Love Letters to the Dead (34 page)

a glistening armadillo left the scene,

rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,

short
-eared, to our surprise.

So soft!—a handful of intangible ash

with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!

O falling fire and piercing cry

and panic, and a weak mailed fist

clenched ignorant against the sky!

I couldn’t stop thinking of it, our flushing hearts, trying to climb to the stars—how with the wrong wind, we can fall. I’m not sure if this is what you meant by the poem, but it made me think of how we all have both parts in us. I think maybe we all carry both the fire balloons and the soft animal creatures who could be hurt by them inside of us. It’s easy to feel like the bunny rabbit frozen in terror. And it’s easy to feel like one of the fire balloons, at the whim of the wind, either rising up out of sight or burning down. Blown one direction or another.

But there is a third thing in the poem—your voice. The one who saw it. The one who could stand and witness, the one who turned the pain and terror into this beautiful lyric. So maybe when we can say things, when we can write the words, when we can express how it feels, we aren’t so helpless.

I thought after reading your poem today that I might want to try to be a writer, too. Even though I don’t think I can ever write a poem as good as yours, it made me think that maybe I can do something with all of the feelings in me, even the ones that are sad and scared and angry. Maybe when we can tell the stories, however bad they are, we don’t belong to them anymore. They become ours. And maybe what growing up really means is knowing that you don’t have to just be a character, going whichever way the story says. It’s knowing that you could be the author instead.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear Judy,

Mom got here four days ago. Of course she had to come back on the last weekend before school is over. Part of me wished I was out with my friends, but instead I was at the airport with Aunt Amy, waiting on the bench and watching the bags turning on their carousel, nervously balling up the fabric of my dress.

Then I saw Mom, riding down the elevator as if she’d walked out of another life. She was shifting her travel purse from shoulder to shoulder, the same one that she used to pack up with snacks to sneak into the movie theater when we were little. Her soft brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail. When her eyes met mine, she waved and put on a big happy smile. Then there was this awkward moment where we weren’t actually close enough to say anything yet. I didn’t know if I was supposed to run up and hug her, but I stayed frozen in my seat.

When she was standing in front of me, I got up and let her pull me against her body. She smelled the same, like our brand of dryer sheets and the lavender perfume she always dabs behind her ears, and something else—a smell like falling to sleep.

“Laurel,” she said. “I missed you so much.”

“I missed you, too, Mom.”

Then she and Aunt Amy hugged, and we stood around, waiting for Mom’s suitcase and making awkward small talk—how is school, how was the flight, how about the weather. Never mind how was the whole past year when I didn’t see you. It felt like a canyon between us, the time that had passed.

And it stayed like that, the first couple of days. Like we were still in the in-between space of the airport. Like we weren’t home anymore, but we hadn’t arrived anywhere else. I mostly stayed in my room studying for finals, and Mom kept busy, as if she was trying to make up for the year of mom stuff that she’d missed. She made me waffles for breakfast, packed lunches with sandwiches on perfectly toasted bread, and made her famous enchiladas for Aunt Amy and me for dinner. Aunt Amy did a lot of the talking, actually. She’d tell Mom stuff about how well I’d done in my science class, or how Mom raised a good daughter because I always helped with the dishes. Mom would ask me the most basic questions. “What was your favorite class this year?” I felt like we were tiptoeing over a sheet of ice that could break any minute. We’d gone a whole three days without actually saying May’s name.

Then this morning, as Mom was putting down a waffle in front of me, the syrup neatly poured into each square, I said, “No offense, Mom, it’s really nice and all, but I usually just eat cereal for breakfast now. I mean, I’ve had to do all of this stuff without you for a year. You don’t have to be, like, the world’s greatest mother now.”

But then her eyes got teary, and I instantly felt bad. “I’m trying, Laurel,” she said.

“I know,” I said softly, and started to cut the waffle along its lines. It just seemed strange to me, if she cared so much about all of this, that she’d gone so long without doing any of it.

Mom wiped her eyes and said, “I have an idea. Do you want to go out to dinner tonight? Just the two of us?”

I agreed, and so after school this evening, Mom and I went to the 66 Diner and ordered burgers and fries and strawberry shakes.

I was doing my best. “What was it like at the ranch?” I asked.

“It was pretty,” Mom said. “It was peaceful.”

I still couldn’t picture it. “Were there, like, palm trees and stuff?”

Mom sort of laughed. “No, not on the ranch. But there were in the city.”

“Oh,” I said, sucking my shake out of its straw. “You went to LA?”

“Yeah,” Mom said. “For the first time in my whole life.”

“What did you do there?”

“Well, I went to see the Walk of Fame. I found Judy Garland’s star. I wanted to stand on it.”

“Was it cool?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said. “It was actually a little strange. You think of the Walk of Fame—I always did, anyway, when I used to dream that I’d be an actress—and you imagine it glittering and gleaming. But the truth is, the star was just on the sidewalk. Where people walk right over it. Next to a parking lot.” She sounded sort of bereft when she said this, like a little kid who learned that Santa Claus was made up.

“We should find a star, like, in the sky,” I said to Mom, “to name after Judy instead.”

Mom smiled. “Let’s do that.”

