“Okay, thank you,” I say to him. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” he says. “See ya.”
That’s when I called you, Jo, at your relatives’ house in Moorhead. I was still sort of hanging there in space, still certain I would die if I didn’t stay on my feet and watch out. There still weren’t words for it.
That’s why I couldn’t really talk, and I said so, and you said, laughing, “So you called me not to talk?” In the background I could hear Shayna and Lyle and a bunch of other voices. It was Christmas Eve.
I said, “I just really wish we could…”
I don’t even know what I wanted to say. I mean I wanted to say, “I wish we could be alone,” or something. “I wish we could be together.” Like that time you were half-asleep and rolled with your shoulder in my larynx and said, “Can you breathe?” And I couldn’t really but didn’t need to either, because air seemed unnecessary with all that happiness in my chest.
I couldn’t say any of this to you. Yet you somehow understood it anyway. “I know,” you said. “I wish we could too.”
Sincerely,
AK
Friday, December 25
Dear Kurl,
A confession, Kurl: I am utterly weary of Christmas, and it’s only the second night of our four-night stay up in Moorhead. I’ve often wondered how a person can have so little in common with his extended family. Perhaps it’s because they’re not actually related to us, except for my maternal grandmother, Gloria, whose house we stay at every year. Every year, we three Hopkirks and Gloria are joined by the Hanssen family. Tony Hanssen is Gloria’s stepson from her second marriage. He’s one of those red-faced, round-stomached men who wear watches that were supposedly designed for Navy SEALs or NASA engineers but are only ever worn by men like Tony Hanssen. His wife, Andrea, is so yogacized and blow-dried and made-up that she looks her age only close up, or under the halogen lights in the kitchen. Their kids, Calder (twelve) and Jonah (ten), went to Montessori and Waldorf and Junior Juilliard and puppetry camp and all the other programs that make children impossible to talk to.
I never feel I have anything to contribute to all these people’s endless small talk—Tony Hanssen collects model boats, Andrea hates her boss, Gloria wants to remodel the kitchen—so I sit there silently, awkwardly, while Shayna and the Hanssen boys stare at their phones. This year I also find myself thinking about you, Kurl, missing you: your broad scratchy palms. That heat coming off your skin. And then one of the adults will direct a question my way and I’ll miss it entirely and snap to attention, embarrassed. It’s exhausting.
Tonight I’m feeling homesick and forlorn, lying here on my inflatable cot across from Shayna’s pullout sofa in the study. My sister just fell asleep holding a family photo of the Hanssens that includes Lyle and Shayna and a very pregnant Raphael.
“Everyone always says she looks like me, but she doesn’t,” Shayna commented, when she pulled it off the desk.
Gloria had said it, too, when we first came through the door. She’d grabbed Shayna’s shoulders, stared hard into her face, and teared up. “Oh my good Lord, it’s like seeing a ghost,” she cried. “Spitting image. Spitting image. Darling, you are the spitting image of your mama.”
Shayna passed the family photo over to me for my opinion, but I couldn’t tell one way or the other. My mother wears heavy bangs in the photo, and her face is round and soft with all the extra weight she’s packed on, carrying me. It looked to me as though a stranger off the street had stepped into our group right before the picture was snapped.
You sounded forlorn, too, Kurl, on the phone last night. It was nothing you said in particular, just something faraway in your voice, as if it were coming from a smaller body than yours. I wanted to call you back right after we said goodbye, but I didn’t know who would pick up. I wish I had the money to buy you a phone for Christmas—to buy us both phones with only each other’s numbers on them. But I suppose there is already enough you have to hide.
Yours,
Jo
Sunday, December 27
Dear Little Jo,
Another letter you won’t receive till you’re back in town. It almost seems like there’s no point to writing except that what else am I supposed to do when I get torn awake from a nightmare? I have this one repeating nightmare of a fire burning down a barn, and I have to rescue a horse from it. This horse won’t come out of his stall. He just stands there looking at me while my lungs fill up with heat and smoke, and the look in his eye is what finally wakes me up because it’s so awful. That look says, This is your fault.
Sylvan told me that once Mark jumped out of his car right in the middle of traffic on South Eighth Street. He yelled at Sylvan to take the wheel, and then he limped right through all the cars, right across to the sidewalk. He still used his cane back then, but he didn’t wait long enough to grab it from the back seat. It took Sylvan a few minutes in the middle of all those honking cars to pull over and pass the cane to Mark through the passenger window. Then Mark puked in a flower box in front of the Gap. Sylvan said he wouldn’t get back in the car. Couldn’t.
Why do I dream about this horse? I mean I’m pretty sure I’ve never even seen a horse up close like that, in real life. I’ve never even been inside a barn.
Most veterans can’t afford cars, Sylvan says, but even if they have them they don’t drive them. In traffic is where people in Afghanistan got killed. A traffic jam meant a roadblock, meant suicide bombers or grenades dropped from the rooftops. Honking cars meant here it comes.
