Текст книги "Love Letters to the Dead"

Автор книги: Ava Dellaira

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

You said this thing once: “Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns, and I am engulfed in shame.” I feel like that. I keep thinking about May, how she tried everything and how she was bright and beautiful. But then it keeps coming in, what happened to her that night. I keep seeing her falling. I keep feeling like I did that day when I was seven. She could fly, and I broke it.

I have a new favorite song of yours that I’ve been listening to over and over—“He Can Only Hold Her” for so long. The man in the song tries to love the girl, but she’s not really there, not all the way. She’s running from something inside of her that he can’t see. I think that there’s something like that inside of me.

On the first day back at school today, I wore my new sweater that Mom sent me for Christmas. I cut the neck off and pinned a patch to it, like May’s first-day sweater, and I snuck into May’s room, and for the first time I put on some of the lipstick she left on her dresser—Cover Girl Everlasting. I kept imagining what it would be like when I saw Sky. We’d kiss by his locker. He’d say I looked beautiful. I’d say I was sorry. That I didn’t mean to scare him on New Year’s. I’d had too much to drink. He’d say he was sorry for what he said about May. He’d say he meant to call. And we’d be able to forget about all of it. He loved me. He’d said so, after all.

But all morning he was nowhere. And all day, nothing made sense. At lunch, Hannah started flirting with one of the soccer boys, and a few of them, including Evan Friedman, came over to our table. I felt him looking at me and heard his friend whisper something and snicker. I just tried to avoid eye contact. Hannah was bragging about Neung, how he’s a gangster and stole Christmas presents for his nephew and a gold necklace for her. (She hasn’t been back to his house since that night they hooked up, but I guess she sees him at work, and she told me if it’s slow sometimes they still make out a little in the back.) Everyone was impressed by this, except Natalie, who said that’s not the Christmas spirit, and if it were her and she had no money for gifts, she would have made her nephew something instead. What Hannah didn’t tell everyone was that on New Year’s Eve, she and Natalie had kissed out in the open, like the promise of a world where Natalie was the only one.

I didn’t say anything about Sky. When they asked where he was, I just shrugged. When they asked if I was okay, I just smiled. In spite of everything, I was still hoping that he’d come up and wrap his arms around me. I was trying to concentrate on specific things, like the thread unraveling on the seam of my new sweater, to remember that I was still there.

Finally, in eighth period, I went to chorus with Hannah. Last semester we had PE, which is over now. “Thank god we’re done with that,” Hannah said. She was excited for chorus since she loves singing, and she said what’s great is that in a chorus full of other voices, you can sing without feeling self-conscious.

As we walked into the room, I saw him. Sky. I didn’t expect it. The electives are shared between all of the grades, but I thought he’d take shop or art. Maybe those classes had filled up. He was all the way across the room, talking to a couple of other juniors. I kept waiting for our eyes to catch. But all class, he didn’t look at me, not even once. Mr. Janoff and Mrs. Buster, who co-teach, grouped us into altos and sopranos and so on, and when we started to learn our first song, “A Whole New World” from Aladdin, that’s when it got really bad. I felt like something was stuck in the back of my throat. I couldn’t sing, or even breathe right. I was gasping and looking across the room at Sky, not looking at me. Like I didn’t exist. I wondered if I wasn’t really there. I kept telling myself to get on the magic carpet and fly above everything. I could feel the hot breath of a shadow on me as I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the voices, tried to pick out each voice from the whole chorus of them, blended together. I could hear Hannah near me, singing in her sweet soprano. I could hear the boy from Bio who sells fake acid. And I thought I could hear Sky. The lyrics to the song said not to close your eyes. But when I opened mine and looked at him, he was staring down at his sheet music, not even moving his lips. The song said that there was a whole new world to share. Sky looked blurry across the room. A fading photograph.

When the bell rang, Hannah grabbed my arm, asking, “What’s wrong?” I pulled away. “I don’t feel well,” I said, and I rushed out. I walked down the hall like a ghost who could walk through anything. Anyone. I forgot to move when I saw a crowd of boys walking in my line. One of them said, “Watch where you’re going!”

