“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 68s 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.”
“You want my English paper, babe?”
“It was really good.”
He looked at her for a moment and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Well, who’s next then? I can’t be the only one with something to burn!” The little fire was getting hungrier, eating up the pages. The sun was low and miming the blaze.
Hannah threw in her tests, and then she threw in her dried flowers and cards from boys, and she looked back over her shoulder at Natalie. The fire lit up both of their faces, and Natalie beamed back. Kristen threw in her locker pictures of New York, because now that she’s really going there, it’s not just a dream anymore.
I wanted to take a turn, and I thought about my notebook filled with my letters to all of you. I thought about how they would look, burning in the fire. I wondered if the flame would carry them up to you, wherever you are.
But when I reached for my notebook, I couldn’t do it. Somewhere, it seemed, in my letters to you, was a story I had told. Something true. So I decided that I’m going to turn all of my letters in to Mrs. Buster. School is still open for a few days for teachers to finish their grades, so tomorrow or the next day, I’ll go and leave them in her teacher’s mailbox. For some reason, maybe because she gave me the assignment in the first place, I want her to read what I wrote.
So instead of burning the whole notebook, I took the last blank page out and threw it into the fire. I watched the white page, with its fine blue lines, as it burned. It made me cry for all of you who should have had more time. And for May.
After the fire was done eating my blank page, everyone was looking at me. “I miss my sister,” I said simply, and it was nice to be able to just say it out loud. Hannah put her arm around me as I wiped the tears from my eyes. “She would have loved you guys,” I added.
“If she was anything like you, we would have loved her, too,” Tristan said, and smiled.
When the moment was over, we looked down and noticed that the fire was still getting bigger, so Tristan went to get the garden hose to put it out. He squirted Kristen and made her squeal, and then he squirted us all, and we tackled him for the hose and squirted back. All of our clothes were wet after that, but none of us cared, because it was summer-night warm out.
As the sun fell over the horizon, we went to sit on the deck, and I texted Sky to ask if he would come and meet us. When I saw his truck pull into
the driveway, my heart leapt. He walked up wearing his same leather jacket, even on the brink of summer. He looked as beautiful as he did the first day I saw him, but more than that even, because now I knew him.
He came up to sit with us, and the sky opened wide, the way it does in summer, to let a lightning storm in. We all watched it for a while, and Kristen brought out a bottle of her parent’s champagne and popped it, and we toasted each other. I took a sip, but I gave the rest of mine to Tristan.
Then I said, “Hey, Tristan?”
“Yes, Buttercup?”
“I think that next year in college, you should start a band.”
He smiled a soft sort of smile that didn’t go with his normal pointy edges. “You’re right. I should.”
“You could name it the Regular Weirdos.”
He laughed. “I love that.” It was quiet a moment. Then he said, “Well, no need to wait for college, right?” He turned to Hannah and said, “Are we going to do a song together, or what?”
Hannah got a spark in her eyes. This was maybe going to be the first time that she would sing for people, other than me or Natalie. She swallowed and nodded. We followed Tristan as he went to get his guitar and set it up in the living room and pulled up a stool for Hannah to sit on. “What do you want to sing?” he asked. Hannah wiped her palms on her dress and thought about it for a long minute. She said, “‘Sweet Child O’ Mine,’” which was all of our New Year’s song. Tristan grinned and started right away with the first strings of the guitar that vibrate through your body. Hannah’s voice shook for a moment, coming out quiet, but as she kept singing she got louder and louder, until the song was pouring out of her. She looked at Natalie as she sang. Tristan looked at Kristen as he strummed the guitar hard and mouthed along with Hannah. And I looked at Sky.
I grabbed his hand and whispered under the music, “I really want to kiss you.”
He took my face in his hands, and it was a different kiss than it’s ever been. I didn’t feel like a light that he was crowding toward anymore, like a street lamp, or even like a moon. I felt like we both had the sun inside of us. Our own ways to stay warm. So when our bodies came together, it was the hottest thing I’d felt.
As Tristan and Hannah got to the end of the song, we all bounced up and down and shouted along, “Where do we go now?” Hannah was beaming, and Tristan played the end again. I can’t describe how it felt, being there right then, so close together, on the edge between who we were and who we wanted to be.
Sometimes when we say things, we hear silence. Or only echoes. Like screaming from inside. And that’s really lonely. But that only happens when we weren’t really listening. It means we weren’t ready to listen yet. Because every time we speak, there is a voice. There is the world that answers back.
When I wrote letters to all of you, I found my voice. And when I had a voice, something answered me. Not in a letter. In a new way a song sounded. In a story told on a movie screen. In a flower shooting through a crack in the sidewalk. In the flutter of a moth. In the nearly full moon.
I know I wrote letters to people with no address on this earth. I know you are dead. But I hear you. I hear all of you. We were here. Our lives matter.
Yours,
Laurel
EPILOGUE
Dear May,
I had a dream about you last night. I watched you walk on the tracks, your moonlit arms balancing you like thin white wings. I saw you turn to look back at me. I felt your eyes catch mine. I saw you fall. And I saw you hovering there, midsky, like you were standing on air. I kept begging myself to move my feet. But I couldn’t. They were stuck. I kept thinking you were waiting for me. There was still a moment. If I could just walk forward, I could reach out and take your hand and pull you back across the tracks to the land. But my body was frozen. I tried with all my strength, but lifting my foot was as hopeless as shoving a mountain. It was the most awful feeling. I was in a panic, trying to get to you.