Sincerely,
AK
Monday, December 28
Dear Kurl,
Back home at last, and I found both your letters waiting for me in our mailbox. Thank you, Kurl! It’s by far the best Christmas present I’ve received this year. Your letters are heavy in content, I know, but it’s such a joy and relief to hear your “voice” that I felt lighter reading them. I’d like to deliver this reply, and my previous letter, to your house, but I worry about possible interception. Did you receive that one letter I posted in the mail, the one about your brother Mark? I hope it found its way safely into your hands, though I don’t think it contained anything too incriminating, if your Uncle Viktor did happen to read it.
At 3 a.m. this morning in Moorhead, Shayna shook me awake. She’d switched on the halogen lights in the study, and once my eyes adjusted to the glare I saw that she had spread photographs all over the rug between my cot and her sofa bed. “Get up,” Shayna ordered. “Come look.”
It was so cold in the room my nose was numb. Gloria likes to economize on heating at nighttime. My sister had swaddled herself in all her blankets. Rather than unzip my sleeping bag, I wormed to the edge of the cot and flopped over onto the floor.
“Watch it!” Shayna hissed. “You’re messing them up.”
“Where did you find all these?” I said.
“In this thing”—she toed a floral-print file folder—“underneath all that crap in Gloria’s basement.”
“You snooped in Gloria’s basement?”
“Look, will you?” Shayna said. “They’re all of Mom.”
She was right. Raphael with eight candles on her birthday cake. Raphael missing her front teeth. Raphael in a church choir.
“She looks like me,” I said, surprised. I’d always thought I took after Lyle. “Like pictures of me as a little kid.”
Raphael crouching on the grass with her arms wrapped around the neck of a German shepherd. Raphael in a soccer uniform, one foot proudly poised on the ball. Raphael in a turquoise satin prom dress.
“Well, she looks like you more,” I amended. Teenaged Raphael had Shayna’s light brown hair, her pointed nose, her arched brows. Raphael and a friend wearing matching acid-washed jeans, jean jackets, and little bright-colored vinyl purses with long straps. Raphael and two friends posing like models on the steps of a museum or library.
There were so many pictures. Raphael sitting behind a boy on a motorcycle, lifting her
helmet high in the air. Raphael on the sofa beside another boy, holding a bottle of beer. Raphael wearing dark eyeliner, her hair dyed black like in the picture at Rosa’s Room. After a while I found myself scanning the array for images from the less distant past. “Is Lyle in any of these?” I asked.
“Lyle?” Shayna exploded. “Who cares about Lyle? This is Mom’s whole life, right here, and we’ve never seen any of it.”
“But they met really young, right?” I said. I picked up a photo of black-haired Raphael playing guitar and held it up for her to see. “She might have been singing with the Decent Fellows already by this point.”
Shayna lunged to grab a photo from the far side of the display, moving so violently that her blankets swept a half-dozen others under the sofa bed. “Do you remember this?” she asked me.
It was Raphael in a hospital bed with her leg in a cast, in traction. Her arm was wrapped around a small child curled beside her, asleep. “That’s you?” I guessed.
“It’s you. Remember? You would have been three or four. I think she slipped on some rocks or something when we were swimming. Maybe at a festival?”
I looked closer. The child’s face was wide and pale, the hair long and feathery. I didn’t recognize myself.
“Don’t you remember?”
I shook my head, and when I looked up Shayna was crying. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s like he just erased her.”
“Lyle?”
“Yes. Like, maybe you actually would remember some of this stuff, if he hadn’t gone and destroyed all the evidence of her existence.”
She wiped her face with her blanket and was quiet a minute as I looked at more of the photos. Then she said, “You know that place called the Ace? So it turns out that guy Axel, the owner, is pretty cool. He really liked me, that time Bron and I went to the open mic night. He says he might give me a gig.”
“Like Raphael, on that postcard,” I said.
Shayna nodded. “Mom played there a lot, apparently. Just her and her guitar. Axel says she used to pack the place.”
“Cool,” I said, to make her feel better. But I knew Lyle wouldn’t think it was cool, that my sister was frequenting the Ace. In fact, I strongly suspected that Lyle had never thought it was cool that Raphael played there, either, although I didn’t know why not. Maybe she’d had a falling-out with the Decent Fellows and went solo, and there’d been hard feelings.
I kept all this speculation to myself, though. Things are heated enough between Shayna and Lyle these days; I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire.
Yours,
Jo
Monday, January 4, 2016
Dear Little Jo,
Who would have thought in a million years I’d be so happy to be back at school? There you were at lunchtime wearing some kind of heavy goat herder’s turtleneck sweater under your Loaghtan tweed jacket. And those knitted gloves that only reach your knuckles.
“Oh, hi, Kurl,” you said.
Do not press Jo’s icy red fingertips between your hands and blow on them, I told myself. Do not put Jo’s fingers into your mouth. I mean Bron was standing right there.
It’s actually hard to think of things to write when you just invited me home with you after school. What are we going to write about, Jo, now that we can say everything to each other in person?
Sincerely,
AK
Wednesday, January 13
Dear Kurl,
We must have picked the coldest evening of the year to visit your Outer Sanctum. I could see the potential of the place under the skeletal trees and knee-deep snow, but this particular trip was all business. Bron and Shayna needed to see a train up close, as research for their Civics presentation on crude-oil transportation safety policies.
