Love Letters to the Dead

Dear River Phoenix,

I read that when you were little, before you were famous, your family moved around a lot. You lived in communes, and then you guys joined a cult for a while called the Children of God. Your family did missionary work for them in Texas, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and finally Venezuela. The cult called your father the Archbishop of Venezuela and the Caribbean, but they didn’t give your family any money to live on, so you and your next-oldest sister, Rain, used to sing in the streets for change. People would gather around to hear the two of you.

Your family quit the cult when your parents heard about what the leader was asking the women to do, “flirty fishing,” they called it, which was to have sex with men to recruit them. When you left Venezuela, your family got back to Florida by being stowaways on a ship carrying Tonka toys. The crew discovered your family, but they were nice to you and gave you some damaged toys for presents.

After the cult, your parents changed your family’s last name from Bottom to Phoenix—to symbolize the mythical bird that rises from the ashes. Then your family moved to Hollywood when you were nine so that you and Rain would have a chance to become stars. You loved to sing together, and you decided you wanted to be an actor, too.

At first, it was hard. Your family had no money, and you got kicked out of your apartments every few months, and you and your sister kept singing on street corners. But your mom got a job working for a casting agency, and then a famous talent agent signed you and Rain and your other two sisters and brother, too. Soon she started getting you small jobs, and then the jobs got bigger and bigger.

When you became an actor, you had the ability to dissolve your own personality and inhabit any character. You were brilliant at it. We can lose ourselves, I guess. And you used that. You found the magic in it.

You and your siblings always supported each other. You loved your family so much and talked about your childhood as being happy. But I wonder if there was something that happened to you when you were little that you couldn’t talk to them about. People have said that a lot of bad things went on in that cult, like the cult leader said it was okay to do sexual stuff with kids. When I read that, it made me so angry. I wondered if there was someone who hurt you. You said once in an interview that you lost your virginity when you were four. But then you took it back and said that it was just a joke. So I don’t know. But maybe there was a time that you needed someone to protect you and they couldn’t.

I am writing to you now because there is something that I can’t talk about, too. Something that I wonder if you would understand. I keep trying to get rid of it, to push it out of my head, but it keeps coming back in. I am worried, because I am falling in love with Sky, but I feel like one day, he’ll find out everything and leave me.

Last night, I snuck out to meet him. Since it was a cold night, instead of walking through the neighborhood, he picked me up and we decided to drive in his truck. We blasted the heater and rolled the windows down and listened to music, and finally we pulled over on a dark street and made out in the car. We made out so much, my whole body was burning up, and the windows were frosted with breath. I finally pulled away from him and sat up a moment. I was trying to remind myself of where I was, and I turned to the glass and drew a heart in it with my finger. That’s when he asked, “Do you want to come over?”

His mom was sleeping when we got there. In the low light I could see that the house, which looked so perfect on the outside, was different indoors. Every surface was piled high with fading housekeeping magazines, abandoned library books, scattered crafts. A half-finished needlepoint sampler with a scene from summer. A pile of cutout snowflakes and their paper scraps for the winter. Sky wanted to go quickly to his bedroom, but I lingered. I wanted to see everything, as if the house were full of clues to him. Then, in a cabinet crowded with delicate china, I saw that there were soccer trophies and a framed photo of Sky. He was younger, maybe twelve. He was in his uniform, grinning with a ball in his hands. There was something about seeing him like that—the same boy I loved looking out at me as a kid who smiled for the camera. I wanted to pull him out of the picture and protect him from everything between then and now.

“I didn’t know you played soccer,” I whispered. “Are all of those trophies yours?”

“Yeah,” he said, shifting, like he didn’t want to be there. “That was my past life.”