Sky’s driftwood heart is still on my dresser. I run my fingers over it to make sure my hands are real. To know that his must have been, because he carved it.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Kurt,

Have you seen the trees in the winter, when the branches are bare and covered with birds who have landed there? It was like that today. They kept perfectly still, shawling the tree in feathers. I was shaking. The wind was blowing hard, but the branches with their blackbirds didn’t move at all.

But I’m not starting at the beginning. This was Sky and me breaking up. His voice kept getting carried off by the wind. I was looking at the birds in their trees, thinking of how fast their hearts beat and wondering if their fast-beating hearts keep them warm. I might sneak out right now just to get to cry out loud.

When I came home from school today, our second day back from break, there was a letter taped to the gate with my name on it. It was a strange thing to find, but I knew it would be from Sky. I sat down on the bench outside and tore it open. I think part of me was still hopeful, in spite of myself. And it started out like a love letter, too, the old-fashioned kind. All about how I am different from other girls. And so special, et cetera. And even about how he loves me. He said he decided to leave a letter like this because he hasn’t been sure what to say to me in person. He said that all he’s wanted is to know me, but on New Year’s he realized that neither of us is ready. He said that I have to take care of myself, and he can’t take care of me. He said, You’ll be much happier, without me.

When I read that, it was like I landed with a slam in the world that I had been trying not to live in—the world where he was really leaving. It’s a lot like something you said in your suicide note. You said that your daughter’s life would be so much happier without you. I can tell you that you are wrong. It’s a terrible excuse from someone who can’t bear to be around. It’s a bad way to make yourself feel better when you know you are leaving someone who doesn’t want you to go. Someone who needs you.

After I read the letter, I lost all sense. I had to see his face. So I got up from the bench and started to walk to his house. I brought my phone and kept trying to call him. When no one answered, I walked the whole two and a half miles, crying all the way.

I knocked on the door. I wasn’t seeing straight, until his mother answered, in her frayed satin bathrobe, a bun coming undone in whispers. Her face shocked me, and I stopped sobbing. It was so soft, the way she looked, and so kind. Her eyes said she understood everything. But before I could get a word out, Sky came. He said, “Mom, go inside. I’ll be back in a little bit.” He shut the door and stepped onto his porch, now decorated with sparkling plastic snowflakes.

I had had so much in my head, but suddenly, there was nothing to say. Sky’s body was tense, and his eyes didn’t want to look at me. Finally he said, “Come on, I’ll drive you home.” So I followed him, and on the way to the car, he said, “You understand, right? You can’t come here anymore.”

That’s when I started crying again. I cried the whole way back in his truck that smelled like thousand-year-old leather. His truck where we first touched. Your voice was playing low on the stereo. Aqua seafoam shame …

When we got to the golf course near my house, I said, “Stop.”

He glanced over at me like he didn’t want to, but I said it again. “Sky, stop!” Then I said, more quietly, “I just want to go on one more walk. You can’t just never talk to me again.”

So he parked. And we got out. I remembered the golf course with the geese and the time we fell down laughing there. The geese were gone and the leaves were gone, and there were just the blackbirds now, shawling their trees. The tears wouldn’t stop. I wanted to find him.

“You said you love me,” I said.

“I know.” I could see Sky’s face start to freeze over.

“Then why would you leave me?” I shouted.

“I don’t know. I can’t watch you like this. Sometimes it’s like you disappear. It’s not just that you cry so much. It’s that you cry and I don’t know what you’re crying about. And you won’t tell me. I can’t fix it.”

I was sinking. All I could do was cry harder. The thing is, Sky was right. I wondered if I could have told him, if he would have stayed. But I knew it was too late. The damp was under my clothes. The moon in its almost circle shape was under the clouds. When I looked up at Sky, I couldn’t see his face. Just a shadow.

There was something shattered in me, and now he saw it. No one could fix it. I had tried to be brave like May, to be bright and free and a bolt of stars, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t. He’d seen it. He had opened the door to the underneath part of it where I was just her little sister, who couldn’t save her or anything. Bad and wrong and it was all my fault.

