Love Letters to the Dead(71)

“So, can I come in?”

Over his shoulder, I could see the shadow of his mother, peering toward the open door. “Skylar, who’s there?”

Finally I just ducked under his arm and stepped inside. The television was on, talking about someone’s dream house. Sky’s mom walked over. She had on her same bathrobe, and her hair was in the same frayed bun. She pointed to the cut tulips from the yard that stood proudly in a vase amid the clutter.

“Did you know if you put a penny in the water it keeps them straight?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said, “no, what a good trick. They’re really pretty.”

She smiled the kind of smile that made it seem as if it had honestly occurred to her to be happy in that moment. But then she just kept looking at me, like she was trying to figure out who I was.

“Mom, it’s Laurel,” Sky said. “You met her before. Outside, when we were planting the flowers.”

“Oh,” she said, “silly me.” But her eyes didn’t flash with recognition. “Can I get you a cup of tea?” she asked, a bit bewildered.

I followed her to the kitchen while she made it. Sky tried to help, but she swatted him away. She performed the ritual with careful, measured steps, as if she had memorized the motions as handles to hold on to, to keep her upright.

When I took the cup and smelled the peppermint steam, she said, “Skylar, I’m going to lie down. I’ll leave you two alone.”

I followed Sky across the squeaky floors to his bedroom. Unlike in the rest of the house, everything in his room had a place. The furniture and posters lined up in straight lines, like they were working hard to form a kind of sense. He had one of your posters, the one from In Utero, and one of the Rolling Stones.

Sky propped a pillow against the bedpost and gestured for me to sit down. I arranged myself on the edge of his bed.

“So…” I said.

“So,” he answered.

“So I never really thanked you for the night at the party. And the night at the bridge. And all of that. Thank you. For being there.”

“You’re welcome. I’m glad that you let me.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Do you see her when you look at me? I mean May?”

“No. I see Laurel.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you even love me? I mean, why did you?”

“Because—because you remind me of my first concert. The one I told you about on New Year’s. You remind me of the feeling of wanting to make something.”

My heart twirled around in my chest when he said that, and it wanted to leap into his arms.

“Listen,” he went on, “I’m sorry that I took so long to tell you all of that stuff about May. And I’m sorry that I said it the way I did. But I don’t want you to think … I mean, the way I felt about you, I’ve never felt that way about a girl before. Not your sister or anyone.”

“You know how you said May didn’t have an easy time in high school or whatever? I just always thought that it was different from that. Why didn’t she ever tell me?”

“You were her little sister. She probably wanted to protect you from all of that stuff. She probably wanted you to look up to her.”

Maybe he was right. I thought about the lengths that she went to to make me believe she had wings when we were kids. Maybe May had needed me as much as I needed her. She needed the way I saw her, the way I loved her. “Do you think that I didn’t know her?” I asked. “What if I didn’t really know her?”

“Of course you knew her. You knew her for your whole life. Nothing changes who she was to you. Maybe it’s just when you get older, you understand things that you couldn’t before.”

“I think that after my parents split up, she must have been really angry at them. I mean, my mom spent May’s whole life telling her how she brought our family together. So she must have felt betrayed. Even though of course it wasn’t her fault, maybe she felt like it was. So maybe she was angry at herself, too.”

Sky said, “When she used to talk to me, she’d talk about you sometimes. How she hoped that growing up would be so much easier for you.”

I smiled to think of her saying that, but of course it wasn’t easy. I guess it’s not for anybody. The truth was too sad to feel right away. May couldn’t see how she was letting me get hurt, because she was hurting, too.

“I just want to go back in time and tell her that she could talk to me. That I would understand. That it could get better.”

“I know,” Sky said.

“The only thing I liked about that story you told me,” I said to Sky, “was Paul getting beat up. But I’m sorry that you got kicked out of school. That wasn’t fair.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It wasn’t fair what happened to you, either. Or what happened to her. A lot of things aren’t. I guess we can either be angry about it forever or else we just have to try to make things better with what we have now.”

I looked at him. “Yeah,” I said. “You’re right.”

I didn’t know if I would ever kiss Sky again or not, but it was nice to be able to talk about May with someone who knew her.

I looked up at your In Utero poster, with the picture of the winged woman with the see-through skin, watching Sky and me from the wall. I thought about how for a long time, I wanted to be soaring above the earth. I wanted Sky to see me as perfect and beautiful, the way I saw May. But really, we all just have these blood and guts inside of us. And as much as I was hiding from him, I guess part of me also always wanted Sky to see into me—to know the things that I was too scared to tell him. But we aren’t transparent. If we want someone to know us, we have to tell them stuff.