Then I heard you whisper, “Laurel,” as you turned your back to me. “Look.” And that’s when I saw it. I saw you take your wings out. I saw them, paper-thin but stronger than anything, glittering like water. They weren’t broken. They were carrying you into the sky. You got smaller and smaller, until you turned into a pinpoint of light, same as a star. And I knew you were there. And everywhere.
When I woke up, I went into your bedroom. Aside from your clothes that I borrowed (but always put back) and your Nirvana poster I tore off of the wall (sorry), everything was just where it was the last night we left for the movies. I sat on your bed for a moment. And then I took some of your Mexican candles to burn in my room, and your collection of seashells that I wanted to spread on my desk. This time, I wasn’t afraid of moving things and making new places for them. My room is pretty much the same as it’s always been, too, ever since you moved out of it when you got to high school. And I want it to be more like who I am now. I want it to have some pieces of you, together with other things, like the Janis Joplin record Kristen gave me before she left for New York, and the heart that Sky carved me for Christmas, and the glow-in-the-dark stars that have been there since we were kids.
When I was looking on your bookshelf, I found an E. E. Cummings book. You had a bookmark in it, the one you’d made yourself in third grade. May was written in blue glue glitter, laminated over. I read the poem you’d marked, and really, it was so beautiful I started to cry. I loved the whole thing, and the last line was perfect: i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart).
I brought the book into my room with the bookmark still in it. I read that poem again and again, and I knew somehow you’d marked it for me to see. I knew I was supposed to find it. May, I carry you in me.
Still, it doesn’t change how much I miss you. Every time something happens, any little thing, I wish that I could tell you about it. Sky and I got back together. Sometimes my mind races, and I worry about what will happen after next year, when he leaves for college. But I try to take a deep breath and stay where I am. I have my first job this summer, at the city pool snack bar. My friends Natalie and Hannah come to meet me sometimes when I get off late in the afternoon. Hannah reads magazines and Natalie draws and we all drink Cokes and eat Goldfish. They don’t ever get in, but I love to swim like I always did. I love how you can push water away and it always comes back. I run into Janey there sometimes, too. You’d be surprised if you could see her now. She comes with her boyfriend and wears a pink and white polka-dot bikini. It was awkward at first, because she was mad at me for disappearing on her after you died. But it’s getting better. Now she’ll sometimes come over and sit with me and Natalie and Hannah. Today, we were talking about the time when you taught us to flip off the diving board. We were both terrified until you made it look so easy.
I wrote all of these letters for school this year, and it helped me a lot. When I finally gave them to my teacher (I left them in her mailbox at school), she called me to say she was proud of me for handing them in. I thanked her for reading them. Then she said that I needed to get help to deal with all of it. But I told her Mom and Dad already started making me see this therapist. The therapist is actually nice, and she talks to me like I am smart. I’d told Mom what happened when she got back from California, and after that Mom told Dad. “I’m sorry we let you down, Laurel,” he said. “I’m sorry we let your sister down, too.” He looked like someone had shot him in the heart. I just hugged him. I didn’t know what else to do.
May, I realize this now—it’s not that I shouldn’t have tried to tell you about Billy. It’s that I should have told you sooner, and maybe then you could have told me things, too, and neither of us would have ever had to go back there. I think that if you were still here, we could have helped each other. I think that you would have walked away from the ledge you were on, and everything bright in you would have kept glowing. I can’t bring you back now. But I forgive myself. And I forgive you. May, I love you with everything I am. For so long, I just wanted to be like you. But I had to figure o
ut that I am someone, too, and now I can carry you, your heart with mine, everywhere I go.
Today I decided I had to do something. I knew it was time. After I went through your room, I went to find Dad, who was listening to baseball like usual. He turned down the volume right away when I walked in.
I asked, “How are the Cubs doing?”
“Three games out of first. Cross your fingers for us.”
I smiled and showed him that my fingers were actually crossed. Then I said, “Dad?”
“Laurel?” he teased.
“I want to scatter May’s ashes.”
He was not expecting this. He swallowed. “Oh.” And then he tried to recover. “Well. What were you thinking?”
“I think in the river.”
I know I could have saved your ashes to put into the ocean, but I wanted you to have the journey, all the way with the currents, to the open sea. And I know that when I finally get to see the waves washing on the shore, to hear them, I will feel you there.
Dad said, “Okay. I think that’s a nice idea.”
“Can we go?” I asked.
“Right now?” His voice jumped.
I nodded. “And we have to go get Mom.”
Dad swallowed. “Okay,” he said, and he got up, the baseball game still murmuring in the background.
I called Mom at Aunt Amy’s house, where she’s still staying. When I told her we were coming, she didn’t argue, or ask any questions even. She just said, “Okay.” Aunt Amy was out for the afternoon with this guy Fred who she met at her church. He’s really nice, much better than the Jesus Man. I nicknamed him Mister Ed in my mind, because he has long white hair that he wears in a dignified ponytail and a horse nose.
Mom and Dad were quiet with each other in the front seat as we drove. I sat in the back, holding the jar of ashes tight, mostly noticing how heavy it felt, and thinking of what it contained. What’s left of what your body was—once the girl with bare shoulder blades, giggling, once the girl galloping an imaginary horse, once the girl sleeping in her sequined red dress—was now ash in a jar. Grains of bone. But then, I knew it wasn’t you anymore. You were somewhere more.