All at once, the blackbirds flew off the trees. Like there was a thing that told them when to go. To some secret place in the sky, before they would have to come back down and find new trees. I think I went with them, but I wasn’t sure if I would ever land again.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Kurt, Judy, Elizabeth, Amelia, River, Janis, Jim, Amy, Allan, E.E., and John,

I hope one of you hears me. Because the world seems like a tunnel of silence. I have found that sometimes, moments get stuck in your body. They are there, lodged under your skin like hard seed-stones of wonder or sadness or fear, everything else growing up around them. And if you turn a certain way, if you fall, one of them could get free. It might dissolve in your blood, or it might spring up a whole tree. Sometimes, once one of them gets out, they all start to go.

I feel like I am drowning in memories. Everything is too bright. Mom making tea for May and me. Walking home from the pool in a thunderstorm, with the mulberries stained red on our feet. Galloping our imaginary horses through the snowfall. Dad riding away on his motorcycle, with the elm trees raining seeds over him. Mom folding clean shirts into a suitcase. May walking toward the movie theater, her long hair swinging behind her. May’s hand pressed against window glass. They don’t stop.

What I remembered first from that night is the sound of river water. The sound kept moving, steadily, like it would never stop. I saw the bluebell-shaped flowers, popping up between the cracks in the pavement. Two of them trampled, one still cupping the moonlight. The river getting louder, drowning everything with its roar.

We were driving down the old highway, May and me. The night was filling with stars. We had the sunroof open and the music loud and she was singing “Everywhere I Go,” in a voice that was sweet and slow. “Tell me all that I should know…” She knew every up and down and lilt and curl. May started singing so hard, I thought her voice would explode into millions of pieces. I kept my eyes glued upward, watching the stars start to eat the sky alive. I made a wish for her to be happy.

She pushed on the gas, and the car sped like a blast down old Highway 5, into the dark. The speed took all of the sound with it, until there was only the music left. We were alone on the road. She pulled over at our place, where the old train tracks cross over the river. In the springtime you can hear the rushing water. By the end of the summer, it dries up and moves so slowly, you can hardly hear a thing. In the winter, it nearly freezes over. But this was spring. Flowers, everything’s-possible spring.

We first discovered our spot when we’d go on river walks with Mom and Dad as kids. And then May and I started coming here together again, on weekend afternoons when we were supposed to be at the library, or after movie nights like this one. We’d park by the tracks and crawl out on our hands and knees over the wood planks. We would sit there and feel like we were floating. We would play Poohsticks like we did when we were little, searching out the perfect fallen branches and dropping them over the edge of the tracks and into the river, then leaning over the other side to see whose would appear first. We’d say whoever’s stick won would be the first to get to the ocean. We would collect piles of them and play forever. Imagining what great adventures they would have riding the river all the way to the sea. And then we would crawl back to land.

But something different happened that night. We were sitting in the middle of the bridge. I said something I never should have said. May stood up and started to cross back to land on the metal edge of the track, like a tightrope.

I could feel myself begging for her to balance. I wish I could have run out after her, to stop her, to do anything to undo it all. But I couldn’t move. It’s like I had left my body and I was in hers instead. I felt her waver. I kept feeling her fall. It’s like everything that was going to happen had already happened, and I couldn’t do anything but watch it.

And then she turned back to look at me, her dark eyes searching their way through the dark. Wisps of her hair coming loose from her ponytail. Her arms slender and white in the moonlight.

Our eyes met, and in that moment it was real again. I opened my mouth to call her name. But before a sound came, all of a sudden, it’s like the wind just blew her over. Like her body was simply sailing over the blackness below her. She didn’t trip. She didn’t jump. It was as if she floated off. I could swear she stayed there, standing on air for a moment, before she fell.

I can’t stop seeing her body floating there. And all I want to do is run out after her and pull her back. I didn’t save her. My feet were frozen. My voice was broken. I wish I could tell you why.

Because now it’s all I can see. May standing on the air, waiting for me to take her hand and pull her back onto the tracks. Crawl with her back to land. And go home together.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Kurt,

In the second sentence of your suicide note you said it would be pretty easy to understand. It is and it isn’t. I mean, I get how it goes, what the story is and how it ends. Becoming a star didn’t make you happy. It didn’t make you invincible. You were still vulnerable, furious at everything and in love with it at once. The world was too much for you. People were too close to you. You said it in one sentence I can’t get out of my head: I simply love people … so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad. Yes, I understand.

