The Way Out
originally published in the 2013 issue of The Alembic
[content warning: suicide, grief, and mentions of severe agoraphobia]
My brother Lee left me three things when he died: his car keys, his driver’s license, and his dog-eared copy of On the Road.
All of these things were presented as humbly as possible, sealed inside a crisp manila envelope with my name printed on the front in Lee’s steady penmanship. I don’t count the enclosed note as part of my three bequeathals, because Lee wrote notes all the time – preferring them, I think, to human interaction. Laeving aronund six, back later maybe love Lee, deposited on the kitchen counter shortly before the black Chevelle disappeared from the driveway. If mom wants dinner tell her theirs no money in the jar I used it for paint, back soon love Lee, slapped on top of the jar in question. Jesus, Claude I’m sorry but I don’t know how else to get thruogh this. Theres not really a way for me to explian it to you but just know that youre okay, it wasn’t you. Your a good kid and don’t blaime yourself okay. I swear its nothing you could have helped. I’ll miss you, I’m so sorry please forgive me love Lee, carefully creased and tucked into an unassuming brown envelope.
When people used to ask Lee what he wanted to do when he grew up, he’d say, matter-of-factly, “Create.” The walls of his bedroom were covered with giant, arching bridge designs and looming clock towers, skyscrapers with jutting angles and fluid curves, rising over his ancient red bedspread and the desk he rarely used. When the walls ran out, he filched thirty dollars from the jar in the kitchen, bought a gallon of Linen White, and retreated into his closet to cover the sheetrock with paint and ballpoint ink. When the closet walls became a spirograph of tightly overlapping sketches, he fashioned a scaffold from two ladders and Dad’s military cot, lay on his back atop the whole structure, and filled the ceiling with cathedrals and fortresses, Michelangelo-style.
Some days he wouldn’t come out of his room, and some nights he wouldn’t come home. Words were tricky with him – he had made an enemy of them early on, when they proved difficult to decipher – and it was tough to pull them out if he didn’t want to let them go. Occasionally, I would ask him to elaborate on a certain bridge or buttress, and then he would tell me, animatedly and in great detail, everything he knew about the topic, but other times, like when I confronted him about the way he kept taking money out of the jar when Dad’s checks arrived, a hundred dollars at a time, he’d refuse to say a word. I don’t think his antisocial manner was born out of any ill will toward us – I think it was simply his nature.
The only possible evidence I had that he was not completely unsociable, apart from his interactions with me, were those nights that he took the car out and did not return until much later, sometimes not until the next morning. I didn’t know where he spent that time, if he had a real destination or if he just needed to be somewhere other than home. Since he never mentioned any friends, I assumed that he kept largely to himself at school, like I did. Only after he died did I discover the inscription in his copy of On the Road: I hope you enjoy this as much as I did! It’s truly a book that can change your life. I think you’ll like it. Yours, Delia. By then, it was too late to ask him to fill in all those blank nights, and, as he had never mentioned a Delia, I had no way of finding out who she was. I had a hard time imagining that Lee – intense and quiet and deeply introverted – would have been able to forge a relationship with anyone. Of the two of us, I had always pictured myself as the one who was more likely to find a girlfriend and get married – though both of those seemed pretty improbable when I was fifteen.
People used to tell us that we looked alike, me and Lee. Same build, tall and skinny, and light brown hair, tufted at the front and lying flat in the back. Although there were three years between us, we were almost the same height around the time he died. Same narrow green eyes, though Lee squinted more. He needed glasses, he always said, but glasses were out of the question because they meant coaxing Mom out of the house. She was happiest when retreating into her mental world – a little, I thought, like the way Lee tuned us out in favor of his walls and paint and ballpoint pen, though Mom’s isolation always seemed more desperate than his. Before the divorce, Lee was the only one able to talk her out of her head, but by the time he died, she had become nearly irretrievable.
–––
Three things happened when Dad left: Mom refused to leave the house at all, Lee gave up dreaming about college, and I learned to drive.
Dad’s departure was abrupt, but not entirely unprecedented. There were more arguments in the weeks leading up to it, and one night that began with Dad dragging Mom out of the house to buy a color TV and ended with their returning halfway through a screaming match. Three afternoons later, we returned from school to find him standing in the kitchen, surrounded by suitcases, his hand in the ceramic jar by the door. I was thirteen then; Lee, sixteen.
