I keep having this feeling, hot inside of me, that maybe there was no one to look out for me when I needed them to. It was May who I thought would always do it. But maybe there was no one to look out for her, either.
I think of Mom and the question she asked. “Did she jump?” I told Mom no, but I’ll never know the answer. And I think of the question that Mom didn’t ask, the question in her eyes. Why didn’t you stop her? The question I can’t get out of my mind. Why didn’t you?! I want to ask Mom.
She called tonight. After I’d answered her usual questions about how’s school, et cetera, with my usual one-word answers, she asked, “Is everything okay there?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Are you sure? You never talk to me.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. You’re not even here.”
There was a long silence. Then she said, “I wanted to tell you. I finally went to the ocean yesterday.”
“Yeah?”
“I hadn’t gone since I’d gotten here. It’s almost like I was waiting for you and your sister. But yesterday, I just … I got in my car, and before I knew it I was at the water. It’s like May was pulling me. And it was so beautiful, Laurel. I could almost feel her there.”
I wanted to say, Well, how fucking great for you. Instead I was quiet.
“Maybe you can come out for a visit sometime this summer and we’ll go together.”
All I could think when she said that was that it meant that she wasn’t coming back. Instead of answering her, I blurted out, “Mom, why did you leave?” I wanted her to tell me the truth. If she left because she was mad at me, or because she thought it was my fault, or because I never answered her questions, I wanted her to just say it.
“Your sister’s death shattered my heart, Laurel. Nobody knows what it’s like to lose a child.”
“Dad does.”
Mom didn’t answer.
“Nobody knows what it’s like to lose a sister, either,” I said.
“I know, sweetie. I know—”
“But Dad and I didn’t run away. We stayed together.”
“I know, Laurel. But staying together is not always the best thing when you can’t be good for each other. Everything doesn’t always work out exactly how we want it to.”
“No kidding. Don’t you think by now I’ve figured that out?”
I could hear Mom start to cry.
“No, Mom, please don’t cry. Forget it, okay? It’s fine. I have to go.”
When I hung up, Dad walked in. “Hey, sweetie,” he said. “Are you all right?”
I stared straight ahead and tried to wipe the tears away. “I hate her.”
“No, Laurel, you don’t mean that. I know you’re angry, and that’s okay. But you don’t hate her.”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
I looked at Dad’s shoulders, hunched over, and his face that was fighting to stay neutral. I think he was searching for something more to say, but when he couldn’t find anything, instead he came over and gave me a half nelson, like he used to when I was a kid. I knew this was meant to make me laugh, so I did my best.
You grew up so fast, River. But maybe the little boy who needed someone to protect him never went away. You can be noble and brave and beautiful and still find yourself falling.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Janis Joplin,
When you were alive you acted tough, shouting and drinking and singing your heart out. Giving it to everyone. All your fans. But the edge was too close. Your manager came to the hotel to find you one day when you missed your recording session. He saw your Porsche out front, painted bright and bold and psychedelic, with a night sky and a bright day, a land over the rainbow, a butterfly. The car was just there waiting, ready to go. But inside your hotel room, you were dead, sixteen days after Jim Morrison. The dream of the rock stars was ending. The dream of the sixties—where everything seemed possible, where there was everything and more to explore—didn’t make sense anymore. The beautiful, the brave, were burning up. You had believed that the world could change. And then yours ended. An overdose of heroin. Some booze. It was an accident, everyone assumed.
I still love you, but I’m starting to realize that it’s not a coincidence. That the people I most admire, the ones who seemed to be able to use their bodies, their voices, to fight away the fear, you didn’t win, not really, in the end. It’s gotten harder to write these letters, and maybe that’s why.
But I wanted to tell you the only good news that I have had in a while, which is that Kristen got in to Columbia. For a congratulations present, Tristan baked her a cake with a New York City skyline that he drew on it with frosting, which I thought might have been the nicest thing ever. When we all met in the alley after school to celebrate, he cut the cake and passed it around. Natalie kissed Hannah’s fake-bruised cheekbone and fed her bites of frosting. Tristan was smoking a cigarette in the middle of eating his and saying, “You’re my big city girl, right, babe?” Kristen nodded and smiled a half-sad smile. “Right, babe.”
Graduation is less than two months away. Afterward, Tristan is going to community college here. He already has an apartment picked out that he’s going to move into this summer. And he got a job delivering for Rex’s Chinese. They say that they are going to stay together, but they both know that they won’t. She’s leaving him, and he’s happy for her, as much as he can be. Next year, he’ll probably have a new girlfriend. A college girlfriend. Probably she’ll have blond hair and her eyes won’t stay still like Kristen’s. They’ll dance all around a room, and he’ll miss the way Kristen looked at things, the way she looked at him, like there was nothing else to see.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Amy Winehouse,
Aunt Amy asked me if I wanted to go to the mall with her today to get some spring clothes, including a dress for Easter, which is coming up tomorrow. She said she was thinking we’d have an aunt-niece day, like a mother-daughter day, I guess. I wasn’t in the mood, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so I agreed.
We were in JCPenney, and I was browsing the tops, when she came back with an armful of dresses for me to try on, all of them too lacy and too long. I don’t know how she even found so many church dresses in a department store, but she must have left the juniors’ section, that’s for sure.