was another letter, a shorter one, more bitter. She was never going to get stuck on that merry-go-round,
she told me. It was a fix job. The only way you could catch the brass ring was to tumble off the horse
and crack your skull. If that was what the price of a free ride was, who wanted it? PS, Can you come,
Larry? It’s been a while.
I wrote back and told her I’d love to come, but I couldn’t. I had landed a job in a high-pressure firm,
low guy on the totem pole, all the work and none of the credit. If I was going to make it up to the next
step, it would have to be that year. That was my long letter, and it was all about my career.
I answered all of her letters. But I could never really believe that it was really Kitty who was writing
them, you know, no more than I could really believe that the hay was really there . . . until it broke my
fall at the bottom of the drop and saved my life. I couldn’t believe that my sister and the beaten woman
who signed ‘Kitty’ in a circle at the bottom of her letters were really the same person. My sister was a
girl with pigtails, still without breasts.
She was the one who stopped writing. I’d get Christmas cards, birthday cards, and my wife would
reciprocate. Then we got divorced and I moved and just forgot. The next Christmas and the birthday
after, the cards came through the forwarding address. The first one. And I kept thinking:
Gee, I’ve got to write Kitty and tell her that I’ve moved. But I never did.
But as I’ve told you, those are facts that don’t mean anything. The only things that matter are that we
grew up and she swanned from that insurance building, and that Kitty was the one who always believed
the hay would be there. Kitty was the one who had said, ‘I knew you must be doing something to fix it.’
Those things matter. And Kitty’s letter.
People move around so much now, and it’s funny how those crossed-off addresses and change-of-
address stickers can look like accusations. She’s printed her return address in the upper left corner of
the envelope, the place she’d been staying at until she jumped. A very nice apartment building on Van
Nuys. Dad and I went there to pick up her things. The landlady was nice. She had liked Kitty.
The letter was postmarked two weeks before she died. It would have got to me a long time before, if
not for the forwarding addresses. She must have got tired of waiting.
Dear Larry
I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. . . and what I’ve decided is that it would have been better for me
if that last rung had broken before you could put the hay down.
Your,
Kitty
Yes, I guess she must have gotten tired of waiting. I’d rather believe that than think of her deciding I
must have forgotten. I wouldn’t want her to think that, because that one sentence was maybe the only
thing that would have brought me on the run.
But not even that is the reason sleep comes so hard now. When I close my eyes and start to drift off, I
see her coming down from the third loft, her eyes wide and dark blue, her body arched, her arms swept
up behind her.
She was the one who always knew the hay would be there.