“Well, boys,” he said, withdrawing an empty hand from the jar, “your mother and I are separating.”
“What happened?” Lee demanded. “What did you do?”
He looked at Lee long and hard, and to this day I can remember the coldness with which Lee stared back at him. Even then, they did not speak often; Dad thought architecture was a sissy career, and what few conversations they’d had about Lee’s future had ended with Lee locking himself in his room for days afterward, his sketches growing larger and more defiant.
“You can’t leave us,” Lee pressed when Dad failed to respond. “Someone has to be here for Claude, Dad, I’m not always going to be here –”
“Yes, you will,” Dad interrupted, with the finality of one who had grown weary with the circular motion of those around him. “You will end up just like your mother, shut up in your room, pretending to live in a world that isn’t really there. You want to know why I’m leaving your mother, Lee? Do you really want to know?”
For just the smallest moment, Lee hesitated. “Yes,” he said, but the word was tinged with apprehension.
“Because,” said Dad, “it is impossible to love someone like that.”
I expected Lee to register the same surprise that I did; I expected him to falter at such a statement that, though it had been obvious for several years, still seemed obscenely blunt when admitted aloud.
Instead, he shook his head slowly, almost as if marveling at our father’s inability to understand. “No,” he murmured, and then he raised his voice. “No, it’s not.”
And then, as calmly as if he were stating the date or the time of day, he said, “See you, Dad,” and retreated to his room, the click of the lock echoing down the hallway.
Dad sighed, and I glanced at him, taking in for the first time the tucks and creases in his face.
“What’s going to happen to us?” I asked him, running my hand over the handle of one of his suitcases. “How are we going to be able to buy stuff if Mom doesn’t work?”
“I’ll send checks. Enough for groceries and clothes and things like that.”
“Why can’t we come with you?” I asked, trying to find some solid ground in the conversation. Everything seemed suddenly very unstable, and the idea of living with only my mother as a guardian was even more unsettling.
He turned his gaze from mine, placing the lid back onto the jar. “I need to work some things out for myself right now,” he said, his voice taking on the warning tone he used whenever one of us overstepped our boundaries.
I stepped away from him, intimidated. “Where are you going to go?”
“Back to Michigan,” he said, and I nodded; this seemed a logical answer. He’d grown up in Michigan; our grandparents still lived there.
Lee said I should go, too. I could use the money Dad sent – two hundred dollars a month, easy enough to save up for a rail ticket. “You deserve that much,” Lee said. “There are good colleges in Michigan. It’ll be much better than here. It has to be.”
“What about you?” I’d asked. “You’ll come with me, right?”
He hesitated. “Maybe.”
“Where else would you go?”
Something darkened behind his eyes, and he shrugged. “Well, since I’m not good enough for college,” he said, his light tone betraying the disappointment in his words, “I might just . . . leave. Go find somewhere better.”
“What, like in that book?” Over the past few weeks, I’d seen Lee curled up in various chairs around the house, reading intently, his hardcover copy of On the Road held inches from his face. It was rare to catch him struggling through any book, much less a novel; all I’d ever seen him read were the heavy, illustrated tomes about architecture that he borrowed from the library.
“On the Road?” he asked, and I nodded. “Yeah. I guess. There’s nothing left for me here, and I’m so goddamn sick of being stuck in this town. You feel it too, don’t you?”
I did, but in a different way. I was biding my time here; I had a way out. I wanted to go to college; I was fascinated by current events, by NASA and the space race, which Dad used to love to talk about while he was still home. I had no way to pay for school, so I poured my hours into my homework: while Lee’s grades fell far short of his artistic prowess, my academics were my only marketable skill. And so, rather than dating girls or smoking marijuana like other boys my age, I worked toward a scholarship, humming along to the Doors and the Rolling Stones. I worked toward that idea of finding somewhere better, and Lee encouraged me.
He taught me to drive in the cemetery a few miles from our house, where the cops were least likely to catch us. “You might as well know how,” he told me, about a week after Dad left. “Mom isn’t going to get any better, and if I’m not home and there’s an emergency, you’re better off being able to do something about it.”
A little less than two years separated Dad’s departure and Lee’s death, and during that time, Mom’s refusal to leave the house evolved into a paranoia that barely allowed her to look out a window without suffering from a nervous breakdown. Antisocial behavior ran in her family, Dad had told us once, though he’d always seemed to think that her condition ran deeper than that. This worked to my advantage, and to Lee’s also: since she no longer worked, we had free reign of the Chevelle, and she’d never know if I took the car out instead of Lee. The disadvantages were fewer, but infinitely darker: I was the only fifteen-year-old I knew who had had to identify his own brother’s body.
