Letter to Jenny, Page 2

on any of the Chicago field trips that we went on in the coming years. We went to the Museum of Science and Industry, the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum. Mrs. Levy, in a moment of forgetfulness, read your name aloud in the class roster as she checked attendance on the bus on the way back from Chicago. We dropped all fidgeting and became miniature adults with bowed heads and grieving minds. Our teacher stared off, sighing. The secretary needed to update those forms.

  One such field trip, in late middle school, I observed Matilda once again. I had moved to a different house on the other side of town, and our across-the-hall play sessions had ceased. Matilda had become alarmingly American overnight, and attempted to blend in further. I saw her smoking once, in the alley, with other kids. She wore the basics of middle school survival in 1999 - flared jeans, white t-shirt, hair back in a scrunchie. She seemed forever uncomfortable with herself; her arms crossed over her chest, shoulders slumped, face worried. She passed by me and I smelled some perfume. What happened to the dark, bubbling smell of her apartment, her family, her culture? Our eyes briefly met and we looked away with a twin sense of adolescent embarrassment. We were strangers now, despite our afternoons of dolls and blended English and Albanian chatter. Even the one thing that had bonded us was distant in our minds.

  I once asked Matilda about you. I asked her what it was like, losing you. She didn't understand the question fully, and answered my inquiry with basic facts. Matilda had still been in Albania when her family found out. She had been eight, almost nine. Her mother wailed, her grandmother wailed, a picture of you was promptly set on the main table surrounded by candles. To lose an adult relative is an ordeal but to lose a child of the family is catastrophic. In the chaos that ensued (Matilda's family decided to speed along their move to the United States. They dreamt of being able to attend the funeral but with Immigration it still took four months for all the paperwork to go through), no one remembered to inform Matilda. She saw the photo of her cousin, whom she hadn't seen in four years and could barely remembered, her mind registered the candles and the wailing and she concluded that, apparently, you were dead.

  She didn't know how though. She didn't know the details. She wasn't there when it happened. She didn't know, for instance, that it was raining so hard that traffic was stopped and the ambulance couldn't get through. She didn't know that a helicopter landed in the main inner section of Cudahy and lifted your tiny, tiny body into the air. She didn't know that you had just gone to Toys 'R' Us with your mother and aunt. You were looking at the new figure skater Barbie. I know. We talked about it at school that day. You were going to beg your mom to go see it. I wanted you to tell me all about it. I had only seen the commercials.

  Matilda didn't know that I was present in this scene. I was, Jenny. I was there, so close to you, but you didn't know it. I didn't know it either, at the time. I was waiting for Mary and her mom to pick me up, to take me to the YMCA. It was January 24th, 1999. They took too long to get to my house. I heard the car honk and bounded down the stairs, barely catching my curfew shouted at me, gym bag in hand, dreams of swimming around the warm pool at the 'Y'. I jumped in Mary's mom's car and we sang along to Alanis Morrisette. The traffic was so bad. Mary's mom gripped the steering wheel so hard. The rain was beating down. We were stuck in back of an ambulance. The sirens were on, and we turned the music up louder so we didn't have to hear. We couldn't go anywhere. I couldn't help you. I didn't know. I didn't know. We went to the pool. We swam and sang to more Alanis. We returned home to our beds, our hair smelling of chlorine. And in a hospital surgery room, at 1:10 in the morning on January 25, as our eyes twitched happily in their sockets during a REM cycle, they pronounced you dead.

  Matilda didn't know all this. She only knew her cousin had died in a car accident and they were moving to America.

  ------

  Matilda was a good friend. I tried to make her someone she wasn't in my mind. There is probably some sort of psychological word for this, who knows. I would often call her by the wrong name. I called her Jenny. I didn't always immediately correct myself. We grew apart after a year or so, and maybe that's okay. People change. Friendships change. We grow up. Well, most of us.