I feel it, too, when I see Aunt Amy rewinding the answering machine, playing a Jesus-man message from months ago as if it were new. When I see Hannah running over in her new dress to meet Kasey, all the while looking over her shoulder at Natalie. When I see Tristan, playing air guitar to one of your songs, when what he wants is to write his own. When I see Dad, coming over to kiss my head before bed, too tired to worry about where I go at night. When I see the boy in Bio who fills the always-empty seat beside him with a stack of books. Everything gets in. I can’t stop them.

So yes, in a way, it’s easy to understand. But on the other hand, it makes no fucking sense, as you would say. To kill yourself. No fucking sense at all. You didn’t think about the rest of us. You didn’t care about what would happen to us after you were gone.

It’s been three days since Sky broke up with me. I couldn’t bear to see him at school the next day, or the day after that, so I told Dad I wasn’t feeling well and stayed in bed, burying myself under the blankets. When Natalie and Hannah called to check on me, I texted them back that I had the flu. I wasn’t actually sick, but I drank some NyQuil from the medicine cabinet and slept away the days. Dad cooked me Lipton chicken noodle soup every night when he got back from work, which is what Mom used to make me when I was home sick. It was so sweet, him trying like that, but it only made me feel worse. Tonight, when I was still loopy from the cold medicine that I didn’t really need, I asked him for a lullaby. He sang “This Land Is Your Land.” I closed my eyes and tried to travel in my mind to the feeling that I’d had as a kid when he sang it.

But I couldn’t go anywhere, except back to the night that May died. And to the nights before that—what it was like waiting for her to come back. There’s something wrong with me. I can’t say what it is.

I was frozen still when May fell. The policeman found me there the next day, just looking down at the water—that’s what they say. I don’t remember. When they asked, “What happened to your sister?” I didn’t answer. They found her body in the river.

Dad never pushed me, but Mom asked all the time, wanting to know what we’d been doing at the bridge, why we had gone there, why weren’t we at the movies like we were supposed to be. I think Mom was mad at me for not being able to explain. I think that could be why she moved to California and stopped being my mother. I think she thought it was my fault. And I think she’s right. If she knew the truth, she’d never come back.

One day just before she left, I remember Mom was wiping off the counter after breakfast. She looked up and said, “Laurel, did she jump?”

“No,” I said. “The wind blew her off.”

Mom just nodded back at me, her eyes teary, before she turned away.

After Dad went to bed tonight, I lay awake. I tiptoed down the hall and started to turn the handle of the door to May’s room. But then I turned it back. I was afraid, suddenly, of how I knew she wouldn’t be there. Of how quiet all of her things would seem, staring at me just as she’d left them.

Nirvana means freedom. Freedom from suffering. I guess some people would say that death is just that. So, congratulations on being free, I guess. The rest of us are still here, grappling with all that’s been torn up.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Amelia Earhart,

I keep thinking of you, having flashes of what it would have been like in your plane that morning before you disappeared. You’d already flown twenty-two thousand miles of your journey across the world, with only seven thousand to go over the nearly empty stretch of the Pacific. You’d meant to make it to a tiny island called Howland. From the air, its shape would be hard to tell apart from the clouds.

Your plane didn’t have quite enough fuel, and your maps were off by a little bit. Radio communication was bad. When you sent a message to the Coast Guard on Howland—We must be on you, but we cannot see you. Fuel is running low—were you in a panic? They answered back twenty minutes later, but didn’t know if you’d heard them. And then they got your last message, full of static, an hour after that. They sent up smoke signals to you, but we’ll never know if you were close enough to see them. They sent out search parties, and we’ve been searching ever since. It’s a testament to how much we loved you that we are still looking seventy-five years after your death. But sometimes I can’t help wonder what would be different if we finally had an answer.

Today is Monday, my first day back at school after the breakup with Sky. Dad finally said that he thought that he should make an appointment with the doctor, and I knew I couldn’t go on playing sick forever. So when it was time to switch to Aunt Amy’s yesterday, I said I was feeling better. This morning I put on a sweatshirt that I hadn’t worn since eighth grade and pulled my hair back. At lunch, I didn’t feel like eating my kaiser roll or even a Nutter Butter. I went over to our table and sat down with Natalie and Hannah. Before they could start asking questions, I blurted it out. “He broke up with me.”