I had yelled for her to come to the door that day, when I realized that it was a policeman who had rung the bell. I’d waited a long moment before opening the door, clutching to the hope that maybe she would remove herself from her head long enough to face this for me.
She didn’t come, and I opened the front door with dread rising in my chest.
“There’s been an accident,” said the policeman, but as soon as I found the envelope from Lee, propped inconspicuously on his pillow, I realized that the act had been unmistakably deliberate.
Before Lee died, as we watched our mother sink further into herself, I’d wondered if either of us would end up that way – so removed from reality that we were barely capable of emotion. I had seen flashes of her detachment in Lee every now and then, seen him fail to exhibit any emotion when faced with an upsetting event. When his draft notice arrived, several weeks before his death, I watched him pale as his gaze traveled over the letter in his trembling hands, but he did not react other than to finish reading, place the letter on the counter, and lock himself in his room.
The first time I read Lee’s enclosed note, I absorbed the words numbly, and beneath my confusion I felt a nagging worry that perhaps I was becoming the same way. If the only feeling I could ascribe to my brother’s death was overwhelmed, surely there was something wrong with me. But as I skimmed his letter for the fourth and fifth and sixth times, days and weeks after his funeral, I became aware of the resentment mounting inside me. After he had admonished Dad for leaving the family – after he had cited me as a reason to stay – I was utterly at a loss for understanding how he could do the same.
More than anything, I realized, I was angry with him, but the sadness took hold beneath that. I’d find myself struck by his absence while performing the most mundane of tasks: I would feel tears begin to roll down my face in the midst of my algebra homework; I’d dog-ear the page of a biography I was reading and suddenly feel an overwhelming grief weighing on my lungs. Once, rifling through the kitchen drawers in search of a pair of scissors, I found one of his notes, addressed to me. He had switched the order of the a and the u in my name, and the mistake, so classically Lee, knocked me to the floor, sobbing so violently against the cabinets that even my mother cracked the door of her room to see what had happened.
While my mourning manifested itself unpredictably, my mother’s did not manifest at all. She retained her cool composure, interacting with me even less than usual, leaving the master bedroom only to eat a couple of times a day. She did not attend Lee’s funeral, which my father paid for and I had nightmares about for weeks after it happened. Sleeping had become my primary hobby after Lee’s death, although my grief permeated all of my dreams. But no matter how much I slept, I was always just as tired when I woke up. I had no energy to expend on my homework, and my desire to leave home was overshadowed by my desire not to feel.
The time I didn’t spend sleeping, I spent in the black Chevelle. The car was the only place that still smelled like Lee – fresh paint, Ivory soap, and Right Guard deodorant – which I hadn’t noticed until he was gone. The interior also held a faint flowery odor that reminded me a little of the perfume my mother used to wear when she went out – maybe it was how the leather aged, I thought, or maybe Lee had been smoking marijuana all those nights he took the car out and didn’t come home until the small hours of the morning.
When I went driving alone, before he died, I preferred to coast through our rural town, savoring the illegal freedom of it, but once he was gone I tended to end up at the cemetery, whether I intended to or not. I liked to follow the path Lee had used to teach me to drive: go past the aging maple tree, hang a right before the white marble stone that said CORRELLAS at the top, straight until you get to the granite angel, remember to put your blinkers on, another right past the veteran’s headstone with all the flags, sharp left past the Hertzog family plot, U-turn in the worn grassy inlet near the groundskeeper’s shed, put her into park.
Usually I parked the car several rows away and crossed the grass to the smooth gray headstone marked Lee Christopher Hewitt, September 8, 1950 - May 29, 1969. Sometimes I brought On the Road, though I hadn’t read much of it. I liked having it with me more than I liked the story itself – Kerouac’s prose didn’t appeal to me, nor did his flightiness. But I struggled through, if sporadically: if Lee had been able to get through it, I certainly could.
I was sitting by his tombstone, eyes straining to read the text in the weak October sun, when I found the passage he had underlined: Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life. I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control.
In the margin beside these lines were the words, in Lee’s neat handwriting, Look under the back flap of the jacket.
A chill rushed through me, and I flipped the book over, peeling back the final flap of the dust jacket. A sheet of paper, folded into three, was taped to its inside, my name printed on it in spindly ballpoint letters.
