I wanted to hold his heart in mine and to make a safe place for it. “You’re going to create something great. You’ll be an amazing writer.”
Sky smiled at me. “Your turn,” he said. “What was yours?”
“It was sort of long. It was about this John Keats poem that we read in English, the one that ends with ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ I’ve been thinking about what that means. And then, when we were writing stuff down, I thought I understood it all of a sudden. The intention said, ‘Truth is beautiful, no matter what that truth is. Even if it’s scary or bad. It is beauty simply because it’s true. And truth is bright. Truth makes you more you. I want to be me.’”
When I finished, I was waiting for Sky to say something, but he just looked at me for a minute. “That’s pretty,” he finally answered, “but I don’t really get it. I mean, what is the truth you’re scared of?”
I shrugged. I thought somehow he’d understand. I thought somehow those words would have been enough to tell him everything I couldn’t say. “I don’t know,” I replied.
“If you want to be you, you can tell me. I want to know you.”
I wanted to tell him, but the story seemed to start such a long time ago. It didn’t fit into my mouth. It didn’t fit into my brain, even. It started when I figured out how things could get broken. When suddenly May couldn’t protect me anymore. It started when knowing that was sadder than all of the things themselves. My thoughts were spinning away, and then it hit me. She’s gone. I tried to push the reality away, but it was so heavy, I could barely breath.
“Laurel,” Sky said, “talk to me. Stop disappearing. Tell me something. Anything.”
I was spinning again. I started going backward, everything from the past blurring into the present, and through it all was the worst guilty feeling. I had to make it go away. I had to find May.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you a secret.” I leaned into him and whispered, “I’m a fairy.”
Sky looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” I said. “Watch, then, I’ll show you.” I got up and climbed onto the low wall at the edge of the balcony. “Close your eyes, and I’m going to fly off of this.” I ignored the voice in the back of my head that said, Only your sister has wings. It made me mad.
“Laurel, get down from there!” Sky said, from what felt like the distance.
“No. I want to fly. I want to fly like May,” I said, and started crying.
Sky came over and grabbed me, pulling me off the edge. I tried to hit him. I tried to hit him and hit him, but he wouldn’t let me. He held me tighter, so I couldn’t move.
And when I stopped, when I went limp in his arms, he lifted my face and said, “Laurel, I can’t do this. I can’t be with you if you’re going to be like this.”
“Be like what?” I asked. “How am I?”
“Like your sister,” he said.
“You don’t know what she was like. You didn’t really know her.” I paused. And then I asked, more quietly, “How did you know her?”
Sky just shook his head. “Come on,” he said. “You need to go to sleep.”
I was so tired all of a sudden, and so scared, and so ashamed. I could feel everything that’s bad about me and wrong and everything that I know I shouldn’t feel, all of the ways that I am angry at her rushing toward the surface. I followed him inside and lay on the couch. He brought me some water, and then he told me, “I’m going to go home.” I got the worst sinking feeling, like I’d ruined everything.
“Please don’t leave me.”
“I’m tired,” he said.
“Sky,” I said, “Sky, May wasn’t like that. She didn’t do it on purpose. She was good. She wasn’t like me.”
He just nodded. “All right, Laurel.”
“You know how good she was, right?”
Sky squinted back at me, like he didn’t know who he was looking at.
“Say yes,” I said, frantic.
“Yes,” he said. But then he added, “She wasn’t perfect.”
I wanted to scream that he was wrong, but I couldn’t find my voice. I kept hearing his words echo in my head as I lay on the couch watching him walk away from me. I kept hearing it all night, until I finally fell asleep, and woke up from a dream where May came back, her fairy wings shimmering and intact. She said she hadn’t died after all. She’d just flown away for a bit.
I called Sky this morning, but there was no answer.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Kurt,
Today is a day when the world turns out to be flat. January fourth. It’s a taking-down-the-Christmas-tree day. We waited too long this year, until all the pine needles were brittle and shedding so hard they fell past their snow-white sheet and onto the carpet, and finally started to show up in the kitchen. Neither Dad nor I had the heart to do it. Until I woke up this morning and I knew it couldn’t go on any longer—Dad and I looking at each other over Rice Krispies and not saying anything about the dying tree or taking it down, not saying anything about anything, me just putting my ear to the cereal bowl like I used to and making some lame joke about snap crackle pop.
So today when I woke up early, I went in my pajamas and started unscrewing the base, and by the time Dad walked out I had the whole tree over my shoulder, and it was raining its needles all over the cream carpet as I carried it to the door.
Dad asked, “What are you doing?”
“Taking down the tree.”
“Here, let me help.”
“No,” I snapped, without meaning to. “I can do it myself.”
When I got outside, I didn’t know what to do with it. So I went to the toolshed and looked around until I found a saw. I laid the tree down on the cement and started tearing through its trunk, until it was in jagged pieces. The smell of pine was overwhelming, like the tree’s heart was leaking out. I piled the series of sawed-off limbs next to the trash.
When I went inside, Dad was vacuuming up the last of the needles on the floor. The sound covered my stomach’s growl as I walked past him and into the kitchen to pour some Rice Krispies.
Dad came in and poured himself a bowl. He was wearing his work clothes, ready to go. “What do you have on the docket for your last day of vacation?” he asked, looking at me expectantly.