They went into a chorus of Oh my god, are you okay, how come? After something really bad happens, the next worse thing is people feeling sorry for you about it. It’s like confirmation that something is terribly wrong. I tried to hold back the tears that were burning behind my eyes, but they came out anyway. Natalie and Hannah rushed to put their arms around me, and Hannah pulled my head against her shoulder and started to stroke it. “He has no idea what he lost. You are the best, most beautiful girl ever. What a complete idiot asshole, Laurel.”

“No,” I said, my voice muffled by her shirt. “I think it’s me.”

“What? No it’s not. It’s not.”

“I can’t go to chorus today,” I told Hannah. “I can’t see him.”

“Okay, it’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to go. We’ll ditch.”

So in eighth period we snuck off campus, walking through the little flecks of swirling snow that were melting against the blacktop, and went to the sketchy Safeway to get some liquor that we would drink at Natalie’s house before her mom got back from work. We climbed up onto Natalie’s roof, bundled up with blankets, and passed the bottle of cinnamon After Shock between us. Hannah was trying to make me laugh and trying to think of a new boyfriend for me, suggesting friends of Kasey’s that made Natalie wince, and then Evan Friedman—“He and Britt are on the outs again, and I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

But I could hardly pay attention to what they were saying. There was only one thought that I could hear, that kept repeating itself in my head, over and over. She’s dead. And then it happened. Maybe because I was grateful for Natalie and Hannah, or maybe because I was too tired and too sad to try to be like her anymore—I just said it out loud.

“My sister’s dead.”

It was silent for a moment. Finally, Hannah nodded. “I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

It didn’t make sense. “What do you mean you know?”

She hesitated, and then she said, “Tristan told us. He and Kristen used to hang out with some kids from Sandia, and they said that a girl from there died. It wasn’t that hard to figure out that she was your sister.”

“What?” I was suddenly angry, like when your parents yank the blankets off in the morning to make you get out of bed. In the cold January air, my skin felt so thin that it was almost transparent. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

Natalie answered, “You never talked about it. We were just waiting until you were ready, I guess.”

And then Hannah said, “I mean, you’ve never had us over to your house or anything like that. We just thought that you didn’t want us to bring it up.”

I stared at them. My body drained of everything, including the anger that had been so palpable only a moment ago. They’d known this whole time, and they hadn’t treated me any differently than they did. I wondered what they saw when they looked at me.

Hannah passed me the bottle, and I took another sip. “What was she like?” Hannah asked.

“She was beautiful,” I said. “She was … she was great. She was funny, and smart, and she was basically perfect.” And she left me, a voice screamed from inside my head.

I looked at my phone. “Shit, it’s three o’clock! My aunt!” Hannah passed me the mouthwash out of her purse, and I climbed topsy-turvy down the ladder in a rush and ran back to school, slip-sliding over the coating of snow on the sidewalks that was starting to stick. When I arrived, half an hour late, Aunt Amy’s car was one of the few still in the parking lot.

“Where have you been?!” she asked.

“I was just—I—”

“Your cheeks are all red,” she said, and put her hands against them. “You’re freezing!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I … this kid, he fell on the ice and I had to help him inside.”

Aunt Amy gave me a look like she didn’t know if she believed what I was saying. “Lying is a sin, Laurel.”

I looked back at her. “Yeah, I know.”

She was quiet for a moment, tucking her silver hair behind her ear as she tried to decide whether to trust me or not. My stomach knotted with guilt.

“Can we go?” I finally asked.

She nodded, and her old white Beetle pulled off through the parking lot.

When we got home, it was like I’d never been so tired. I told Aunt Amy I still wasn’t feeling well and went to lie down. For some reason I started thinking of this game called the dead game that May and I used to play with Carl and Mark, the neighbor boys.

