Love Letters to the Dead

I don’t know why I’ve written you all these letters. I thought you got it. But you just left, too. Like everyone does.

I walked into May’s room tonight, once Dad was asleep, and I tore your poster off the wall. I tore it to shreds and I threw it out. And I sobbed until I couldn’t sob anymore. And now, that particular poster is gone forever. And I’m sorry.

It can’t be undone. We can’t put it back, and we can’t bring you back to life, and I hate that. And I hate you for it, too. There, I said it, I do. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wonder if your daughter has forgiven you, because I don’t know if I could.

The truth is, I don’t know how to forgive my sister. I don’t know how to forgive her, because I don’t deserve to be angry at her. And I’m afraid that if I am, I will lose her forever.

Yours anyway,

Laurel




Dear Heath Ledger,

The Dark Knight was on TV tonight. I watched it with Dad. One thing that we can still do together is watch movies. Those and baseball, but the season doesn’t start again for another few weeks. When the movie ended and the credits came on, Dad said, “The world has changed, hasn’t it?” before he got up to go to bed. That sentence seemed to carry the weight of everything we can’t talk about.

Dad used to be happy. A man with a family. Superheroes used to be indestructible. They didn’t lose the loves of their lives, or let good people die, or give up on their morals, or have to grieve. And storybook villains used to be simply evil. Not humans twisted into something terrifying. But The Dark Knight is like a grownup version of a superhero story. Batman is broken, too—he loses the woman he loves, and he has to frame himself for murder in order to save hope for the city. You play the Joker, the evil figure, and you are brilliant at it.

The movie scared me, to tell the truth. You scared me. I want to say what I could take from it, but I can’t. All there is is this deep-in-my-stomach feeling of terror, and this fear that there is no really happy ending anymore.

It’s the second week of March. Spring should almost be here, but the air has held on to its cold, wind coming in gusts to scare off the buds that might want to start blooming. It’s been a long time since I’ve written one of these letters—almost a month. I guess after I tore up Kurt’s poster, I didn’t feel like it anymore. Until I watched The Dark Knight and started thinking about you. I first got to know you from that movie 10 Things I Hate About You, and I always remember that scene where you jump up on the bleachers and sing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” to the whole girls’ soccer team to capture the heart of the girl you like. But after that, even though you got a lot of offers, you wouldn’t do any more teen movies. Instead, you ate ramen noodles in your apartment and waited. You didn’t just want to be famous, you wanted to be true to yourself. And eventually you got more roles, better ones, and you became the kind of grownup that made growing up seem okay, like you don’t have to lose your spirit in order to get older. You became the kind of father that any daughter would have wanted to have. When they found you in your apartment, dead from too many pills, I really did think it was an accident. I don’t think you meant to go.

I read about how you were planning to buy a garage for your daughter in Brooklyn so that you could make it into your own private drive-in theater together. When I think about that, it almost makes me cry. How you would have parked there with her, the two of you in the front seat passing popcorn and eating Red Vines and laughing at a cartoon flickering on the screen—the sort of story that ends like it’s supposed to, unlike the ones that haunt us as we grow up.

This month has passed by in a blur, but I guess there are a few new things to tell you about. One thing is that Hannah decided that she thinks bruises are pretty. She’s started painting them onto her cheekbone with eye shadow. They look real, too. Natalie tells her not to, but she loves her so much that she only kisses them and tells Hannah she’ll make it better. Sometimes we want our bodies to do a better job of showing the things that hurt us, the stories we keep hidden inside of us.

The other thing is that Hannah got her provisional license, and on Saturday we drove through the mountain roads to this guy Blake’s house. Hannah met him at her new job at the Macaroni Grill. He’s a busboy there, and she’s a hostess. She got a new job because Natalie got so angry every time she talked about Neung that finally she swore she’d never see him again and quit Japanese Kitchen. But she still has Kasey, and now Blake, too. She doesn’t like taking Natalie over to the boyfriends’ houses anymore, but she still doesn’t like to go alone, so I went with her.