Love Letters to the Dead (11 page)

When Sky finally got out of the car and opened my door, I was longing for more. He was so calm. In control. Unlike me, whose everything was shaking.

“So,” Sky asked with a little smile, “did it turn out the way it was supposed to?”

“Yeah, it did,” I whispered.

“Good,” he said, and kissed me softly on the forehead.

As his truck pulled off, I went inside as quietly as I could, carrying the secret of the night as I tiptoed over the creaking wood floors, past the door of Dad’s room that used to be Mom and Dad’s. Past May’s room. The house felt haunted, like only I understood the way all of our shadows, the ones we’d left, had seeped into the wood and stained it. How the floor and the walls were full of our bodies at certain moments. I went to my dresser and stood in front of the mirror. I unpinned my hair. I wiped away my lipstick onto the back of my hand. I looked at my face until it was only shapes. I kept looking, until something reformed. And I swear I saw May there. Looking back at me. Glowing from her first dance.

I got in bed and played “The Lady in Red” off of her CD. I thought of Sky’s hands pulling me closer. How he had said that I was beautiful. And I knew that he had seen her in me. I skipped back the song again and again until my hand was too tired to move. Before I slept, I felt like I was breathing for both of us. My sister and me.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear Amelia,

I think I am going to be you for Halloween, which is coming up in a little less than two weeks. I’m excited about it, so I am getting my costume ready. I don’t want to be a ghost or a stupid sexy cat. I want to be something that I really want to be, and you are like bravery to me.

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. Christmas and the others can end up making you sad, because you know you should be happy. But on Halloween you get to become anything that you want to be.

I remember the first year Mom and Dad let us go trick or treating alone. I was still seven, and May had just turned ten. She convinced them that double digits meant she was grown-up enough to shepherd me along our block. We ran up to each house, the fairy wings we carried on our backs flapping behind us, ahead of the kids who had their parents in tow. Every time a front door would open, May would put her arm around me, and it felt like she would always protect me. When we got home, our noses were ice-cold, and our paper bags, decorated with cotton ghosts and tissue paper witches, were full. We emptied our candy onto the living room floor to count it up, and Mom brought us hot cider. I remember the feeling of that night so much, because it was like you could be free and safe at once.

I think that this year we are going to a party that Hannah’s college boyfriend, Kasey, is having. I told Sky about it, and I hope he might go, too. It’s been one week since homecoming. I don’t think he wants to have a girlfriend, because of what Kristen said about how he just “has girls” sometimes. I try to remind myself of this so that I don’t scare him off. But to tell the truth, I’ve never liked someone so much. Since the dance, I’ve caught him watching me a few times at lunch. And I watch back. Then yesterday, when I was getting stuff from my locker, I closed the door, and there he was, out of nowhere. My body instantly remembered kissing him. The feeling almost knocked me over.

“What’s up?” he said, just smoothly, the way he does.

“Um…” I was thinking fast. I was
not
going to say nothing. “It’s almost Halloween.”

“Indeed.”

“What are you going to be?”

Sky laughed. “I usually just put on a white sheet and pass out candy to trick-or-treaters with my mom.”

“Well, we’re going to this one party, because Hannah’s seeing this guy or whatever. It’s a college party, and, I don’t know, you should come…”

“You’re going to a college party?” He sounded vaguely disapproving.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I guess maybe I better. I don’t want you getting into any trouble.” Sky said it like he was mostly teasing, but meant it a tiny bit.

I tried to keep myself from giggling. “I’ll send you the address, you know, in case.”

When I told Natalie and Hannah about this at lunch, they were eating Halloween candy early, and Hannah said, in the middle of a handful of candy corn, “That means he wants to do you.”

Natalie hit her shoulder and said, “Han-nah!”

“What? That doesn’t mean she’s gonna. Laurel’s a good girl, can’t you tell?”

My face got all hot.

Then Hannah said, “Sleepover at my house tomorrow, are you in?”