In the summer, after a day at their pool, we’d go home for dinner, and then afterward they’d ring the bell to ask us to come play basketball in their driveway. May would look beautiful, giggling and dribbling the ball, her bikini top still on and bleeding through her tee shirt. She liked to run across the court, but when she got to the basket she’d pause and laugh and never make the shot. But sometimes Mark would pass the ball to me. I would concentrate until I couldn’t see anything else, and I loved the swish that meant he’d high-five me afterward. I loved his hand against mine, if just for a moment.

Then when it started to turn to dusk, before the streetlights came on and we’d have to go in, May would usually say it was time to play the dead game. It was the perfect time of night, when parents would be watching TV and the light was low and sticky. She loved the game because she always won.

She got the idea for it that summer before she started high school, just after Mom moved out. Once our basketball game was over, we’d started playing truth or dare. May thought that Carl’s and Mark’s dares—stuff like flashing the neighbors’ houses—were boring, so she said she had a better dare, for all of us.

The dead game worked like this. You’d lie in the middle of the road on your back with a blindfold—it had to be the dead middle, we made an X with chalk—and wait for a car to come. Whoever could last the longest before they got up and ran out of the way won. The thing is, since you had the blindfold on, you could only know if a car was coming by the sound it made on the road.

Sometimes, the car’s driver would see us in the street and screech the brakes. But lots of times, because it was dusk, the driver couldn’t see. May would wait just a second too long before she rolled away. The first time we played, I thought the car would really hit her. I ran out into the street in front of it, waving my arms up and down, until it came to a screeching stop. An old woman got out and started yelling at us. When she was gone, May turned to me. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you get it? That’s not how the game works.” The point was that when you were the dead one, you and only you knew exactly when to run. My cheeks turned hot with shame.

So after that, when it was May’s turn, I would stand on the sidewalk, curling my bare toes into the cement, still warm from the day’s sun. I would try not to look at the street. I would look instead at the coming stars and wish for May to be okay. But at the last minute, I couldn’t help it. I always looked down and saw her body there, motionless. When she’d roll away in time, I would wipe the hot tears from my eyes. And then she would be so alive, grinning and panting in the summer night air, high on it.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear River,

In chorus today, Hannah held my hand almost the whole time. I kept thinking, Don’t look at Sky. But I couldn’t help lifting my eyes, just once, to where he was like a mirage across the room, and remembering how his chest felt rising up and down with breath. I would have given anything to go back to his arms around my body. I would have given anything to be someone different, someone he wouldn’t have left.

After class, Hannah was waiting for me, but I told her I’d meet her in the alley. When the room cleared out, I sat down, putting my head against my knees and trying to stop breathing so fast.

Eventually I walked out to the alley and found Natalie and Hannah with Tristan and Kristen. When they saw me, they all got quiet and looked at me, in that way that makes you certain about why you never wanted to talk about anything in the first place. If it had just been about Sky, they would have found something to say. But it was more than that. It was May. I guessed that Natalie and Hannah had told them that I’d finally admitted that I had a sister who’s dead.

After a few moments of silence, they forced themselves to chatter. Tristan lit a cigarette with his giant kitchen lighter. When he and Kristen had to leave to get ready to go to dinner with her parents, they both squeezed my hands, like they were trying to transmit a secret I’m sorry. But I didn’t want any pity. I didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t a normal kind of thing where I could just cry and be sad and let them stroke my hair. There were too many mixed-up feelings—and what’s starting to grow, more and more, is this ball of anger in my stomach that I can’t control. I know that it’s not what I’m supposed to feel. And I feel even guiltier for feeling it. But I can’t help it.

When Tristan and Kristen left, I was about to go, too, so that I wouldn’t be late again to meet Aunt Amy. But then Hannah said, “Hey. About your sister. I’m sorry that there’s nothing good to say. And I’m sorry that we didn’t say anything sooner.”

The way that she said it, so kindly, made me wish that I could tell her everything. “I’m sorry, too,” I answered, “that I didn’t talk to you guys about it before.”

Hannah said, “I mean, words can’t be good enough for a lot of things. But, you know, I guess we have to try.”

Then Natalie said, sounding very serious, “It’s, like, really sad that people die.”

We all laughed at once, because this was so obvious. It was an accidental, perfect example of what Hannah had just said.

“Are you drunk?” I asked her, which made us laugh harder.