I carefully separated the paper from the jacket, my stiff fingers trembling as I unfolded it and smoothed it across my knee. It was dated May 28th, 1969.
Dear Claude,
I wanted you to know what hapenned.
The spelling error was so familiar, so typical, that I almost laughed; at the same time, I felt my eyes warm and sting, felt my cheeks smart as the tears met the cold breeze.
I’m so sorry it had to go like this. I wanted to go somehwere else, I wanted to get out of here, but I had no way to get there, and their was nowhere to go.
See that quote in the book? Thats exactly how I feel right now. I have no control over anyhting. If I stay here any longer Ill end up just like mom, and if I go to Veitnam, I’ll die. Do you understand that? This way, I control what I become, and I can do it on my own terms. There’s nothing left for me here: mom is useless, dad is gone, Delia’s leaving for college, and youll be leaving soon too, and even if I went to Veitnam and came back there still wouldn’t be anything here for me. I’d rather do this now then have to live like mom does for the rest of my life.
Remeber the time you asked me why I kept taking money out of the jar and I wouldnt tell you. I put some in an acount at the bank for you for colege. I know youll get a scolarship anyway, but I couldnt leave without making sure you wouldnt end up like me, and going to school will keep you out of the war. Their should be about eight hundred dollars there. Theyll ask you for id at the bank but if you use my lisense youll be ok.
If you do one thing for me Claude please find somewhere good. Your smart enough to find a way out of this, you have everything you need. Get the hell out of here and find something good. I’m sorry I cant be there to do it with you. I’m so goddam sorry, Claude. Please forgive me.
Love,
Lee
I stayed there for a long time after I finished reading, tears streaming down my face. I had just begun to accept that I would never hear from Lee again, but I could hear his words on the page as clearly as if he had spoken them. I reread the last two paragraphs several times, taking stock of what I now had at my disposal: I could pay for at least one semester of college, if I couldn’t get a scholarship right away. I had a car to get me there, and I had a ticket out of the draft. I had everything I needed, Lee said: I had a way to get out.
I stood up, brushing the grass off my blue jeans and tucking the letter back into the book. It was growing darker out, and I had homework to finish.
© 2013 Hannah Lamarre
My brother Lee left me three things when he died: his car keys, his driver’s license, and his dog-eared copy of On the Road.
All of these things were presented as humbly as possible, sealed inside a crisp manila envelope with my name printed on the front in Lee’s steady penmanship. I don’t count the enclosed note as part of my three bequeathals, because Lee wrote notes all the time – preferring them, I think, to human interaction. Laeving aronund six, back later maybe love Lee, deposited on the kitchen counter shortly before the black Chevelle disappeared from the driveway. If mom wants dinner tell her theirs no money in the jar I used it for paint, back soon love Lee, slapped on top of the jar in question. Jesus, Claude I’m sorry but I don’t know how else to get thruogh this. Theres not really a way for me to explian it to you but just know that youre okay, it wasn’t you. Your a good kid and don’t blaime yourself okay. I swear its nothing you could have helped. I’ll miss you, I’m so sorry please forgive me love Lee, carefully creased and tucked into an unassuming brown envelope.
When people used to ask Lee what he wanted to do when he grew up, he’d say, matter-of-factly, “Create.” The walls of his bedroom were covered with giant, arching bridge designs and looming clock towers, skyscrapers with jutting angles and fluid curves, rising over his ancient red bedspread and the desk he rarely used. When the walls ran out, he filched thirty dollars from the jar in the kitchen, bought a gallon of Linen White, and retreated into his closet to cover the sheetrock with paint and ballpoint ink. When the closet walls became a spirograph of tightly overlapping sketches, he fashioned a scaffold from two ladders and Dad’s military cot, lay on his back atop the whole structure, and filled the ceiling with cathedrals and fortresses, Michelangelo-style.
Some days he wouldn’t come out of his room, and some nights he wouldn’t come home. Words were tricky with him – he had made an enemy of them early on, when they proved difficult to decipher – and it was tough to pull them out if he didn’t want to let them go. Occasionally, I would ask him to elaborate on a certain bridge or buttress, and then he would tell me, animatedly and in great detail, everything he knew about the topic, but other times, like when I confronted him about the way he kept taking money out of the jar when Dad’s checks arrived, a hundred dollars at a time, he’d refuse to say a word. I don’t think his antisocial manner was born out of any ill will toward us – I think it was simply his nature.
