“Are you looking forward to summer?”
“Yeah. It’s weird that the year is almost over.”
Then she launched into it. “Laurel, the last time we talked, you mentioned that there was something—something that you’d told your sister … I’m worried about you.”
I wiped my palms on my dress. “I don’t really want to get into it on the phone, Mom.”
“I’ve been thinking about how you said you feel like I’m not there for you. And I know that you aren’t eager to take a trip out here. But it’s been too long since I’ve seen you. So I think that I’ll come back for a few months this summer. If not for good, then at least for a visit. I can stay with Amy.”
“Okay…” I said. I wasn’t sure what to make of this. “But you know I still have to be at Dad’s every other week. I can’t just ditch him ’cause you’re coming back.”
“Yes, I know, sweetie.” Then she said, “I can’t wait to see you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You too, Mom.”
I know Mom coming back is what I’ve wanted this whole time, but now that it’s really happening, I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s like I’ve finally gotten used to just being with Aunt Amy and Dad. But mostly, I am scared that she’s only coming back to try to get some story out of me. So that I can tell her the whole answer about what happened to May and confirm her suspicions that it was my fault. Fine, I keep thinking, if she wants to know, I’ll just tell her this time. And then she can disappear forever. I’ll feel like I am starting to get better, but with Mom, suddenly I turn into a little kid again, who got left behind somewhere.
Judy, you took the pills the studio gave you. The pills the doctors gave you. You started so young that you could never stop, and then you were gone. I can’t help but wonder if nobody ever really grows all the way up. I look at you in The Wizard of Oz, on that yellow brick road that you just hope will lead to home, and I know you always wanted to get there.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Amelia,
This morning at school, something great happened. I saw Hannah standing with Natalie, getting books out of her locker. Hannah zipped up her bag, and then I watched her lean into Natalie and give her a kiss on the lips. Right there, in front of everyone passing, anyone who wanted to look. She grabbed Natalie’s hand and walked with her down the hall, as they weaved through the soccer boys staring, the science nerds pointing, all of them talking and whispering and saying what they would. Natalie and Hannah were beautiful, both of them, like their own constellation.
You once said that you thought people are too timid about flying their own Atlantics, and I think it’s true that all of our lives are full of oceans. For Hannah, the Atlantic was standing up to her brother. And I think that now that she’s on the other side of it, she’s realizing how brave she can be.
For me, maybe the Atlantic has been learning to talk about stuff, even a little at a time. But I think the thing that takes me the most courage is realizing that as many oceans as I might cross, the stupid simple truth will always be on the other side. May was here and then she was gone. I loved her with all of my soul, and she died. And no guilt or anger or longing changes that. There’s a new sadness now, as I open the fist I’ve been clenching shut and realize that there’s nothing there. I don’t know how to keep her anymore. Sometimes I’ll be doing something normal, like standing in the alley with my friends, or getting ready for bed, and suddenly the pain of missing her will come up and nearly knock me over.
But sometimes, there are things that help. Tonight was a good night. Sky came over and watched baseball with me and Dad. He liked it so much when I had Hannah over, I figured I’d try to do that kind of thing more. And he and Sky seemed to be getting along. I was more or less tuning out while they were talking about players and trades and stuff. It’s still early in the season, but I know that the Cubs are doing pretty well so far. In this particular game, however, they were losing by a lot, and Dad just shut it off all of a sudden and said, “What do you say we go out back and have a little ball game of our own?” It’s funny how he comes alive with other people around. Maybe he feels like it’s a sign that I’m letting him into my life, or that I’m not ashamed of our family. Or maybe it’s just been forever since the house hasn’t felt totally quiet.
It was sort of a crazy idea, because it was already almost dark out—the dead game time of dusk—but I thought, why not? So Dad pulled out his old gloves and bat and a wiffle ball, and he pitched for Sky and me. I kept missing, but Dad gave me more than three strikes, and finally I got a good hit. Then Sky pitched to Dad, and he hit the ball clear over the roof! He loved this so much. “Your old man’s still got it!” Dad told me as he ran around the yard, crossing the imaginary bases, and finally calling out, “I made it home!”
It was pretty much totally dark by then, so we figured it was a good note to end on. Dad went to bed, and he was in such a good mood, he didn’t even kick Sky out before he said good night. Sky came into my room with me, and we both sat down on my bed.
“Your dad is really cool,” Sky said. “We should hang out with him more.”
“He likes you. I think it made him happy, you being here.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Thank you for coming.”
“Of course.” He smiled.
I lay down on my pillow. Then I said, “So, my mom’s coming back. Next weekend. At least for the summer.”
“Oh, wow. Are you happy?”
