Love Letters to the Dead

Maybe this is weird to say, but when I was younger, before I’d ever kissed, sometimes I’d imagine kissing you. Now that I kiss in real life, I’m happy to say that it’s a lot like I’d hoped it would be.

My boyfriend, Sky—my first boyfriend—he is perfect to me. It’s been two weeks since the Halloween party where we got together. And now, we’ve gotten to kissing everywhere. Kissing in the alleyway between classes, when no one is there, and the sun makes spots in the bright middle of my eyelids. Kissing in his truck that smells like thousand-year-old leather. Kissing when it’s dark and I crawl out of my window. (I’ve gotten good at it at both houses. At Aunt Amy’s my window pushes up, but at Dad’s I have to unhook my screen, the way that I used to see May do.) I love these middle-of-the-nights with Sky the best. Everything else is sleeping, and the whole world feels like our secret. It reminds me of the feeling I used to get when May and I would sneak into the yard to collect ingredients for fairy spells.

For the first time in forever, it feels like I have magical powers—the ones that May taught me about when we were little. With Sky, I can make the scary stuff disappear. We walk through the neighborhood after dark, and our shadows stand on top of each other, stretching across the whole street. We kiss, and I feel that if my shadow could stay inside of his, then he could eclipse everything that I don’t want to remember. I can get lost in the things about him that are beautiful.

Sky reminds me of you a bit, honestly. How he’s a boy, and strong, and the air makes way for him when he walks through it. But also how there is something fragile like moths inside of him, something fluttering. Something trying desperately to crowd toward a light. May was a real moon who everyone flocked to. But even if I am only Sky’s street lamp, I don’t mind. It’s enough to be what he moves toward. I love to feel the wings beat.

Last night we walked to the park, and we kissed with my back pressed up against the cold bars of the jungle gym. We stopped for breath, and his bottom lip fell a little crooked to the left, like it does. I whispered, “Can we go to your house?”

He sounded uncertain. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“We don’t have to go in. I just want to see it.” I didn’t tell him that I already had, the night that I drove by with Tristan and Kristen at two a.m. I wanted to be there with him.

“I don’t think you understand,” he said finally. “My mom isn’t really … like other moms.”

“How do you mean?”

On the outside, Sky got tougher. “She just has her own way of doing things.” Then he said, “Like, she sings lullabies to the flowers in the middle of the night.”

“Oh. Well, that’s okay.”

“They’re dead now,” Sky added. “Her marigolds are. She sings to them anyway.”

“Maybe we could plant some bulbs for her. Tulips, or something that will grow in the spring.”

Sky wasn’t so sure about it, but I promised him we could just stay in the front yard and we wouldn’t have to go inside, and he finally agreed. So tonight, I snuck out again to meet him, and we drove to his house to pull up the dried-out marigolds and put in tulip bulbs. Earlier today I’d gone into our shed, where Mom used to keep her gardening stuff, and found some stacked in a box with newspaper between them. It was a new moon night, and we worked in the dark, wearing our jackets. As we were patting down the last ones, our nails with dirt under them, we looked up at each other, and our eyes touched, closer than you can get even with skin.

That’s when the front door opened. It was his mother, standing there in her bathrobe, holding a watering can.

“Mom?” Sky asked wearily. “What are you doing?” I think he’d been hoping that she would stay asleep and he wouldn’t have to introduce us yet.

“I wanted to help,” she said innocently.

Then she turned to me and looked me in the face, as if she’d just noticed that I was there. Her expression was warm. “And who is this?” she asked Sky.

“This is Laurel,” Sky said.

“We, um, we planted tulip bulbs,” I said, “so they’ll grow in the spring.”

Sky’s mom smiled and nodded, as if planting flowers in the middle of the night were normal. “Thank you, dear.”

She started to walk up and down the rows, sprinkling the dirt. She sang softly as she went, something about horses in the sun.

“It’s important to sing to them,” she said when she was done. “So that they know you are there.” Then she took her watering can and set it near the front door and just walked back inside.

“So that was my mom,” Sky said.

“She … she seems really nice.”

“You mean crazy.”

“Well, no. But what’s, um, what—”

Sky’s voice turned hard. “That’s just the way she is.”