Love Letters to the Dead(31)

Dad frowned, but he nodded. “Get your coat.” Then he kissed my head good night.

When we went out, I was happy to be with Sky in the night air. It was cold in the clean way, in the making-stars-clear way. It smelled like burning leaves. There were pumpkins that never got carved sitting quietly under people’s porch lights. Sky took my fingers and blew hot breath on them, and then wrapped them up in his hands. He said, “Your dad seems nice.”

“Yeah, but I think he’s really sad. He and my mom split up a couple years ago. And then after, you know, May … my mom left for a ranch in California.” I paused. “I guess I’m kind of mad at her, you know? It’s like, it’s not truly fair. Why should she be the only one to get to go away? As if taking care of horses could change anything. It’s supposed to be clearing her head. But I wish she would come home.”

I missed her a lot right then. For some reason, I thought of her in her teddy bear pajamas, making Eggos for May and me in the morning. How she put a drop of syrup in each square. It felt funny to say it out loud—I’m mad at Mom. But I am.

Sky nodded. “My dad left us, too, a few years ago. Just walked out. I was so mad at him, I didn’t know what to do. It’s like he left me alone to take care of my mom. And after he went, she got worse. Things were always a little bit hard for her. But now, sometimes it’s like she’s not living in the same reality as everyone else. It’s not her fault she’s like that … I just wish I could make it better. But I can’t.”

It was a big deal that Sky was talking to me about this. I wanted to think of something to help. “Have you … Has she seen a doctor or anything? Maybe there’s medicine that could help?” I suggested.

“I’ve tried. Every time I bring it up, she says that there’s nothing wrong with her.”

I could feel him getting tougher on the outside. I took his other hand so that he’d know I was there, which made it hard to walk. He seemed like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to take the hands away from me or not.

We walked in quiet for a while, until we got into a nearby neighborhood where the houses start to get bigger. We passed by the golf course, and Sky asked, “Do you ever jump the fence?”

I hadn’t yet, but it seemed like a good time to start. I smiled and looked at him over my shoulder and started climbing up. My tights got stuck on the wire at the top, the part above my thigh, and Sky had to pry them loose. He followed me over the fence onto the damp brown November grass. The fall geese that had settled there for the night just kept standing about, seeming not to mind us.

I had taken Sky’s hands again, and since I had them, I said, “Spin with me.” I think that’s the kind of thing that boys like to do but won’t do unless a girl asks them to. We spun and spun and spun until we fell down in a heap, laughing. But for some reason, on the perfect cold night grass next to the geese, my laugh just turned to crying.

“What’s wrong?” Sky asked. I didn’t know how to explain it. I didn’t know where to start. Sky held me against his chest, which made me push harder away from him into whatever the crying was for. But when I got quiet, I was glad to be with him. I didn’t say anything for a while. Neither did he, but it was like we both knew what it meant to be there.

When we got back to my house, Sky tiptoed into my room with me. We sat on my half of the disassembled bunk bed that got split apart when May started high school and moved into her own room. I’d never really put up posters or pictures on the wall the way May had done in her new room, so it looked pretty much the same as it had when we were kids. Pink walls, gauzy curtains, dried flower crowns draped over dusty stuffed animals that looked out from a hammock in the corner, wands made of ribbons peeking out from the top of a pencil holder. I felt self-conscious and flipped off the lights, and plastic glow-in-the-dark stars shone down on us.

Sky and I started kissing. We kept kissing, and kissing, and his hands were everywhere on me, and everything inside of me was hot, like pavement on a summer night. A burning you can’t stop. When Sky paused and asked, “Are you okay?” I noticed how fast I was breathing. I remembered, in a flash, what it was like those nights at the movies, and I thought for a moment that he could see it. That he knew, somehow, all of the things that I’d let happen. That he could tell. But then I saw him just staring at me, worried. “Laurel?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. It’s just … intense.”

He’d never have to know, I thought. I could be new. I would be May, the May who was brave and magical. I wouldn’t be me, the one who let everything go wrong. I focused so hard, until Sky was all that I could see. And then I got this feeling that I needed to be so much closer to his body. I wanted our skin to stop keeping us apart. So I kissed him harder, and he kissed me harder, and my clothes came partway off, and he touched me everywhere. It was then that all of the sad things inside of me turned into hungry things.

Finally, after we’d made out and gotten quiet and made out again, when the littlest bit of gray light started to leak in through the curtains, Sky tucked me under the blankets and started to sneak out of the house through the window, so Dad wouldn’t hear him.

“Sky?” I said as he was leaving. I was half-asleep, but I didn’t want him to go. As the night air rushed into the room, it seemed like it could swallow him up and take him from me.