Love Letters to the Dead (29 page)

So Friday nights became movie nights. It started late that fall after she met Paul and lasted into the spring. We’d go after the Village Inn dinners, with Mom’s or Dad’s ten dollars. When we’d be in the car on the way, May’s lips would get dark as she put her lipstick on. She’d smile and pass it to me and say, “Do you want some?” I’d watch my lips turn dark, too, as I smoothed the crayon-tasting color over my mouth. It was like make-believe. I thought if I stayed close enough to May, the power of her would rub off. So I’d try to use the crimson as an eraser, to take away the feeling of being scared. For both of us. We’d listen to songs and sing loud. I would ignore the sick feeling in my stomach. I would try to be happy. I was with my sister. She liked me, and we were friends again.

And sometimes, May and I really did go to the movies. Sometimes there was no Paul or Billy to ruin everything, and we’d buy Sour Patch Kids and sit in the back of the theater and whisper.

But other nights, when we’d walk up and I’d see Billy standing outside with Paul, my heart would go sick with dread. May and Paul would go off in Paul’s car, and once they were gone, Billy and I would get into his car, parked on the field of blacktop, and he’d drive off somewhere. I got good at it after a while, riding on the carpet above the earth, or riding with the car engines to the ocean.

Billy would start to touch me and say, “I can’t help it. You cast a spell on me.” I wondered if I did cast a spell on him by accident. What if somehow I made him do it, by wishing to be like May, by wishing that she’d take me with her when she used to leave at night?

Sometimes Billy would hang around with me outside of the theater, waiting for May and Paul to come back, so that I wouldn’t look like I was always alone, I guess. When May would ask me if I liked the movie, I would rush past my answer, asking her for stories instead, imagining parties she’d been to with the music so loud that it got into your heartbeat. A lot of times, her breath would smell like alcohol, or her eyes would be glazed over. But she was always smiling, so I thought she was happy. I wanted her to be happy.

When I would come home and get undressed at night, I pretended like I was peeling off my skin. Taking away the dirty parts so I would be new again. Soon there weren’t many clothes left to wear anymore, and I kept asking Mom for new shirts. I felt bad about it because we weren’t supposed to get that many new shirts, on account of not having a lot of money, and she kept asking what about your old shirts, and I said that in middle school they didn’t wear rain forests or deserts or even tie-dye. And I didn’t tell her that they were all thrown away, balled up in the trash of the McDonald’s near the apartment.

But the frog I couldn’t throw out. I saved him, in the back of my secret drawer. He was the only one who knew what happened. And the frog was my favorite. The shirt he used to live on was gone now, but he still had the bottom half of a snap on his belly to remind him of the home he got broken off from.

The night May died was after a movie night. Things were different with Billy that time. “You’re getting to be a big girl,” he had said. “Let’s try what big girls do.” It used to be that he would just want to touch me places. And then he’d want me to watch while he did something. But this night, he wanted me to do it. He said I couldn’t stop until it was done. I kept waiting for it to be done, but it seemed like it never would be. I couldn’t go anywhere else in my mind. All I could see was that, waiting for it to be over.

After, I was waiting outside the theater. Paul’s car pulled up, and May got out. Her breath smelled like liquor, and she looked like she had been crying. But when we got in the Camry, she tried her best to smile and turned up the music. She said let’s not go home yet. She said let’s go to our spot. And when I reached out to touch her arm, she stopped singing and turned to me.

She said, “Laurel, don’t ever let anything bad happen to you, okay?” She looked back at the road and said, “Don’t be like me. I want you to be better, okay?”

I swallowed and nodded. I didn’t know what to say. When we got to the bridge and crawled out into the middle, I looked at her. “May?” I said. “I’m scared.” I wanted her back.

“What are you scared of?” she asked.

“I—I don’t know.”

“Here,” May said. “Do you want to make a spell? Go get one of those flowers.”

I crawled across the bridge, and pulled one of the little blue flowers out of its crack, and brought it back to her. May pulled its petals off, one by one, and held them in her hand. “Beem-am-boom-am-witches-be-gone!” her voice slurred as she flicked her fingers, scattering the petals to the wind. She laughed a little and looked at me like she was searching for something.

I tried to smile back. But then I blurted out, “Billy says that I am going to be pretty like you.”

“What do you mean? When does he say that?”

“Just, just when you leave sometimes. When he—he takes me in his car with him.”

I could see her face change. She was scared. It made me even more terrified. She started crying. She grabbed on to me and held me too tight. “What happened, Laurel?” she whispered. “What did he do?”

“No. Never mind,” I said, desperate to push it away. “It’s okay.” I was grasping for anything to make her stop crying. I just wanted her to be magical again and protect me from everything. “May, remember? Remember when you could fly?”

She looked at me with a little smile. “Yeah,” she said softly. And then she stood up. She started to walk across the track, her arms out like make-believe wings. I kept looking for my voice. I wanted to call her name, but I was somewhere else. Not there, not all the way. And then—it’s like the wind blew her away from me. When I screamed, “May!” it was too late. She didn’t hear me. She was gone. She was gone already. “May! May!” I screamed her name over and over, but my voice was drowned out by the river.

When she went somewhere I couldn’t follow, I sat frozen. Waiting for her to come back. To come and get me. I heard the river like the sound of distant traffic, like the sound of the far-off ocean, same as ever. But no cars came. The road was as empty as a night sky without starlight.