I was so happy, because the invitation meant that Hannah thinks I “get it,” like she said Natalie does. That now we were real enough friends for me to go to her house. In my head, I started calculating how I’d get permission. I’d still be with Aunt Amy, before I switched to Dad’s on Sunday.

Finally, as a last resort, I decided to call Mom and ask her to tell Aunt Amy that she should let me spend the night at my friend’s house.

“What friend?” she asked.

“Hannah,” I said. “I always hang out with her. My friend Natalie’s going, too. Dad already lets me spend the night with them.”

“What’s Hannah like?” Mom asked.

She could probably hear the shrug in my voice. “I don’t know. She’s just normal.”

“What does ‘normal’ mean?”

“She’s cool and nice. What is this, twenty questions?”

“I just wanted to know a little bit about your life now,” Mom said, sounding hurt. “Who your friends are.”

I felt bad, but I couldn’t help thinking that if she really wanted to know, she’d be here.

It was quiet for a moment, and then Mom laughed a little. “Do you remember when we used to play that game with your sister in the car on the way home from school?”

She meant twenty questions. “Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t help laughing a little, too. May was great at that game, like she was at everything. She always thought of something super specific. Instead of just a train whistle, it was the train whistle from the lullaby that Mom would sing us. And she added her own category, too—in addition to a person, place, or thing, you could also think of a feeling. Her feeling wouldn’t just be something like “excited.” It would be the exact feeling of waking up on your birthday.

“I’m thinking of a feeling right now,” I said to Mom.

“A feeling that’s more happy or more sad?” Mom asked.

“More sad,” I said.

Mom asked a few more questions, but in the end she didn’t guess, so I had to tell her that the feeling was missing her.

And of course, after all of that, she told Aunt Amy to let me go.

Hannah’s house is outside of town, in the red dirt hills. Natalie’s mom dropped me and Natalie off, and Hannah brought us upstairs to say hi to her grandpa. When she knocked on his bedroom door, he came out to the hallway. He smiled at us, but Hannah had to yell when she told him my name, because he doesn’t hear very well. Her grandma was sleeping, and after we met him, her grandpa went back into his room to watch TV.

Then we went wandering in the forest behind the house, and Natalie and Hannah smoked cigarettes. You can walk to the river through the cottonwood trees covered in brambles and webs. The leaves have all turned yellow now, so the light looks golden even when the sun just leaks through the clouds. But when we started to get close to the sound of the river, it made me start to breathe too fast. I saw May that night in a flash, before my brain shut off and wanted to blank out. So while Natalie and Hannah walked to the riverbank, I hung back, pretending to get lost in looking at a spiderweb or something.

When we got back from our walk, we went to visit Hannah’s horse named Buddy. Buddy was actually her grandma’s horse, but since her grandma isn’t doing well, Hannah takes care of him, and she says Buddy is more like hers now. She says that Buddy is her favorite one in the family. She also takes care of Earl, their donkey, since she doesn’t trust her brother to be nice to the animals. To tell the truth, Hannah’s brother, Jason, is scary. He’s trying to train himself for the Marines, so he goes on obstacle courses he made for himself near the river, with old tires and ropes and things. He used to be a football player, but then he tore his shoulder, and he hasn’t been able to play since. He should have gone to college this year, but he didn’t. I don’t know if it’s because he couldn’t get in now that he can’t play football or because their grandparents are old and can’t really watch after Hannah. I think her brother thinks he’s supposed to be like her parent, but he’s bad at it. For groceries he only buys Vienna sausages in a can and grocery store–brand sour cream and onion chips. Even though their family isn’t poor or anything, maybe part of why Hannah wants to have a job is so that she can pick her own things to eat, without having to ask Jason. She likes to eat spinach out of the bag and Doritos (the real brand) and Luna Bars.