As she drove, Bron lectured us the whole way: The spill-cleanup contingency plans are laughable, she said. Even the so-called safety tankers are vulnerable to explosion in the event of derailment. They roll right through Minneapolis, these firebombs-in-waiting, 170 tanker cars at a go.
I kept sneaking looks at you in the back seat. At first I was looking for a way to take your hand, maybe by spreading my extra sweater and gloves between us on the seat, but there was about four feet of space between us in that monster vehicle, and in any case you were staring out the window into the dark, lost in thought.
I wondered if it was Bron’s talk of explosions silencing you—you have some expertise in that subject, I know—and then I started thinking how often it is that I see you not jump into a conversation even when you know something about the topic, how more often than not you get quieter, not more talkative, when the rest of us are discussing a subject you know all about. I thought about how I would never have any idea what you know—how much you know—unless I read it in your letters.
The whole thing took my breath away for a moment. How lucky I am that you write to me. How, even if you and I were able to talk together openly about any subject we wanted, anywhere and in front of anyone in the world, I would still want you to write to me as well, just so I could be sure I was getting the whole story.
Anyhow. We parked the car (Bron: “This is the sort of spot my parents always tell me not to park the Escalade.”) and you broke trail for us, flashlight swinging through the brush to find the path. The snow went directly down the cuffs of my boots, so I tried to step only where your footprints had broken the crust. I saw you half turn, notice my struggle, and shorten your stride for me. Then you started dragging your boots instead of stomping, making a kind of ski track for the rest of us to follow.
Bron and Shayna started bickering behind us. Bron said, “You didn’t read any of those articles I sent you, did you?” and Shayna said, “Did you bring us any green, Bron? A couple of beers?”
“I need you to take this project seriously,” Bron said. “I’m starting to get really sick of carrying you at school.”
We were at the tracks. The girls burst out into the open white stripe of snow, and you held me back under the trees. You took off your glove, dragged a hot finger to my cheek, pushed it between my lips. “You’re quiet,” you said.
I kept my eye on the girls and bit down until you pulled your finger back. “You’re quiet,” I said.
“C’mon. They’re fighting. They’re distracted.” You tried to kiss me.
I was distracted by the fight, too, though. “Excuse me for wanting a decent grade on this,” Bron was saying, and Shayna retorted, “It’s not just the grade, though, is it? It’s this whole other agenda with you. You want to write a story on this for the paper, for your portfolio.”
Port-FOH-lee-oh: Had you ever heard someone put so much sneer into a word?
I have to say I’m fully in agreement with Bron about my sister’s attitude these days. Shayna’s been on a steep downhill slide since school started again: going right back to bed after Lyle leaves for work, slumped in front of reruns when I get home from school, skipping all her SAT practices, sneaking out at night.
Bron had somehow consulted the train schedule and timed our trek around it. I see now why that long, straight run of track is such an important feature of your Outer Sanctum: We could hear the train coming, and see its headlight, for four or five long minutes before it was upon us.
Anticipation! Which my sister decided to amplify for the rest of us by plowing straight up the slope to stand on the tracks.
“Really?” Bron hollered. “You’re doing that? Give me a break, Shay.”
Immediately, you were up there on the tracks beside Shayna. I heard you murmuring to her, one hand raised to stop us from joining you.
“Congratulations. You’re in the fucking Breakfast Club, all right? You’re officially a teenager cliché.” Bron was stomping little circles, clutching her arms around herself, swiveling her head from the oncoming train to her friend and back. I said, “Shh,” and tried to take her arm, and she shoved me nearly off my feet.
Each of us reacts in our own way to danger, do
n’t we? Bron short-circuits straight from fright to anger. I focus on whoever is closest to me and try to divert them, draw their fire, pacify. And you. You stand directly in the path of the oncoming train, murmuring comfort.
It’s morning, and time for school now. I suppose you’ll have to tell me the rest of last night’s story. Or maybe you’ve already written it, and in that case I wonder which part you chose. Maybe I can guess: the very last part, the best part.
Yours,
Jo
Thursday, January 14
Dear Little Jo,
You write me up as such a hero with that train situation but I didn’t feel it to be dangerous exactly. I mean Shayna may be pretty unhappy these days but she isn’t suicidal. Also the way I got her to come down off the tracks is I used you. Told lies about you basically. I said you were scared to come down here with us because being hit by a train is your worst nightmare. You had only agreed to come along because you didn’t want to look like a coward. I said you were back there shitting your pants probably. So would Shayna mind please showing a little mercy for your sake?
She smiled finally, and pouted her lips and put her arms up around my neck. I carried her down the slope like some rescued princess. Until I stumbled and we both went face-first into a snowbank. It loosened things up though didn’t it? You’re welcome for that part, because that was heroic. Even Bron laughed.
And we still had just enough time for Bron to remember the magnet lights in her bag and hand them out. You’re supposed to stick these magnetic LED lights on your car bumper if you break down at the roadside so the tow truck can find you. Or I guess so nobody mows you down. Bron had read that people throw them at passing trains at night. I like Bron for that. I will read something and think about it, but Bron will read something and go do it.
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