Love Letters to the Dead

by Ava Dellaira

  Mrs. Buster called me over to her desk after class today and asked why I hadn’t done the letter assignment, even after she gave me two extensions. She said I should be an A student. And I tried to explain that I did do it, I just couldn’t show her. But she said the point of an assignment is to turn it in. I tried to explain that I thought that letters were actually very private.

  She looked at me funny. Then she said, “Laurel, you are a very talented girl,” but she said it like it was not a good thing.

  I shrugged.

  Then she said, “I notice that you don’t speak up in class much.”

  I haven’t really talked at all, actually, since the second week of class when I said something about Elizabeth Bishop. I just pass notes now with Natalie, or look out the window. I pay attention only when we are reading poems.

  I shrugged again.

  “Laurel, I just want to encourage you…” She paused, like she wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to encourage me to do.

  Then she said, “May was special, too, like you.”

  I almost smiled at her. She said that I was like May.

  But her big bug eyes started bugging out at me, like what she saw when she saw us was a tragedy. “I just don’t want you to waste your talent.” She paused again. “I don’t want you to go down the same road that May did.”

  And then I was so angry that everything in my body clenched together. I didn’t know what “road” she thought May went down, or if she was trying to say that’s why she died. She wouldn’t know. No one did. She wasn’t there. No one was, no one but me. I was so angry that if my throat hadn’t been clenched too tight, I might have screamed at her. If she felt so bad about it and all, why didn’t she just give me an A? Grownups can be such fakes, I thought. They are always acting like they are trying to help you, and like they want to take care of you, but really they just want something from you. I wondered what exactly Mrs. Buster wanted. Finally I just nodded and forced myself to mumble something about I’m fine, just that one assignment was really hard.

  The thing is, I can’t hate Mrs. Buster entirely, because she gives us things like your poems to read. Yesterday we read “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The poem is about an ancient urn with pictures on it. It sounds like it would be boring, but really it’s not. I like this part, where you are talking about two lovers, trapped in the instant just before they kiss:

  Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

  Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

  Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

  Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;

  She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

  For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

  The boy and the girl beneath the trees, they will forever be frozen into exactly what they are just then—they will never touch lips, but they will never lose each other, either. They will be full of possibility, immune to whatever sorrow might follow.

  It’s like that, almost, when you look at any picture. Like this picture framed on my desk in my room, of May and me as kids in our yard in the summertime. We are swinging on the swing set. I’m just starting to pump, still near the ground, watching her. She’s high up, right in the moment before she jumps. But she’ll never fall off. It’s just after sunset, so the air is still warm. We will stay where the sky is deep electric blue, never turning to night—a place beyond time that can’t be touched. When I sit at my desk and see the November sky purring with snow, it doesn’t matter. I am seven years old in the summer dusk.

  But what I love most is the end of your poem, when the urn talks to us. It says this: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I keep trying to figure out exactly what you mean, but that sentence is like a circle. If beauty is truth, and if truth is beauty, they are defined by each other, so how do we know the meaning of either? I think that we make our own meanings, by putting ourselves into them. I put the moon over the street lamp into the idea of beauty, and I put the feeling of Sky’s heartbeat like moths wings, and I put Hannah’s singing voice, and I put the sound of my footsteps running after May along the trail by the river, chasing the sky. And then I start to circle back to the idea of truth. I put how May said her first memory was of holding me after I was born, and how she said she was proud when Mom trusted her to take me in her arms. I put the way Sky’s voice sounded when he said he wanted to be a writer, and that he’d never told anyone before. I put Natalie holding Hannah the night we slept in the barn. And I put when May whispered in my ear, “The universe is bigger than anything that can fit into your mind.”

  Then I just go around and around. And I still don’t know how to make sense of the world. But maybe it’s okay that it’s bigger than what we can hold on to. Because I think that by beauty, you don’t just mean something that’s pretty. You mean something that makes us human. The urn, you say, is a “friend to man.” It will live beyond its generation, and the next ones. And your poem is like that, too. You died almost two hundred years ago, when you were only twenty-five. But the words that you left are still alive.

  Yours,

  Laurel

  Dear Kurt,

  I was reading about you tonight, because I wondered what your life was like when you were a kid. You were the center of attention in your family, but after your parents divorced when you were eight, you were orphaned in a way. You were angry. You wrote on your wall: I hate Mom, I hate Dad, Dad hates Mom, Mom hates Dad, it simply makes you want to be sad. You said the pain of their split stayed with you for years. They passed you from one of them to the other. Your dad remarried, and your mom had a boyfriend who was bad to her. By the time you were a teenager, your dad had custody of you, but he passed you off to live with the family of your friend. Then you moved back to live with your mom. When you didn’t graduate high school or get a job, she packed your stuff into boxes and kicked you out. You were homeless then. You stayed on other people’s couches, or sometimes you slept under a bridge, or in the waiting room of the Grays Harbor Community Hospital—a teenager just becoming a man, sleeping alone in the hospital where you were born eighteen years before.

