Dear Kurl,
I’ve promised myself this is my last letter to you, Kurl, because I’m keenly aware of the hypocrisy of me saying, Let go your hand from my shoulders and then tapping you on the shoulder with another letter.
Yesterday Lyle and I drove up to Moorhead to visit Shayna. I’m still finding it hard to know what to say to my father. In the car he played Tony Rice and I drowned it out with Prince turned up loud in my earbuds.
Life in Moorhead seems, surprisingly, to agree with my sister. She looked older than I remembered her, even though it’s only been three weeks. Her hair looked shinier—she’d dyed it a brown-black shade instead of blue-black—and she was wearing new clothes.
She wouldn’t come out of Gloria’s guest room to see Lyle, though. She let me in and then locked the door behind me. I sat next to her on the bed while Lyle conversed with her through the door for a few minutes—long paragraphs of apology and reconciliation from Lyle, eye rolls and monosyllabic responses from Shayna—until Gloria called to him that the coffee was ready, and he retreated to the kitchen.
Shayna said she and Gloria get along pretty well. “Gloria makes me go with her every day to this place called the Harbor where she volunteers. All these down-and-out people, basically. After school all these kids come to get free snacks. Mostly I just play guitar for them. There’re a couple guitars the kids like to mess around on. This one kid is actually getting pretty good.”
I showed her my picture of Raphael, the one Trudie had given me. Shayna didn’t look all that shocked or impressed, though. She told me that Gloria has some similar pictures. “She and Grandpa Hanssen went to LA a couple times to buy her dinner and stuff. Once they tried to check her into the hospital, but she jumped out of the car.”
I’d assumed Shayna must still be furious with Bron, since she hasn’t been answering any of Bron’s correspondence. I told her about the Prince memorial and tried to portray Bron as humbled and contrite about her role in the Axel/Lyle blowout.
But Shayna says it’s more that she needs to make a clean break. “Bron is separate from me,” she told me. “I barely knew that, I think. I need to have a life. Not the life he’d want for me—Lyle—but not Bron’s, either, you know?”
We didn’t talk about you, Kurl. About what happened between you and my sister. I suppose I hoped Shayna would bring it up—deliver a formal apology for her part in it, report on the deep psychological analysis she’d been performing on herself to figure out her motivations, reassure me that she never meant to hurt me, her beloved brother. But she behaved as if nothing had happened, and I found it was actually a relief not to have to talk about you, not to hear your name spoken aloud. And anyway I would have had to tell Shayna that all was forgiven. I would have had to admit to her that I no longer have any claim over you, nor did I, technically, even at the time of Bron’s party.
We said goodbye, my sister and me. We hugged in front of the guest-room door and then she unlocked it for me and swung it open, and we both froze where we stood. From the kitchen came Lyle’s sobbing, and his strangled words: “I can’t lose her. I just can’t. I don’t think I’d survive it.”
And Gloria’s reply, loud and clear: “Listen, you need to understand something. Shayna is nothing like her mother. Nothing. Something was damaged in Raphael, her whole life. Some deep-down damage.”
Gloria was weeping, too. We heard the sound of her blowing her nose. I started down the hall but Shayna held me back by the arm and put a finger over her lips.
“I blame myself,” Gloria said. “Rapha’s daddy… well, Lyle, you know he was not a good man. He wasn’t good to her. I blame myself.”
“Oh, no, come on,” Lyle said. “That’s not—”
Gloria plowed on: “Shayna, though. Shayna’s different. She’s… fine, Lyle. She’s whole. She’s fierce as all hell.”
Lyle gave a laugh-sob.
“She’s angry at you right now because she wants her mama, that’s all,” Gloria said. “But she is going to be fine. Trust me on this one.”
They were quiet a minute. I crept down the hall toward the kitchen while Shayna leaned in the guest-room doorway.
Lyle took a shuddering breath. “I loved her so much,” he said.
“I know you did,” Gloria said. “I did, too.”
Another quiet minute. Then: “I know you’re there, Jonathan,” Lyle called. “I can hear you sniffling.”
Behind me the guest-room door clicked shut.
More bitter than I can bear. I was remembering, just now, those suffering words from Walt. You burn and sting me. Is that how Raphael feels to Lyle and Gloria as well as to me? The lost Raphael, the ghost of Raphael? Or is it different for those who remember her, who knew her before she was a ghost?
Goodbye, Kurl,
Jo