Love Letters to the Dead

Tristan explained, “Quote courtesy of Lady Joplin. She’s obsessed.” So then Kristen started talking about you, and I figured out that Kristen really loves you, pretty much as much as she loves Tristan.

When I got home today, I looked up about Slash, and I also looked up about your life, so that I can start my education, and so that I can be friends with Tristan and Kristen. I read that you grew up next to oil towers in Texas, and that when you were a teenager, everyone in high school was terrible to you. But that made you fearless. And then you became famous. When Kristen and I are better friends, I am going to ask her to play me some of your music. I know that I could find some online, but I sort of hope that the first time I hear it will be with her. Until then, though, I am writing because I wanted to thank you for saying that thing about regular weird people, because I thought about that a lot, and I am one of them, too. With all of us standing there together, Kristen, Tristan, Natalie, Hannah, and me, I realized that there is a reason that we were all there—we are each weird in a different way, but together, that’s actually normal. And even if there’s a lot that I can’t say to them, it feels good to belong somewhere.

Yours,

Laurel




Dear Allan Lane,

I am at my aunt Amy’s. It’s her week. I like the weeks with my dad better, because Dad is my dad and he’s part of my used-to-be-normal family. But I still love Aunt Amy, which is why I am writing to you. Since you are Mister Ed the talking horse’s voice, I figured you’d be the closest thing to Mister Ed himself. My aunt Amy loves Mister Ed. Really loves him. She also really loves Jesus.

When we were little, Dad didn’t used to like us to spend time with her, because he thought that she was unstable. But Mom would cry and say, “Jim, they’re all she has.” Since Aunt Amy never had kids of her own, she’s always thought of May and me as her daughters, too, I guess.

Even though she’s only forty now, Aunt Amy’s hair is silver already and long, and she wears flower-print dresses. You can tell that she was pretty when she was young. But she’s not like Mom, who seems just as pretty now. Mom looks soft, like an out-of-focus picture that blurs her hair and her face a little bit into the landscape. Or maybe that’s just how I see her now that she’s gone. Aunt Amy is skinny and bony and you don’t want her to stroke your head or hug you. She holds too tight.

Aunt Amy had a few boyfriends a long time ago, but they were all bad ones. I probably shouldn’t know about that, except I heard Mom talking about it once when she and Dad were fighting. Aunt Amy hadn’t dated anyone since I’ve known her until last year, when she fell for this guy who was walking across the country for Jesus. She found out about him on the news, and she decided she really admired this man. She sent him letters and care packages to pit stops along his route. And then she decided to fly out to Florida so she could join the end of his pilgrimage. She walked the last one hundred miles with him, and they struck up a romance on the road. I think Aunt Amy imagined she’d finally found her mate. Afterward, she called him a lot and left him messages, where she did impressions of Mister Ed or of the Jamaican bobsledders from the movie Cool Runnings. (That is her next favorite thing after Mister Ed.) At first, he called back a little bit. She’d ask him when she could see him again, but he’d never say exactly when. And soon the calls stopped coming. She’s always checking the answering machine, though she tries to act like she doesn’t care. I think she doesn’t want me to see her being hopeful. (I don’t know if being super into Jesus makes you against things like modern technology, but Aunt Amy still hasn’t figured out cell phones.)

At the beginning of the summer, after Mom had told me she was going to go to California for a while, she decided she needed to call some kind of family meeting. It was there that Aunt Amy asked if I wanted to spend Mom’s weeks with her. Clearly the two of them had planned this. Mom and Dad and Aunt Amy and I were sitting in the house May and I grew up in, on the sofa that had been worn in by years of our bodies. Aunt Amy turned to me and asked, “What do you think, Laurel?” She looked so hopeful about it.

Dad didn’t look so sure, but I knew that if I said no to Aunt Amy, she would start talking about how they let May go too far down a path of sin and how I needed God or something.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”