Then it was quiet for a moment. I dipped a French fry in the ketchup and started nibbling on it.

Finally Mom looked up from her plate and said, “Laurel, I owe you an apology. I am sorry that I was gone for so long.”

I didn’t know what to say back to that.
It’s all right
? It wasn’t. And I wanted to try to be honest. “Yeah,” I said. “It was hard.” And then, “I mean, I know that you left because you were mad at me. I know you think that it’s my fault, and that’s why you wanted to go. You can just say it.”

“What? Laurel, no. Of course I don’t think it’s your fault. Where would you get that idea?”

“Because,” I said, “because you left. I thought that was why.”

“Laurel, if I left because of someone’s failings, they were my own, not yours. I really just—I must be the world’s worst mother.” Her voice started to break. “How could I have let that happen? How could I have lost her?”

I didn’t realize that Mom felt guilty, too. “But Mom,” I said. I reached out to take her hand across the table. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes, it was. I was supposed to protect her. And I didn’t.”

“Well,” I said quietly, “maybe you didn’t know how.”

Mom shook her head. “It’s like when you guys were little, you needed me. I was the sun that you’d orbit around. But as you got older, and the orbit got wider, I didn’t know my place in the universe anymore. I thought,
That’s what’s supposed to happen. They’re growing up.
I thought the best thing I could do was to try not to hold on too tight. But you two were my reason to be.”

“But what about Dad?” I asked. “Why didn’t you love him anymore?”

“I’ll always love your father, but we got married so young, Laurel. When May started to have her own life, and you did, too, your dad and I started having more trouble. It felt like we had so little in common, besides our daughters. But I shouldn’t have left him. I don’t think May ever forgave me.”

Mom was shaking now. She looked down at her burger that had only one bite out of it. She seemed so fragile, like a little girl. I saw why May thought that she had to keep all of the hard stuff secret from her.

“And look at you,” she said. “You’re doing so well. I can’t help but think that I was right. That you were better off without me.”

“Mom,” I said. “I love you, but that’s dumb. I still need you.”

“Do you want to tell me, Laurel? Do you want to tell me what happened?”

There it was. I knew it was coming. I couldn’t help the surge of anger that rushed into me. “That’s why you’re really here, right? So that you can find out finally? So that you can have an answer to everything? And then you can feel better?”

“No! No. I just want you to know that you can talk to me, if you want to.”

“Well, I don’t. Not about that. We can talk about something else.”

She looked like I’d stabbed her in the heart when I said it.

“Fine, Mom. Look. When we were supposed to go to the movies, mostly we didn’t go. May was seeing an older guy. And she went off with him. She thought I went to the movies with this friend of his who was supposed to take care of me, but I didn’t go, either, because the friend molested me instead, and when I tried to tell May that night, she was already drunk, and then she was so sad, and when she got up, she started pretending to be a fairy, and she slipped or tripped or fell off the bridge or something. There you go. You can go back to California now.”

I got up from the booth and walked out. I was crying in the parking lot, and hating myself for crying, and for being so mean to Mom, and for everything. It’s supposed to get easier when you say it out loud. But it didn’t feel that way. I was searching the sky through my bleary eyes, trying to find you, to find May, to find some sign that things weren’t as lonely as they seemed.

Then Mom walked out. She was crying, too, but I could tell she was trying not to. She put her arms around me. “I’m so sorry, Laurel. I’m so sorry I let that happen to you.” And I don’t know what it was, the way that she smelled like Mom or the way that she stroked my head like she had when I was a kid trying to fall asleep, but I felt little again, and I put my head against her chest and just sobbed. I wasn’t the same person she’d left. But she was still my mother. And the memory of the way that felt, to have a mom, it took me over.

People can leave, and then they can come back. It sounds simple, like an obvious thing. But when I realized that, the truth of it seemed important. My mom wasn’t perfect. And she didn’t even always take care of me. But she wasn’t gone forever.

When I finished crying, I looked up at the sky and pointed to the star in the middle of Orion’s Belt. “That one,” I said to Mom. “That’s the Judy Garland star.” And then I pointed to the one at the handle end of the Big Dipper. “And let’s give that one to May.”

Yours,
Laurel

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

I am writing to say thank you, to all of you, because I think this will be my last letter. It feels right like that. Yesterday was our last day of school. When the final bell rang, the halls filled up with woohoos. I walked past the screams and cheers and out to the alley to meet my friends. The air hung open in that way where we weren’t sure if we should be somber or celebratory, but when Tristan got there, he walked up to Kristen and slapped her butt and said, “How’s my New York babe?” She smiled. It was their last day of high school, forever. Tristan said that this called for a ceremony, and Kristen agreed.

So we all drove up to Kristen’s house, and Tristan made a tent of little sticks in the yard that he lit up with his kitchen lighter. It would be like New Year’s, but this time we were supposed to burn things we wanted to let go of. Tristan pulled the contents of his emptied locker out of his backpack—algebra quizzes and lab reports and tests with red
68
s circled on them—and he started putting them in the fire. Then he pulled out his English paper, one he had gotten an A on, called “I Lost Paradise,” but before he could throw it in the fire, Kristen grabbed it and said, “I’m keeping this.”