  For me, it’s not as bad as it was for you. But I understand how it is when a family falls apart. Tonight is Sunday, the house-switching night. It makes the gloominess of the end of the weekend even worse, putting my things in the little Tinker Bell suitcase that I’ve had since I was eleven. Mom and Dad bought it for me as a consolation prize when they split up.

  It was the summer before May started high school. She would turn fifteen at the beginning of the school year. I was going into seventh grade, about to turn twelve that summer. May and I had just finished the waffles that Mom had made us, and then she and Dad said that we had to have a family meeting. We went to sit outside, and although it was morning, it was already hot. The elm trees were raining their twirling airplane seeds. It was Mom who said it. “Your father and I don’t think we can be together any longer. We are going to take some time apart.”

  It was hard for me to understand at first what this meant. What I remember most is how hard May cried. She cried like someone had died. Dad kept trying to put his hand on her back, and Mom tried to hug her, but she didn’t want anyone to touch her. She walked away, into a corner of the yard, and curled up. I pulled out one of my eyelashes and hoped that it would count. I didn’t even wish for Mom and Dad to get back together. I wished for May to be okay.

  Later that night she said to me, in a voice that was flatter than anything, “I failed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wasn’t good enough to keep them together.”

  I wished I knew what to say back, but I didn’t. “You’re good enough for me,” I said meekly.

  May smiled at me, although it was a sad smile. “Thanks, Laurel.” And then she added, “At least we always have each other.”

  I made a decision right then that I would love her even more than I alread
y did—enough to make up for everything else.

  After that day our lives turned different. Dad stayed in the house, and Mom moved into an apartment, which sort of made it seem obvious that the split was her idea, although they never explained that part of it. The next month May went to high school, and she started to act happy again, but it wasn’t the same. Now she had a new world to be in, and it didn’t include any of us. Something invisible took her. She was there, but gone.

  We still did one thing together, all four of us, because Mom and Dad said it was important, which was to have family dinners at the Village Inn like we’d done every Friday since we were kids. It was always strained, Mom and Dad talking mostly to us and not to each other. I was quiet, but May told stories, pretending like everything was normal. The waiters would stare at her. Bucky, the Village Inn bear (i.e., the owner dressed in costume), would come over to our table, even though we weren’t little kids anymore. May played along and flirted with him. She didn’t give Mom and Dad anything to complain about. She was beautiful and smart and she had good grades and talked about lots of friends. But we never saw the girls she used to hang out with in middle school anymore. She was always going out, no one was ever coming over, to either of the houses.

  When we were with Dad, he’d let us order stuffed-crust pizza or Chinese takeout, and then he’d retreat to his bedroom. I think he didn’t want us to see him being sad. He still tried to have rules, so May had to sneak out when she wanted to stay out late, but it didn’t seem difficult for her to get away with it.

  Mom tried hard during our weeks with her, almost too hard. She got strawberry kiwi tea (May’s favorite and mine, too), and hung prisms in the windows over the dingy brown carpets in her new apartment, and set up her easels, and took us out to dinner at the 66 Diner, which we probably couldn’t afford. Mom would stare at May over milk shakes, her eyes welling with tears, and ask, “Are you mad at me?” May would push her hair back and say, “No,” the crack in her voice barely hidden. May couldn’t just scream I hate you at our parents, the way that some kids can, and know that everything would be okay later. With Mom, it’s like if May did that, she would have crumbled. Whenever May wanted to go out with friends, Mom looked sad, like she felt abandoned or something. But she let her go. She gave her a key and didn’t say when to be home. She wanted to be the cool parent, I guess, or to make up for things.

  At first I’d asked to go with May, but May would say I was still too young. So I’d be left in the apartment. Mom would ask, “How do you think your sister is doing?” Or, “Who’s she going out with? There must be a boy, right? Do you think she likes him?” Mom was testing to see if I had the answers. And for a while, I just pretended. I answered the questions as if I knew, even though I didn’t.

  But the worst was when I’d hear Mom cry herself to sleep. I’d lie awake and stare up at the blank white wall and remember how May used to cast fairy spells when we were little to make it better.

  When Aunt Amy dropped me off at Dad’s tonight, I thought about how he’s the only one from our used-to-be-normal family who hasn’t left me. I wanted to do something nice for him, so I went into his bedroom and brought him some apples. I’d cut them up and spread cream cheese and cinnamon on them. This is something Mom would do, and I thought he’d like it. He was listening to baseball. The season is over, so he plays CDs with broadcasts of the greatest Cubs games that he orders online. This is what he does basically always now, when he’s not at work. Maybe it takes him back to the days when he used to play himself. He was really good at it in high school, and then he used to play on a team here just for fun. We loved to go and watch him when we were kids. I remember the smell of the first sweet summer grass, and the big lights that would come on when it started to turn to dusk. If Dad got a hit, we’d jump up in the stands and scream for him.