The only possible evidence I had that he was not completely unsociable, apart from his interactions with me, were those nights that he took the car out and did not return until much later, sometimes not until the next morning. I didn’t know where he spent that time, if he had a real destination or if he just needed to be somewhere other than home. Since he never mentioned any friends, I assumed that he kept largely to himself at school, like I did. Only after he died did I discover the inscription in his copy of On the Road: I hope you enjoy this as much as I did! It’s truly a book that can change your life. I think you’ll like it. Yours, Delia. By then, it was too late to ask him to fill in all those blank nights, and, as he had never mentioned a Delia, I had no way of finding out who she was. I had a hard time imagining that Lee – intense and quiet and deeply introverted – would have been able to forge a relationship with anyone. Of the two of us, I had always pictured myself as the one who was more likely to find a girlfriend and get married – though both of those seemed pretty improbable when I was fifteen.
People used to tell us that we looked alike, me and Lee. Same build, tall and skinny, and light brown hair, tufted at the front and lying flat in the back. Although there were three years between us, we were almost the same height around the time he died. Same narrow green eyes, though Lee squinted more. He needed glasses, he always said, but glasses were out of the question because they meant coaxing Mom out of the house. She was happiest when retreating into her mental world – a little, I thought, like the way Lee tuned us out in favor of his walls and paint and ballpoint pen, though Mom’s isolation always seemed more desperate than his. Before the divorce, Lee was the only one able to talk her out of her head, but by the time he died, she had become nearly irretrievable.
–––
Three things happened when Dad left: Mom refused to leave the house at all, Lee gave up dreaming about college, and I learned to drive.
Dad’s departure was abrupt, but not entirely unprecedented. There were more arguments in the weeks leading up to it, and one night that began with Dad dragging Mom out of the house to buy a color TV and ended with their returning halfway through a screaming match. Three afternoons later, we returned from school to find him standing in the kitchen, surrounded by suitcases, his hand in the ceramic jar by the door. I was thirteen then; Lee, sixteen.
“Well, boys,” he said, withdrawing an empty hand from the jar, “your mother and I are separating.”
“What happened?” Lee demanded. “What did you do?”
He looked at Lee long and hard, and to this day I can remember the coldness with which Lee stared back at him. Even then, they did not speak often; Dad thought architecture was a sissy career, and what few conversations they’d had about Lee’s future had ended with Lee locking himself in his room for days afterward, his sketches growing larger and more defiant.
“You can’t leave us,” Lee pressed when Dad failed to respond. “Someone has to be here for Claude, Dad, I’m not always going to be here –”
“Yes, you will,” Dad interrupted, with the finality of one who had grown weary with the circular motion of those around him. “You will end up just like your mother, shut up in your room, pretending to live in a world that isn’t really there. You want to know why I’m leaving your mother, Lee? Do you really want to know?”
For just the smallest moment, Lee hesitated. “Yes,” he said, but the word was tinged with apprehension.
“Because,” said Dad, “it is impossible to love someone like that.”
I expected Lee to register the same surprise that I did; I expected him to falter at such a statement that, though it had been obvious for several years, still seemed obscenely blunt when admitted aloud.
Instead, he shook his head slowly, almost as if marveling at our father’s inability to understand. “No,” he murmured, and then he raised his voice. “No, it’s not.”
And then, as calmly as if he were stating the date or the time of day, he said, “See you, Dad,” and retreated to his room, the click of the lock echoing down the hallway.
Dad sighed, and I glanced at him, taking in for the first time the tucks and creases in his face.
“What’s going to happen to us?” I asked him, running my hand over the handle of one of his suitcases. “How are we going to be able to buy stuff if Mom doesn’t work?”
“I’ll send checks. Enough for groceries and clothes and things like that.”
“Why can’t we come with you?” I asked, trying to find some solid ground in the conversation. Everything seemed suddenly very unstable, and the idea of living with only my mother as a guardian was even more unsettling.
He turned his gaze from mine, placing the lid back onto the jar. “I need to work some things out for myself right now,” he said, his voice taking on the warning tone he used whenever one of us overstepped our boundaries.
I stepped away from him, intimidated. “Where are you going to go?”
“Back to Michigan,” he said, and I nodded; this seemed a logical answer. He’d grown up in Michigan; our grandparents still lived there.
