. “Okay,” she said finally, “if it’s really important to you.” And then she asked, “Are you mad at your sister? For leaving you?”

My heart squeezed up. I started to panic. I thought somehow she knew. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, like, ’cause she died.”

“But it’s not her fault,” I said.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be mad. I’m mad at my parents for dying and leaving me with Jason, and I don’t even remember them.”

I thought about it. Nobody had ever said it like that before. “You’re brave,” I said.

She laughed. “What do you mean? I am not. I’m an idiot.”

“No, you’re so smart. I wish that you knew it.”

And then it was quiet. We turned up the music and drove down the mountain roads, dark and shiny from March’s melting snow.

The stories change as we get older. Sometimes they don’t make sense anymore. I would like to write a new story, where Hannah just loves Natalie, and May comes back home, and I never tried to be like her but got the whole thing wrong.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear River Phoenix,

There’s this part in
Stand by Me
where your character tries to convince Gordie that he could be a writer someday. You tell him that it’s like God gave him a special talent and told him to try not to lose it. But, you say, “Kids lose everything unless there’s someone there to look out for them.” That hits me in the heart. It makes me think about everything there is to lose as you grow up. It makes me wonder if there was no one to look out for you. Or if there was and they just turned away for a moment.

I keep having this feeling, hot inside of me, that maybe there was no one to look out for me when I needed them to. It was May who I thought would always do it. But maybe there was no one to look out for her, either.

I think of Mom and the question she asked. “Did she jump?” I told Mom no, but I’ll never know the answer. And I think of the question that Mom didn’t ask, the question in her eyes.
Why didn’t you stop her?
The question I can’t get out of my mind.
Why didn’t
you
?!
I want to ask Mom.

She called tonight. After I’d answered her usual questions about how’s school, et cetera, with my usual one-word answers, she asked, “Is everything okay there?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Are you sure? You never talk to me.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. You’re not even here.”

There was a long silence. Then she said, “I wanted to tell you. I finally went to the ocean yesterday.”

“Yeah?”

“I hadn’t gone since I’d gotten here. It’s almost like I was waiting for you and your sister. But yesterday, I just … I got in my car, and before I knew it I was at the water. It’s like May was pulling me. And it was so beautiful, Laurel. I could almost feel her there.”

I wanted to say,
Well, how fucking great for you
. Instead I was quiet.

“Maybe you can come out for a visit sometime this summer and we’ll go together.”

All I could think when she said that was that it meant that she wasn’t coming back. Instead of answering her, I blurted out, “Mom, why did you leave?” I wanted her to tell me the truth. If she left because she was mad at me, or because she thought it was my fault, or because I never answered her questions, I wanted her to just say it.

“Your sister’s death shattered my heart, Laurel. Nobody knows what it’s like to lose a child.”

“Dad does.”

Mom didn’t answer.

“Nobody knows what it’s like to lose a sister, either,” I said.

“I know, sweetie. I know—”

“But Dad and I didn’t run away. We stayed together.”