Dear Kurl,
The dilemma I’m struggling with is that when I don’t write to you, Kurl—when I fight the impulse to write and force myself to do other things instead, like read or watch TV or ride Nelly randomly around town—I start feeling increasingly ghostly and unreal, as though I’m only half awake and may or may not have been dreaming the whole day. For example, I have been spending quite a bit of time over these last two weeks not fully believing Lyle’s revelations about my mother. I keep wondering whether I misheard—I was on Percocet, after all—or experienced a series of auditory hallucinations. Or maybe he lied about it all, for reasons that are currently unfathomable but will become clear at some point in the near future.
So I keep asking him questions, even though I know it pains him to have to answer. “When did Mom get addicted to heroin?” I asked him, as he dressed for work this morning.
I watched him wince a little, and then square his shoulders in a conscious decision to be honest and face this head-on. “She broke her leg,” he said. “One summer, when you’d just turned three. We played at a festival, and she slipped on some rocks at the river.”
“Shayna remembers that,” I told him. “We found a photo at Gloria’s house of Raphael in traction.”
“Yeah, well, it was a bad break,” Lyle said. “They gave her a ton of painkillers after her surgery, and she was still in a lot of pain after the prescriptions ran out.”
“So it was Axel to the rescue?” I guessed.
Another wince. Another shoulder-squaring. “Not right away. She shopped around, took whatever pills she could get on the street. I didn’t have the whole picture, of course. But yes, that was the year she starting playing at the Ace, so it wasn’t long.”
Be real and be true. Remember I told you that that was Lyle’s motto? The truth is, I don’t think Lyle ever said those words, exactly. I think I may have invented them myself, and ascribed them retroactively to my father, deep in the fog of my Lyle-as-Hero fantasy. My beautiful, laughable fable of a life.
Yours truly,
Jo