IOFTEN THINK ABOUT MY LAST NIGHT OUTSIDE. How I’d struggled and stowed away for hours, changing trains three times, to make it as far east as I could. It was cooler by the shore. And from a distance the water twinkled spectacularly, a muddy bluegreen in the last gasp of twilight, and I hoped you were recovering in a hospital bed.
Then I heard the news. In the drugstore. It was channel 9, I think, and the anchorwoman was visibly shaken. She said you had been fatally shot in your dressing room. She said police had arrived at the theatre after a 911 call about a fire and found the slain actress. She said they’d rushed you to the hospital but it was too late. They were now questioning your friends, family, and boyfriend, John Strong, and if anyone else had any information about the crime they were asked to come forward.
I bolted from the store, running straight down to the beach, my sneakers crunching into the sand, packed hard from the previous days of rain. Heavy black clouds moved through creamy orange streaks of sky, air so damp it clammed my clothes. But I was sweating bullets: what a demented thing to say.
At the ocean’s lip, I dropped my backpack and walked into the waves splashing over on themselves in tiny whitecaps, paddling me at the waist. I thought about going deeper, setting myself out to sea, where I’d be reunited with Blair in the undersea world and maybe you’d be there, that look in your eyes, the one I’d first seen at my grandparents’ condo, it was there in those last few seconds, I swear. You had the look.
Cold suddenly in the black black water, I shivered. A couple of sea gulls fluttered nearby, one craning its neck sideways to jostle something on its back. It had a glowing pink glob caught in its feathers. Bubble gum. That stuff could take years to wash off. And it soiled with age. I imagined the old gull with a blacktop scar on its back. Anything good or sweet or brightly colored could eventually become damaging. I felt sadder than ever, out there waist-deep in the bay, and wished I had someone to talk to, but everyone was gone.
I slouched up out of the water and sat down on the beach. A jogger passed, the first person I’d seen in a while, and I watched him disintegrate into a black shadow as he ran down the beach and it looked like a fade-out, like dying, which slayed me all over. Wind bustling, I smoked a cigarette with my hands cupped, then emptied the contents of my backpack out on the sand. There was my bloody shirt, the copy of People, my half-destroyed, charcoaledged book. It smelled like a neglected campfire and felt lighter than ever. Flipping the frayed pages turned my stomach. You were everywhere—in sketches, cartoons, clips from magazines … I tore out a page and the wind lifted it up and carried it down the dark beach like the cloudy trail of an airplane, and I stood up and screamed into the rumbling bay, screamed, “Why? Why? WHY?!”
First I burned the magazine. Then the shirt. And, finally, the book, warming my hands over the flames as my life went up in smoke. Then I lay back and dozed for a while. When I awoke the clouds had edged out slightly, making way for a few intrepid stars, and I remembered I was still part of the world; in fact, I’d never felt so aligned with it—sand, water, and the great galaxy of emptiness above, I matched it molecule for molecule, as if my body were disassembling like people in the teleportation machine on Star Trek—and it made me think of a prayer I’d once heard on the radio out in Arizona: “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”
Understand, I had to believe something. Why not proclaim myself part of an infinite universe, where you might return someday in a supernova of love and forgiveness? I was a bit like your mother in that respect, demanding you be bigger than this world. To this day, she maintains you got where you needed to be. As much as I try to believe her—and it’s taken awhile—I can’t. My heart is as dusty black and empty as that last night sky.
I still love you, Brooke, and I always will. For that I won’t apologize. The rest I offer up to the lawyers, judges, shrinks, and reporters, to all of your fans who hate my guts, to your family and friends and boyfriend, John Strong, although I recently heard he’s married your sister and, I’m sorry, that makes me mad. Seems like they’d have more respect for your memory, but who am I to say? We’re all supposed to be healing. So maybe this’ll help. All I ask is that you clean up the punctuation a bit and please be kind.