  When I gave him the plate of apples, he smiled. I couldn’t tell if his eyes were teary or if it was just the light. Sometimes the light is like that. He turned the game to half volume and said, “You doing okay?”

  He was wearing his nightshirt, the one that May and I made him for Father’s Day one year. It says We love you, Dad in puff paint, with a small and an even smaller handprint, side by side, on the front of it.

  “Yeah, Dad.”

  Then he said, “Who is it that you’re always talking to on the phone? Is it a boy?”

  “Yeah. Don’t worry. He’s nice.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?” Dad asked.

  I shrugged. “Yeah,” I said. I would never have told Aunt Amy. But I figured there was no point in lying to Dad about it. Maybe he’d think it was a sign that I was well adjusted or something.

  “What’s his name?” Dad asked.

  “Sky.”

  “What kind of a name is Sky? That’s like naming your kid Grass,” he teased.

  “No it’s not. The sky is not at all like the grass!” I laughed.

  Then Dad got more serious. “Well, the point is, you know what boys your age are after, don’t you? One thing. That’s all they think of, night and day.”

  “Dad, it’s not like that.”

  “It’s always like that,” he said, only half kidding.

  I tried to tell him that he doesn’t know and that boys are different now, different from when he was a boy, but in my heart, I didn’t mind if Sky was thinking about having sex with me.

  Finally Dad said, “Laurel, I understand why you haven’t brought your new friends over here. I know that it’s hard, and I know your old man isn’t much to brag about, either, these days. But if you are going to be hanging out with a boy, I’d like to meet him.”

  I didn’t want to bring Sky to our house, but it made me sad to hear Dad say that he thought he wasn’t much to brag about, so I said, “All right.”

  “And how about those girlfriends you’re always with? They’re not a bunch of rabble-rousers, are they?” He raised his eyebrows, trying to make a joke of it.

  “No, Dad.” I tried to laugh. Then I took a deep breath and asked, “When do you think Mom is going to come back?”

  He sighed and looked at me. “I don’t know, Laurel.”

  “I wish she hadn’t left,” I blurted out.

  “I know.” He frowned. “I know there are things you need a woman to talk about. But at least you have your aunt for now.”

  “Aunt Amy doesn’t know those things, I don’t think. I think you should tell Mom she should come home.” I looked at him, waiting.

  I wondered if he was mad at her still, for moving into that stupid apartment when she did, and then for leaving us again. I saw him start to tip over with pain, and I regretted saying anything. He sighed the kind of sigh that makes you wonder how he ever got that much air into his lungs to let out, and I understood that he couldn’t help Mom being gone any more than I could.

  Where Dad grew up, life made sense. His parents still live on their same farm in Iowa where he used to wake up at the crack of dawn to do the chores. He always said he loved the smell of alfalfa in the morning. When he was twenty-one, he rode away on his motorcycle, stopping in different towns and picking up odd jobs, mostly in construction, then moving on when he was ready. He said that he thought that the world might have more in store, and he’d gone out to find it. But mostly he had loved to tell how it all changed the day he met Mom. How he’d met her and understood, suddenly, why loving somebody and building a family could be enough.

  I think I might have been starting to show tears without meaning to, because Dad leaned over and gave me a knuckle-rub on the head, which meant the conversation was over. It’s more talking than we ever do these days, anyway.

  I remembered then how Dad would sing me and May a lullaby at night, after he’d cleaned himself up from work, and I could smell the spicy cologne still on his cheeks. He’d sing:

  “This land is your land, this land is my land

  From California, to the New York Island

  From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters

 
; This land was made for you and me.”

  When he’d sing that song, each place was like a mystery that I would one day discover. It made me feel the world was huge and sparkling and full of things to explore. And I belonged in it, with him and Mom and May. And now, Mom is actually all the way in California. And May is nowhere.

  Yours,

  Laurel

  Dear Jim Morrison,

  At Fallfest, there is a band that plays your songs. Everyone crowds into a park near the foot of the mountains the weekend right after Thanksgiving. When May and I were kids, we would get excited for it every year. There are tents with crafts, and booths with Indian fry bread and roasted chiles, and booths with ladies selling dried red corn for decoration and pies. But once it gets dark and colder, all anyone wants is the music. Moms and dads and kids and teenagers, too, all head for the stage. Everyone puts on their jackets and dances.

  Mom and Dad used to swing dance on the dirt dance floor. They were the best. Everyone would watch them, spinning and lifting. May and I would be on the side, with the Thanksgiving wreaths we made at the craft booth, licking the powdered sugar from the fry bread off our fingers. Mom laughed like a little girl as Dad threw her in the air. It was almost time for the winter to come, but we forgot about our cold toes and our frozen fingers, because we could see what it looked like when they looked like love. We could imagine the story of them, how it was when they met, how it had happened that they made our family. We were proud that they were our parents.