Lee said I should go, too. I could use the money Dad sent – two hundred dollars a month, easy enough to save up for a rail ticket. “You deserve that much,” Lee said. “There are good colleges in Michigan. It’ll be much better than here. It has to be.”
“What about you?” I’d asked. “You’ll come with me, right?”
He hesitated. “Maybe.”
“Where else would you go?”
Something darkened behind his eyes, and he shrugged. “Well, since I’m not good enough for college,” he said, his light tone betraying the disappointment in his words, “I might just . . . leave. Go find somewhere better.”
“What, like in that book?” Over the past few weeks, I’d seen Lee curled up in various chairs around the house, reading intently, his hardcover copy of On the Road held inches from his face. It was rare to catch him struggling through any book, much less a novel; all I’d ever seen him read were the heavy, illustrated tomes about architecture that he borrowed from the library.
“On the Road?” he asked, and I nodded. “Yeah. I guess. There’s nothing left for me here, and I’m so goddamn sick of being stuck in this town. You feel it too, don’t you?”
I did, but in a different way. I was biding my time here; I had a way out. I wanted to go to college; I was fascinated by current events, by NASA and the space race, which Dad used to love to talk about while he was still home. I had no way to pay for school, so I poured my hours into my homework: while Lee’s grades fell far short of his artistic prowess, my academics were my only marketable skill. And so, rather than dating girls or smoking marijuana like other boys my age, I worked toward a scholarship, humming along to the Doors and the Rolling Stones. I worked toward that idea of finding somewhere better, and Lee encouraged me.
He taught me to drive in the cemetery a few miles from our house, where the cops were least likely to catch us. “You might as well know how,” he told me, about a week after Dad left. “Mom isn’t going to get any better, and if I’m not home and there’s an emergency, you’re better off being able to do something about it.”
A little less than two years separated Dad’s departure and Lee’s death, and during that time, Mom’s refusal to leave the house evolved into a paranoia that barely allowed her to look out a window without suffering from a nervous breakdown. Antisocial behavior ran in her family, Dad had told us once, though he’d always seemed to think that her condition ran deeper than that. This worked to my advantage, and to Lee’s also: since she no longer worked, we had free reign of the Chevelle, and she’d never know if I took the car out instead of Lee. The disadvantages were fewer, but infinitely darker: I was the only fifteen-year-old I knew who had had to identify his own brother’s body.
I had yelled for her to come to the door that day, when I realized that it was a policeman who had rung the bell. I’d waited a long moment before opening the door, clutching to the hope that maybe she would remove herself from her head long enough to face this for me.
She didn’t come, and I opened the front door with dread rising in my chest.
“There’s been an accident,” said the policeman, but as soon as I found the envelope from Lee, propped inconspicuously on his pillow, I realized that the act had been unmistakably deliberate.
Before Lee died, as we watched our mother sink further into herself, I’d wondered if either of us would end up that way – so removed from reality that we were barely capable of emotion. I had seen flashes of her detachment in Lee every now and then, seen him fail to exhibit any emotion when faced with an upsetting event. When his draft notice arrived, several weeks before his death, I watched him pale as his gaze traveled over the letter in his trembling hands, but he did not react other than to finish reading, place the letter on the counter, and lock himself in his room.
The first time I read Lee’s enclosed note, I absorbed the words numbly, and beneath my confusion I felt a nagging worry that perhaps I was becoming the same way. If the only feeling I could ascribe to my brother’s death was overwhelmed, surely there was something wrong with me. But as I skimmed his letter for the fourth and fifth and sixth times, days and weeks after his funeral, I became aware of the resentment mounting inside me. After he had admonished Dad for leaving the family – after he had cited me as a reason to stay – I was utterly at a loss for understanding how he could do the same.
More than anything, I realized, I was angry with him, but the sadness took hold beneath that. I’d find myself struck by his absence while performing the most mundane of tasks: I would feel tears begin to roll down my face in the midst of my algebra homework; I’d dog-ear the page of a biography I was reading and suddenly feel an overwhelming grief weighing on my lungs. Once, rifling through the kitchen drawers in search of a pair of scissors, I found one of his notes, addressed to me. He had switched the order of the a and the u in my name, and the mistake, so classically Lee, knocked me to the floor, sobbing so violently against the cabinets that even my mother cracked the door of her room to see what had happened.
