Love Letters to the Dead(4)

If I can’t fall back asleep, I get up and tiptoe down the hall, turn the handle of the door so it doesn’t creak, and walk into May’s room. It’s as if she never left. I notice everything, just the same as it was when we went to the movies that night. The two bobby pins in a cross on the dresser. I pick them up and put them in my hair. Then I put them back in the same exact cross, pointing toward an almost empty bottle of Sunflowers perfume and the tube of bright lipstick that was never on when she left the house, but always when she came back. The top of her bookshelf is lined with collections of heart-shaped sunglasses, half-burned candles, seashells, geodes split in their centers to show their crystals. I lie on her bed and look up at her things and try to imagine her there. I stare at the bulletin board covered with dried flowers pinned with tacks, little ripped-out horoscopes, and photographs. One of us when we were little, in a wagon next to Mom in the summer. One taken before prom where she wore a long lingerie dress she found at Thrift Town, the same rose in her hair that is now dried and pinned there.

I open May’s closet and look at the sparkly shirts, the short skirts, the sweaters cut at the neck, the jeans ripped at the thighs. Her clothes are brave like she was.

On the wall above her bed hangs a Nirvana poster, and next to it, there’s a picture of you from Stand by Me. You have a cigarette half in your mouth, cheekbones carved from stone, and baby blond hair. My sister loved you. I remember the first time we saw the movie. It was right before Mom and Dad split up, and right before May started high school. We were up late together, just the two of us, with a pile of blankets and a tin of Jiffy Pop that May made for us, and it came on TV. It was the first time either of us had seen you. You were so beautiful. But even more than that, you were somebody we felt like we recognized. In the movie, you were the one to take care of Gordie, who’d lost his older brother. You were his protector. But you had your own hurt, too. The parents and the teachers and everyone thought badly of you because of your family’s reputation. When you said, “I just wish I could go someplace where no one knows me,” May turned to me and said, “I wish I could pull him out of the screen and into our living room. He belongs with us, don’t you think?” I nodded that I did.

By the end of the movie, May had declared that she was in love with you. She wanted to know what you were like now, so we went on Dad’s computer and May looked you up. There were all of these pictures of you, some from Stand by Me and some from when you got older. In all of them, you were vulnerable and tough at once. And then we saw that you’d died. Of a drug overdose. You were only twenty-three. It was like the world stopped. You’d been just right there, almost in the room with us. But you were no longer on this earth.

When I think back to it, that night seems like the beginning of when everything changed. Maybe we didn’t have the words for it then, but when we found out you’d died, it’s like the first time that we saw what could happen to innocence. Finally May shut off the computer and wiped the tears from her eyes. She said you’d always be alive for her.

Whenever we saw Stand by Me after that (we got the DVD and watched it over and over that summer), we always muted the part at the end where Gordie said that your character, Chris, got killed. We didn’t want that. The way you looked, with the light haloed around your head—you were a boy, a boy who would become a real man. We wanted to just see you there, perfect and eternal forever.

I know May’s dead. I mean, I know it in my head, but it doesn’t seem real. I still feel like she’s here, with me somehow. Like one night she’ll crawl in through her window, back from sneaking out, and tell me about her adventure. Maybe if I can learn to be more like her, I will know how to be better at living without her.

Yours,

Laurel




Dear Amelia Earhart,

I remember when I first learned about you in social studies in middle school, I was almost jealous. I know that’s the wrong way to feel about someone who died tragically, but it wasn’t so much the dying I was jealous of. It was the flying, and the disappearing. The way you saw the earth from the air. You weren’t scared of getting lost. You just took off.

I decided this morning that I really need even the tiniest bit of the courage that you had because I started high school almost three weeks ago, and I can’t keep sitting alone by the fence anymore. So after I looked through all of my old clothes, which are terrible no matter how much I try to pick the most inconspicuous ones, I went and opened May’s closet and looked at it, full of bright, brave things. I remembered her body filling them. She would leave in the morning with her backpack slung over her shoulder, and it seemed that everything outside of our door must have rushed forward to greet her. I took her first day outfit—a pink cashmere sweater with a Nirvana patch on it and a short pleated skirt. I put it on. I didn’t look in the mirror this time, because I knew it would scare me out of wearing it. I just paid attention to the swish of the skirt against my bare legs and thought of how May must have felt in it.

In the car with Dad on the way to school, I could feel his eyes on me. Finally, as he pulled up to the drop-off line, he said carefully, “You look nice today.”

I knew that he recognized the outfit was May’s. “Thanks, Dad,” I said, and nothing more. I gave him a little smile and jumped out of the car.

Then at lunch, I walked through the cafeteria to the outdoor tables and watched everyone swirling together, looking happy, like they should all be part of the same movie. I saw Natalie from my English class with this blazing redheaded girl. They sat down at a table together in the middle of the crowd. They both had Capri Suns and no food. They looked like the sunlight had landed on purpose right in their hair. Natalie had her pigtail braids and drawn-on tattoos and wore a Batman tee shirt that was tight across her chest. The redhead had on a black ballerina skirt and a bright red scarf, with lipstick to match. They weren’t dressed like the popular girls, who look clean and cut out of a magazine. But to me, they were beautiful, like their own constellation. Like one that maybe I could belong in. They looked like girls who would have been May’s friends. They shooed off the soccer boys who swarmed around the redhead.