When Jason went for one of his workouts, which Hannah says take at least a couple hours, we decided to take Hannah’s grandma’s old van and practice driving. Natalie and Hannah both turned fifteen at the beginning of the year and have their learner’s permits. Natalie went first. She rolled the van down the dirt road, and Hannah stood up and stuck her head out of the sunroof and screamed, “Woohoo!” which I guess made Natalie want to go faster, so she did. The thing is, she went off the road when she swerved to miss a bird. Probably the bird would have flown away at the last minute, but I guess Natalie got nervous. So the car wheels stuck in the soft sand. Natalie revved the gas harder, but the wheels just spun farther into the ground.

Hannah kept saying, “We have to get it out. My brother can’t know.” She sounded terrified. She yelled for Natalie to push the gas harder, and Natalie was all shaky because Hannah was so upset, and then Hannah made Natalie and me get out, and she went behind the wheel and tried to make the car go herself. Natalie and I pushed from outside, but it wouldn’t move. It wouldn’t move at all. Hannah started crying, and she yelled at Natalie, “Why did you do that? Are you stupid?” Natalie’s cheeks and her chest turned red. I know it’s because she was trying not to cry, too. Eventually there was nothing to do but to walk back and tell Jason, who by now would be done with his workout.

Hannah told us to wait outside when she went into the kitchen. But we followed her and watched from the hallway. Jason wasn’t just angry. He was really, truly mad. His face was red, and he was screaming. He called Hannah a lot of bad names. I’ve never seen Hannah like that before. She laughs at everything and does whatever she wants, like she’s not afraid of anything. Like nothing can hurt her. But this was different. She was crying and she kept saying, “Please, Jason.”

I kept trying to think of a way to protect her, but I was scared frozen. Natalie must have felt the same. She kept whispering that she hated him, and that she wished she could punch him in the face, and those kinds of things. Finally Natalie went into the kitchen and stood next to Hannah. Hannah looked at her like she wished she would disappear. But Natalie said, in a very soft voice, “Please don’t get mad at her, it was my fault.”

Jason glared, but his voice got a little calmer as he said, “Like hell it was. That’s her dying grandmother’s car.” Then he threw his drink across the counter and he told Hannah, “Clean it up,” and he walked out. I guess he went to go get the car out with the tractor hitch.

We didn’t feel like staying in the house anymore after that, so what we did is we stayed in the barn that night. We got supplies while Jason was gone—flashlights and sleeping bags and Doritos and a bottle of this red wine that we took from her grandparents’ cabinet, because Hannah said that it had been there for years. It tasted old, like shoe leather and fall leaves and dusty apples. Hannah sang songs, Patsy Cline and Reba McEntire and Amy Winehouse. Natalie and I closed our eyes and listened. Sometimes Natalie sang along. When we were falling asleep in the loft, I heard Natalie whisper, “I’m sorry.” And she held Hannah, I think, all night. The hay in the barn smelled sweet, as if it were still growing in the rain.

I understood then, at least a little bit, why Hannah always has a boyfriend or sometimes more than one. I think she needs people to love her and give her attention. Her grandparents don’t seem like they can be there for her, and her brother is terrible to her. I want her to see that Natalie could love her for real. I think that deep down, Hannah must know that, but I’m not sure if she can imagine what it would be like. Maybe part of her would rather have Natalie as a best friend, because best friends don’t break up or anything like that. And even though it shouldn’t be this way, a relationship like theirs still makes you different in some people’s minds. Maybe Hannah isn’t ready yet to stand up for it. Because once you’re afraid of one thing, you can get scared of a lot of stuff. In school, the teachers tell Hannah, “Don’t waste your talent.” But she doesn’t turn in her papers or anything. She acts annoyed that they care about her, like she doesn’t trust it. Even if she can laugh at everything and have as many boyfriends as she wants, I think Hannah must be afraid like I get afraid, the way I did when I heard the river yesterday, the way I do when I don’t even know what the shadow is, but I feel it breathing.