While my mourning manifested itself unpredictably, my mother’s did not manifest at all. She retained her cool composure, interacting with me even less than usual, leaving the master bedroom only to eat a couple of times a day. She did not attend Lee’s funeral, which my father paid for and I had nightmares about for weeks after it happened. Sleeping had become my primary hobby after Lee’s death, although my grief permeated all of my dreams. But no matter how much I slept, I was always just as tired when I woke up. I had no energy to expend on my homework, and my desire to leave home was overshadowed by my desire not to feel.
The time I didn’t spend sleeping, I spent in the black Chevelle. The car was the only place that still smelled like Lee – fresh paint, Ivory soap, and Right Guard deodorant – which I hadn’t noticed until he was gone. The interior also held a faint flowery odor that reminded me a little of the perfume my mother used to wear when she went out – maybe it was how the leather aged, I thought, or maybe Lee had been smoking marijuana all those nights he took the car out and didn’t come home until the small hours of the morning.
When I went driving alone, before he died, I preferred to coast through our rural town, savoring the illegal freedom of it, but once he was gone I tended to end up at the cemetery, whether I intended to or not. I liked to follow the path Lee had used to teach me to drive: go past the aging maple tree, hang a right before the white marble stone that said CORRELLAS at the top, straight until you get to the granite angel, remember to put your blinkers on, another right past the veteran’s headstone with all the flags, sharp left past the Hertzog family plot, U-turn in the worn grassy inlet near the groundskeeper’s shed, put her into park.
Usually I parked the car several rows away and crossed the grass to the smooth gray headstone marked Lee Christopher Hewitt, September 8, 1950 - May 29, 1969. Sometimes I brought On the Road, though I hadn’t read much of it. I liked having it with me more than I liked the story itself – Kerouac’s prose didn’t appeal to me, nor did his flightiness. But I struggled through, if sporadically: if Lee had been able to get through it, I certainly could.
I was sitting by his tombstone, eyes straining to read the text in the weak October sun, when I found the passage he had underlined: Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life. I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control.
In the margin beside these lines were the words, in Lee’s neat handwriting, Look under the back flap of the jacket.
A chill rushed through me, and I flipped the book over, peeling back the final flap of the dust jacket. A sheet of paper, folded into three, was taped to its inside, my name printed on it in spindly ballpoint letters.
I carefully separated the paper from the jacket, my stiff fingers trembling as I unfolded it and smoothed it across my knee. It was dated May 28th, 1969.
Dear Claude,
I wanted you to know what hapenned.
The spelling error was so familiar, so typical, that I almost laughed; at the same time, I felt my eyes warm and sting, felt my cheeks smart as the tears met the cold breeze.
I’m so sorry it had to go like this. I wanted to go somehwere else, I wanted to get out of here, but I had no way to get there, and their was nowhere to go.
See that quote in the book? Thats exactly how I feel right now. I have no control over anyhting. If I stay here any longer Ill end up just like mom, and if I go to Veitnam, I’ll die. Do you understand that? This way, I control what I become, and I can do it on my own terms. There’s nothing left for me here: mom is useless, dad is gone, Delia’s leaving for college, and youll be leaving soon too, and even if I went to Veitnam and came back there still wouldn’t be anything here for me. I’d rather do this now then have to live like mom does for the rest of my life.
Remeber the time you asked me why I kept taking money out of the jar and I wouldnt tell you. I put some in an acount at the bank for you for colege. I know youll get a scolarship anyway, but I couldnt leave without making sure you wouldnt end up like me, and going to school will keep you out of the war. Their should be about eight hundred dollars there. Theyll ask you for id at the bank but if you use my lisense youll be ok.
If you do one thing for me Claude please find somewhere good. Your smart enough to find a way out of this, you have everything you need. Get the hell out of here and find something good. I’m sorry I cant be there to do it with you. I’m so goddam sorry, Claude. Please forgive me.
Love,
Lee
I stayed there for a long time after I finished reading, tears streaming down my face. I had just begun to accept that I would never hear from Lee again, but I could hear his words on the page as clearly as if he had spoken them. I reread the last two paragraphs several times, taking stock of what I now had at my disposal: I could pay for at least one semester of college, if I couldn’t get a scholarship right away. I had a car to get me there, and I had a ticket out of the draft. I had everything I needed, Lee said: I had a way to get out.
I stood up, brushing the grass off my blue jeans and tucking the letter back into the book. It was growing darker out, and I had homework to finish.
© 2013 Hannah Lamarre