“A goodbye? She’s gone.”
“Not inside your heart. Or your head.”
I shook my head. “So, what do I do? Talk to the sky? Talk to the ground?”
“Write her a letter.”
“What?”
“Write her a letter. The act of writing. Think about it. Your heart and mind work together to create words. And you’re getting it out. You’re writing it out. And it’ll be there. Meaning you can look at it, if you want. You could throw the letter out. Burn the letter. Keep it tucked away. Maybe even sleep with it, so the next time you have that dream, you can give her the letter before she exits the plane.”
“Exits the plane?” I asked, almost growling. “She jumps. She fucking jumps.”
“Okay. Give her the letter before she jumps.”
“A letter. That’s the plan then? I write her a letter. I say goodbye. I let her go for good.”
“Well, you said it yourself, Josh… she’s already gone.”
That angered me.
Only I was allowed to say that she was gone.
And only I was going to make the final decision on what to do next.
Being gone and saying goodbye were two very different things.
A Gathering
A LONG WHILE AGO
(Amelia)
Fly, baby, fly… just spread those wings and fly. Never be afraid of the fall because you can fly. You can soar high above the clouds, all the way to the stars. You can see the stars during the day. Yes, you can. You just have to fly high enough. And you can fly high enough.
She always left those type of notes under my pillow. Kind of like the way the Tooth Fairy would sneak a dollar there for every tooth I lost. My plan had been to save up enough money to buy my own house, but I realized I was running out of teeth and houses were way too expensive.
I tried to draw pictures to sell, but the only person who bought one was Mom.
So I wrote stories, like she did.
Her stories were better.
Mine were always about animals that could talk.
Mom laughed.
Nobody ever wanted to buy my stories.
So, I was stuck with twelve dollars and no chance of buying a house.
And Mom was upset, as always.
Even when she took her magical pills, as she called them, she was still upset. Nothing seemed to help her anymore. Not even my latest story. Which was about a pig that wanted to live with ducks because it wanted to learn how to fly. But first, the pig had to learn how to swim. And when a group of mean geese tried to pick on the ducks, the pig defended the ducks.
There was more to the story, but whatever, it wasn’t that good at all.
I sat on the floor in front of my bed with Mom’s newest note in my hand.
Fly, baby, fly…
I looked to the window and shook my head.
Jumping out of my window would be stupid. And dangerous.
I couldn’t fly. I wasn’t some character in a story. I couldn’t fly above the clouds. Or see the stars in the daytime. Or any of that other crap Mom wrote about.
But what I could do was keep writing. And get really good at it. So I could make money at it. Then buy my own house. Then I could do whatever I wanted to and be happy.
I heard the shattering of glass and looked to my right.
Mr. Monkey sat there, lifeless as he was designed to be. Two years ago, I heard him talk and saw him move. But now I was older, wiser and stuffed animals didn’t move. Or talk. Ever. Even when Mom said to use my imagination, it didn’t matter.
“Well, looks like another crazy night,” I whispered to the stuffed animal.
Across from me was Mary. She was once a white unicorn that was now dirty from time and me carrying her around for so long. That was before I realized unicorns were kind of babyish. Or maybe because Sarah at school called me a diaper wearing freak-head and told me to put the unicorn’s horn up my butt. Everyone laughed. I blushed. And that night I had to let Mary know she was going to stay home from then on.
We both cried.
Well, at least I did.
Mary didn’t cry. She was a stuffed unicorn, remember?
Mary was in between Jeffrey, a black and white penguin, and Steven, a leatherback turtle that I got from an aquarium. That was the last true family trip I could remember. In all reality, I should have thrown Steven out because the memory attached to him was one that made me want to cry, but he had huge, marble-like eyes that forever stared at me.
Plus, Steven was the one I held tight the one night when things went way too far. The night Mom fell down the steps. The night my father left for a week. He came back when he was out of money, in tears, saying that what happened on the steps would never happen again. I figured that meant he was going to fix them so Mom wouldn’t fall again, but they were never fixed.
And come to think of it, I never remembered her falling down the steps at all.
What I did remember…
I shivered and looked at Steven.
“Can you talk, dammit?” I growled.
The stuffed turtle stared at me.
I missed being younger. I missed everything from before the age of six. That’s when life really was worth living.
Now…
I looked at the door and heard the noise.
More glass shattering.
More pounding.
The yelling was just background noise at that point.
I reached up to my bed and found my favorite notebook.
I had been working on a new story. One that was going to change everything. The story that wasn’t about talking animals. Well, that was a lie. There were talking animals in my story, but the main character was a woman. A strong woman. Who drank a lot of coffee. Who smiled a lot. Who wasn’t afraid to fight back and
