Love Letters to the Dead (21 page)

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.