“I don’t know. I want to be, but it’s like I don’t know if I trust it.”
Sky nodded. “I get that. When parents ditch out, it’s pretty hard to forgive them.”
He lay down next to me, and I reached out and let my hand fall onto his chest. “Was he good while he was around?” I asked. “Your dad?”
“Not really. He had his moments, but not so much.” Sky paused, and then he said, “I don’t know what will happen to my mom after next year, if I want to go away to college or something. I’m scared sometimes that I’ll turn out like him. Like I’ll always be the kind of person who leaves.”
I looked at him. “You’re better than your dad. But maybe it’s not your job to make up for him forever.”
His lip that falls a little crooked to the left straightened out when I said that. He was thinking about it.
We lay there next to each other on my bed, quiet for a while, looking up at the bumps in the ceiling that turned to shapes. I remembered lying in May’s top bunk and looking up, trying not to fall asleep so that I could see if she went out to fly.
“Look,” I said to Sky, pointing up. “That’s a face. She’s half girl, half ghost. You can see where she’s split—she only has long hair on the one side.” I pointed to the place where the paint gathered into tresses. “And there, that’s a hand. It belongs to a man living inside the wall. He’s collecting raindrops. He wants to come out and give them to the ghost-girl. She’ll fight off the spirit in her. And then they’ll go together and swim in that ocean”—I pointed—“over there.”
Sky laughed and nuzzled his face into my neck. I put my hand out and stroked his head. He seemed like a little boy just then, in a way that he never had before. Maybe because I felt stronger now, strong enough to hold him.
We didn’t kiss or anything else. We just lay together like that, breathing. I felt something between us shifting, like the hidden plates of the earth. You think you know someone, but that person always changes, and you keep changing, too. I understood it suddenly, how that’s what being alive means. Our own invisible plates shifting inside of our bodies, beginning to align into the people we are going to become.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Elizabeth Bishop,
At school, everyone is buzzing with the energy of the coming summer, a week and a half away. I went up to Mrs. Buster’s desk today after class. I’d never really spoken to her voluntarily before. But there was something I had to tell her. “You know the assignment from the be
ginning of school? The letter?” I asked.
“Yes?” She looked surprised.
“Well, I’m still working on it.” And then I added, “Actually, I’ve been working on it all year. I have a whole notebook full of them. I just wanted you to know.”
“Oh, well, I’m really happy to hear that, Laurel.” She lit up when she said it, but then she kept looking at me in that way that she does, like she was waiting for something. Like she wanted me to say something about May. So finally I asked, “When May was in your class, what was she like?”
“She seemed like a girl who was struggling to figure out who she was, kind of like you are. She was very bright, in both senses of the word. I thought that she had a lot to offer. I think that you do, too.” She paused, and then she said, “I know what it’s like to lose someone, Laurel.”
“You do?” I asked.
“Yes. I had a son—he passed.”
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry.” I was searching for something better to say. It made my chest crush in to think of that happening to Mrs. Buster. “When—when did it happen?”
“He was young,” Mrs. Buster said. “It was a car accident.”
I stared at her big blue eyes, and they didn’t seem like bug eyes anymore. They seemed sad. It’s like all of a sudden she’d turned from a teacher into a person. I guess when you lose someone, sometimes it feels like you are the only one. But I’m not.
“I’m sorry about your son,” I said again. “And I’m sorry that I wasn’t nicer this year. I think you are a really good teacher. I loved all of the poetry you gave us. And I am—just really sorry—I wish there were something good to say. I guess there aren’t really any words for it, huh?”
“There are a lot of human experiences that challenge the limits of our language,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons that we have poetry.” She smiled. “Here.” She fished something out of her desk. “I wanted to give you this. I’d copied it for you at the beginning of the year, since you seemed to like Bishop so much. But then—well, maybe you weren’t ready for it yet.”
I took the poem. “Thank you,” I said.
Then she said, “I’m proud of you. It’s not easy, and you’ve done a great job this year.” She didn’t have to be that nice to me, but she was.
I thanked her again for the poem. I was anxious to read it, so I found a bench and sat outside before I went to lunch. It was your poem called “The Armadillo.” I loved the poem so much, it stopped my heart. And I knew why Mrs. Buster had given it to me. It was about a certain kind of beauty we aspire to and how fragile it is. The poem starts out talking about fire balloons that people send off into the sky. The paper chambers flush and fill with light / that comes and goes, like hearts as they rise toward the stars. When the air is still, they steer between the kite sticks of the Southern Cross, but with a wind, they become dangerous. The end of the poem shows the tragedy that happens.
Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair
of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.
The ancient owls’ nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
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 cu
t 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.”