Love Letters to the Dead

I’d actually never smoked pot, so I think Tristan thought I was just going along to sit with him. But when he pulled out his pipe, I said, “I want some.”

He raised his eyebrows at me, but he passed it over.

Before I started to try to figure out how it worked, I said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Hit me.”

“Do you think it’s true, what you said about being saved? Do you think Sky found someone better at saving him? Like Francesca? Maybe I just couldn’t do it. And maybe she can. Maybe he’s happier now. Like really happy.”

“You’re too good for him, Buttercup. You deserve a better man. As for her, she couldn’t save a ladybug from a rainstorm if you gave her a fifty-foot umbrella.”

“But what about my sister? Why couldn’t I save her?” My voice wavered, and I could feel myself tilt inside. Maybe outside, too. I never say things like that out loud.

Tristan paused for a minute and got very serious. But not quiet the way most people get about these things. He looked at me and said, “I was wrong.”

“About what?”

“What I told you about saving people isn’t true. You might think it is, because you might want someone else to save you, or you might want to save someone so badly. But no one else can save you, not really. Not from yourself,” he said. “You fall asleep in the foothills, and the wolf comes down from the mountains. And you hope someone will wake you up. Or chase it off. Or shoot it dead. But when you realize that the wolf is inside you, that’s when you know. You can’t run from it. And no one who loves you can kill the wolf, because it’s part of you. They see your face on it. And they won’t fire the shot.”

A long moment passed with me looking at him. I knew what wolf he was talking about. I feel its teeth all the time. And I understood, too, that even though Tristan seems tough, he is afraid, like me, that there is something inside of him that could eat him alive.

Then he said, “Laurel, you couldn’t have saved your sister. But, love, you’ve got to save yourself. Do that for me, okay? Because you are worth it.”

No one had ever said that to me before.

I realized I was still holding the pipe when Tristan said, “Do you want to pass that over here? You don’t need it.” So I did, and smiled at him. It was already almost three o’clock. Tristan was waiting for Kristen to come out, so I said bye and started walking back.

I went past the alley, on my way to the bus stop, and I nearly bumped into him. Sky. In the corner of my eye, I saw Francesca pulling away in her yellow car.

“Hey,” I said, startled. I was closer to his body than I’d been since we broke up, and it hurt how badly I wanted him to touch me.

“Hey,” he said back. He shifted awkwardly. “How are you?”

“All right.” It was quiet for a moment. I knew that I should just walk away, but I couldn’t do it. Everything in me that was angry at him for leaving started bubbling up to the surface. I thought of his arms around Francesca now, the way they’d been around me, and of his voice hot and gravelly, the way it would get when he said things that he meant. I kept telling myself not to cry, but the tears were already coming to the edges of my eyes. I wiped them away with the sleeve of the stupid lavender velvet shirt. “How could you do that?” I asked. “How can you just … be with her?”

I could see the muscles in his body get tense, and his voice was, too. “’Cause that’s my way of dealing. You have these great friends. I don’t. So yeah, it’s nice to have someone around. It’s nice to just be with someone who’s easy to be with. I’m not proud of it. But that’s what happens sometimes.”

“But you said you love me. You don’t just leave after that.”

Sky was speaking low, like if he let himself go, he would explode. “Yeah, I did. You were the only girl I’ve ever said that to. You think it’s just you who got hurt, but it’s not like that. How do you think it was for me when I saw you climb up on the edge of that balcony? How do you think it was watching you cry all the time and not being able to do anything about it? I wasn’t lying when I said I love you. How do you think it feels watching you in the fucking middle of the street waiting for a car to come and hit you?”

Sky was angry at me. Although maybe it’s messed up to say, it felt good in a way, because it meant he cared. I guess when you love someone and they put themselves in danger, you are supposed to be mad.

I thought about what he said. That I’d hurt him. I’d never actually realized that. We do things sometimes because we feel so much inside of us, and we don’t notice how it affects somebody else. I’d been selfish. I remembered the feeling of Sky’s moths fluttering, looking for a light. I felt like a street lamp that had gone out.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I reached my hand out to his chest. He didn’t pull back.

“It’s okay. It’s just, I know that you love your sister, but it scared me, seeing you act the way that she would.”

“What do you mean? How did she act?” And then I took a deep breath and asked, “How did you even know her?”

Sky paused a moment. “Do you really want to know?” He sounded nervous.

“Yes,” I said. Although honestly, I wasn’t sure.

“We had a couple of classes together freshman year. She was pretty much the life of any room she walked into. And she was the only girl in our grade who was always at all of the parties with upperclassmen. I never used to do that kind of stuff. Then when my dad left that year, I started going out, too. So we’d talk sometimes. She was usually drunk. She’d tell me about your family, and your parents getting divorced, and she talked about you, too. But she was always hooking up with these seniors. She got a reputation for being, um, wild, I guess. Maybe she needed the attention. I just thought that she’d get sick of all of that eventually…”

Sky trailed off. He was looking at me expectantly. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. I was trying to put it together, and the puzzle pieces fit, but the picture didn’t make sense. I was trying to see May, but it wasn’t the May who rushed off into high school like a new world was waiting to greet her. I guess it shouldn’t have been so much of a surprise. I’ve known for a long time how she snuck out at night and came home drunk, about Paul and all of that stuff, but part of me still wanted to believe that there was something beautiful on the other side of it. That she was happy.

“What are you thinking?” Sky asked.

“I don’t know. What happened after that?”

“Nothing really. By sophomore year, it’s like she was somewhere else entirely. She’d sit in the back of the class, and she’d do her work, and she’d hardly talk to anyone. She was seeing that older guy. I saw them at a party together once. She was so drunk, and he was all over her. It was clear that she was out of it. They disappeared into some bedroom together. The whole thing made me sick. A few days after she died, I spotted him hanging around the parking lot at school. Maybe he was looking for her. I guess he didn’t know yet. I was so pissed off. I beat the shit out of the guy. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. When I got questioned about it afterward, I didn’t want to say anything about who he was. I knew May had a family, of course, and I didn’t want to cause any trouble. Anyway, that’s why—I got kicked out of Sandia after that.”

He finished talking, and then there was this gulf of silence. I wished that all of the words that Sky had said could go back into his mouth and never come out. Because there was one thing about the whole thing that was sinking in, that came through in his voice when he talked about her, and soon it was all I could hear. “You liked her,” I said flatly.

“Yeah, maybe,” he said reluctantly. “I mean, maybe I had a little bit of a crush on her.”

Why did that hurt so much? I’d known it all along, anyway—when he looked at me, he’d only seen a shadow of May.