“Oh, just a little TV in my pajamas,” I said, giving him a weak smile. I don’t have to go back to school until tomorrow, thanks to teacher planning day.
“Where’s that boyfriend of yours?” Dad asked. “You think you might want to bring him around in daylight hours one of these days?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, my heart plunging into my stomach. I didn’t want to tell Dad the truth, that Sky hadn’t called me back in five days.
And then, as I picked up my spoon to try to force down some cereal, I saw it. One of the little plastic spiders I’d given Dad for Christmas, floating in my bowl. He must have snuck it into the cereal box. I did my best to laugh, and then I looked up at him. He was smiling so hopefully. “Gotcha,” he said, before he left for work.
When he was gone, I put on In Utero and lay down and listened to “Heart-Shaped Box”—it must have been a thousand times—and felt sick. I thought about dialing Sky’s number again, just to hear it ring. I’ve called over and over since New Year’s, and when the voice mail picks up—not even Sky’s own voice, but the generic woman’s that comes with the phone—I hang up. I haven’t left a message. I don’t know what to say.
Earlier tonight when I was trying to fall asleep, I kept thinking of the tree going in the trash, and it just wasn’t right. I couldn’t stand it being there like that. So I snuck out, and I carried the limbs, two by two or three by three, all the way through the dark neighborhood where I would walk with Sky and back behind the golf course to the ditch, and I tossed them into the water so they might get to go to the river and then, who knows, maybe to the ocean. They could become driftwood on a beach in California.
I am back in bed now, but I still can’t sleep. My hands have splinters. They smell like something stolen from the forest. I keep thinking about the day that May’s wings broke.
We were fairies, and when we were together, the magic worked and I believed in it. Every time the shadows in our room seemed to come alive, I could wake May up, and we would sneak out into the yard with new lists of ingredients for a spell. They changed with the season. Six red berries. Seven yellow leaves. A drop of honey from the honeysuckle. A hard-searched-out feather. A melted icicle. We cast spells to keep the shadow people at bay, spells to preserve the fairy gene, spells to defeat the evil witches. When I found an injured bird one day, we cast a spell to help her heal, and sure enough, when I went back to her box the next day, she was gone. She’d flown away.
But there was this part of the fairy world that I could never share with May; I couldn’t fly. I knew the rules. Only the oldest child had wings. But I kept thinking maybe there could be some exception. It was all I wanted. When Aunt Amy would take us to church, that’s what I’d pray for. When May pulled an eyelash off my cheek, I’d squint my eyes shut and wish for wings with all my might.
But when they didn’t come, I thought that if only I could see May fly, that would be the next best thing. If I saw her soaring into the sky, I would for sure be part of the magic. I would look at her naked back when we’d lie on the bed after a bath and Mom rubbed cold lotion on us. I would see her shoulder blades jutting out and imagine how she could unzip her smooth skin to reveal these transparent, magnificent, shimmering wings.
I would beg and beg to see. Just the tip of a wing. Just for a minute. But she always said she couldn’t show me. I kept begging, and one day, I must have been about seven by then, I begged so hard that I started to cry. So finally she told me that she would fly to the top of the elm tree in our yard, and after she flew up there, I could come out and see her.
“But you can’t look until I tell you. Until I’ve landed. Do you promise?”
I promised. I meant to keep the promise, too. I really meant to. But as I stood by the back door, waiting for her to call me, something so strong pulled at me. I thought maybe if I saw by accident, it wouldn’t count. So I cracked the screen door and peeped out. And I let my eyes flash toward the tree, just for a second, just in time to see her falling from high up. She was screaming, “You broke them! You broke them!”
I ran over and started sobbing. “But I didn’t even see. I didn’t even see. I didn’t look!”
“You broke them.” May was crying, too.
“I can fix them! Can’t I fix them? Isn’t there a way?”
May looked into my face. I was crying harder than she was. She wiped the tears from my cheeks. She said, “Maybe I can find a way to sew them. They might be crooked, but maybe they could work again.” And she gave me a list of things to find for sewing and said to go get started. She was going to take out the wings and have a look.
It was at that moment that I understood what the wings were. They would never work again. Because they were made up, and the magic spell that May had cast to make me believe, it was broken. But neither of us could admit it. Neither of us could stop pretending for the other. She had crutches after that for a month. As she’d hobble through our house, I kept telling her that I was sorry. But she’d tell me it was okay—her wings were working again, and by night she’d be soaring.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Amy Winehouse,
Your parents got divorced when you were nine. Your dad had been seeing another woman for almost your whole life. He said later that it didn’t even seem like the divorce affected you that much when you were a kid, but that somewhere deeper maybe it really did. You sang a song about it called “What Is It About Men.” The song talks about your destructive side that comes from a past that’s “shoved under” your bed. “History repeats itself,” you sang. I wonder if that’s true. If there’s a hurt that’s buried in us, maybe it keeps finding its way through.
You said this thing once: “Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns, and I am engulfed in shame.” I feel like that. I keep thinking about May, how she tried everything and how she was bright and beautiful. But then it keeps coming in, what happened to her that night. I keep seeing her falling. I keep feeling like I did that day when I was seven. She could fly, and I broke it.
I have a new favorite song of yours that I’ve been listening to over and over—“He Can Only Hold Her” for so long. The man in the song tries to love the girl, but she’s not really there, not all the way. She’s running from something inside of her that he can’t see. I think that there’s something like that inside of me.