  I always wonder if we would have been friends. I remained friends with Ellie and Sandra. They still live next door to each other. Sandra went to college and got a real job! Ellie is going to art school. But college, jobs, adulthood.... what do they matter to you, Jenny? You are ten years old. There are no 'what ifs' for you. You will always be ten years old.

  The teachers, robed in sagging vests of Crayola Crayons and too many years of small town education, sat us down on the morning of January 25. We already knew. We knew by the look in their eyes that someday, maybe in our forties over the morning paper, or in the midst of a drinking game at twenty-two, or while our grandchildren played in the sandbox, someday we would remember this moment. One teacher, in the style of a Greek tragedy, stepped forward in lamentation and told us. Her broken voice informed us of an accident, of it being a classmate, and of it being you, Jenny. I remember the collective gasp. The most horrible noise. Children are not supposed to hear this. Children are not supposed to have to grasp each other's sobbing bodies and have their heart ripped out of their chest. Those stages of grief, whatever they are, should not happen to fourth-graders.

  But there we were, little adults in a world too big for us. I don't want to remember any more. I wrote a letter to your parents, Jenny. I don't know why. I suddenly needed to express my gratitude for inviting me over to your house on your birthday and also, P.S. (almost as an afterthought), I am sorry your daughter died. I never mailed it. I still have it.

  I went to your funeral. I didn't even know what to wear. I didn't know you were supposed to wear black. I guess most people don't think to inform their children what to wear to funerals. You hope it doesn't come up. I just wore my school clothes from that day. A pink turtleneck and leggings. It was 1996, you know.

  The funeral. it was like one of those scenes in a movie in which the camera is tilted slightly to the left, diagonally, so that you feel like you have to keep turning your head to stay upright. Your feet sway, and gravity laughs at you and disobeys the rules. The room was stretched too wide. So many black chairs. We walked in. A wail reached over the chairs and grabbed us with such force. It was your mother, Jenny. She had seen us, ran over, and grabbed us, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. I breathed in so sharply I can never get the smell of grief out of my nose. Your mother just kept hugging us and squeezing us. It seemed as though she considered the life in our young bodies to be unfair to the lack of life in her own daughter. She dragged us over to the front. She wanted us to say goodbye. To you, Jenny. because you were there, but not really. Your body was in this doll house colored casket, white and pink and frilly and disgusting. I was lifted up and almost thrown into the casket by someone. Your face. It wasn't fair. It's not fair. Your mother sobbing. You. Dead.

  At this point I passed out. I don't know why. I remember your face turning grey but it was just my vision. I was sitting in a chair, facing the front while the mourners filed by, and the mother of the deceased wailed on. Ellie was standing next to me, crying softly, then louder. Her mother came forward, concerned about us. Funerals are no place for children, she said, perhaps ironically. We were taken away. We laid in Ellie's bed all day, with her mother bringing us macaroni and cheese. We rarely talked about Jenny again. About you.

  I worried about you becoming the past tense. I want these memories to be alive as if they happened yesterday. That's the only way anyone ever survives. Stories.

  Sometimes I change the story. In another version, you moved away. On January 24, your family packed up their little compact car (it is still in pristine shape here, not crushed between a pickup and an SUV) and moved to Virginia. You had to jump right into the middle of fourth grade, but you did just fine. Everyone always loved you. Ellie, Sandra and I wrote you letters for a while. You answered them, once, twice, but in the end, as do all pen-pal friendship
s, the letters fizzle out. We would bring your name up in conversation sometimes. We would laugh at the way you flung mashed potatoes and that weird salisbury steak - in chunks - while diving under the table. You were only one that got caught, but you never tattled on us. Our hero. We would remember your crazy hair-dos and mid-90's clothing (hey, its the 2000's by now. We can laugh). We would attempt to do your accent. We would build you up in our minds, as this heroine of J.E. Jones Elementary school. You would never change. You would always be ten years old. Perfect. Maybe this is the right story. Maybe this version will trump all others. Maybe this is what I will tell people, when they inevitably bring up the question, "Hey, what ever happened to that Jenny girl?"