Dear Kurt,

Aunt Amy is snoring now in the next room. After I got off the phone with Mom, she came in, and I was crying and crying. When I finally calmed down, she made me tea and tried to talk to me. I told her that I was just sad tonight and asked if I could go to bed. But I couldn’t actually sleep, so I wrote you letters. And then I didn’t know what else to do. The spring air was coming in through the window. It smelled just like it did the night she died, blossoms in the dark, new weather trying to break through the cold. I couldn’t be alone.

I picked up my phone and saw that I’d missed a call from Sky. I kept almost pressing the button to call back and then taking my finger away. But finally, I let it ring. I told myself there was nothing left to ruin.

It was late, midnight, but he picked up. “Hey,” he answered.

“Hi.”

“I was worried about you.”

“I kind of have to … I’m at my aunt’s and I just … I can’t be here right now. Could you come and get me?”

He paused a moment. “All right.”

So I crawled out the window, shivering in my sweatshirt, and waited for his truck to pull up. When I got in, Sky didn’t really look at me. He was staring straight through the windshield.

“Where do you want to go?”

“The old highway.” Right then, I knew I had to.

“Are you sure?” Sky asked.

I nodded yes.

So we turned onto the road, which I hadn’t been on since, except in my mind. I was breathing way too fast.

When we got by the bridge, I said, “Stop here.” I forced the door handle open and stepped out. I walked toward the edge of the bridge. I kept walking forward. I put one foot on the ledge. I held my arms out. The night was still. No wind. Nothing to push me one way or the other.

I could feel my one foot on the slim line of metal. The balance beams of our childhood. And the other foot still back on the earth.

I saw May walking out, her slender arms reaching out through the air on either side. I saw her fairy wings come out. I saw them trying to flutter to keep her up. To take her back. But I’d broken them. I saw the wings like tissue paper break off and float into the sky as she fell. I saw them falling after her, slowly like leaves. But her body. Her body had density. It was gone before I could hear it splash. Her body that I used to sleep next to. Her body that would steal the covers and roll like a burrito so that I would shiver and then give up and scoot closer, just to get a little warmer. I remembered how she smelled like apples and mint and earth in the summer. I wanted to go with her.

And then I heard Sky. “What the fuck are you doing?”

I pulled my foot off of the ledge. I could feel him grab me.

“Don’t get that close,” he said. “You’re scaring me.”

I heard the sound of the river moving on, as if it hadn’t stolen my sister’s body. I turned to him. And I just talked. Because everything was already lost. “She left me. She’d leave me alone at the movies with this guy who used to do stuff to me. I know she didn’t mean to—but I was so—I’m so mad at her.” I’d said it. I’d said it out loud.

“Laurel,” Sky said, and reached out to me again. “Of course you are. What guy? Who did that?”

“It doesn’t matter now. A friend of Paul’s. And I tried to tell her what happened, and then—she was so upset, and I’m afraid, I’m afraid it killed her.”

“Why would you think that? What happened?” Sky asked.

I told him the whole story. When I was finished, he looked at me and said, “Laurel, it wasn’t your fault.”

“But maybe if I never let it happen in the first place, or maybe if I never said anything, maybe she’d still be here.”

“Stop it,” he said. “You can’t blame yourself. Maybe she’d still be here if she hadn’t been drinking. Or if the wind were blowing a different direction that night. Or if she’d leaned another way. You’ll go crazy thinking like that. She made her own choices. You have to look out for yourself now. That’s the best thing you can do for her. That’s what she’d want for you.”

I looked at his eyes, and it started to sink in. I’d told Sky, and nothing bad was happening. Nothing worse. He was still right there. Just standing in front of me.

“You don’t hate me?”

“No.”

“You’re not scared of me?”

“No. I just want you to know that you don’t have to let that stuff happen to you anymore.”

He put his arms around me, and something burst open. I started to cry. “How could she just leave me here to live without her? I miss her so much. I love her. I want her to grow up and become who she was meant to be. I wanted her to grow up with me.”

Sky let me cry, and when I finished, he led me away from the bridge and opened the door to his truck. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get out of here.”

We got in together, driving the other way on the road. He drove fast but never too fast. Just right the whole time, the way he always had.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear Amelia,

Sometimes it feels strange that the sun just goes on rising, as if nothing happened. When I woke up today, the birds were chirping their oblivious chirping, and cars were starting down the block. I’d hardly slept last night after I got home from the bridge, and my eyes would only open into little slits. As I tried to pull myself out of bed, I thought of you for some reason. I thought of you on the tiny island where you might have landed and lived as a castaway.

I imagine what it would have been like, waiting and waiting for someone to come and rescue you. Building fires, making smoke signals that disappeared into the clouds. How long could you have lived there, you with your navigator? Which one of you died first and had to mourn the other?

They’ve found artifacts on Gardner Island, which lies near Howland—the place you meant to land that morning, in the middle of the Pacific between Australia and Hawaii. They found pieces of Plexiglas that matched the kind on the windows of your plane, the heel of a shoe that could have belonged to you, bird bones and turtle bones, the remains of a fire, shards of Coke bottles that seemed as if someone had used them to boil water to drink. And then, most recently, they found four broken pieces of a jar, the shape and size of one used for a cream made to fade freckles in the era when you were alive. Everyone knew that you had freckles you wished you could erase. As I got dressed, I carried the thought of that little jar, left behind as evidence. It seems so vulnerable, compared to your brave face meeting the world.