I Love You, Michael Collins by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Author:Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

Sincerely yours,

Mamie

Friday, July 18, 1969

Dear Michael Collins,

Last night, after a TV dinner, I tucked myself into bed. It was a little lonely, yet somehow I managed.

Bess was home, but she was on the phone with Vinny all night, which is as good as no one being here. Without parents around to stress to her the importance of family dinners, she didn’t even bother to eat with me. I tried telling her to get off the phone in case one or both of our parents were trying to call, but she wouldn’t listen.

Once I was there in bed, alone in the dark except for Campbell, for the first time all day I had a chance to think and then all sorts of thoughts began flooding in.

When my dad left and after I’d been upset in the driveway, I’d called Eleanor, woken up Bess, went to see Buster, came home, and did the things I had to do around the house, like taking care of myself and feeding Campbell and watering the tomatoes in the garden. Maybe another person would’ve panicked more or for longer, seeing her dad’s taillights come on at the stop sign and then him pulling away. But what choice did I have? The grown-ups weren’t acting like grown-ups—if you ask me, they were both acting like crazy little kids—and someone had to make sure things went on happening like they’re supposed to around here.

Perhaps you understand what this is like, Michael Collins. Really, you of all people must know. An emergency happens—you have a fire on your F-86—what do you do? Do you start to panic? Break out into tears? No. Of course not. You react immediately. You start flipping the switches that need to be flipped, you follow proper procedure, you pull the cord on the parachute if you have to, you do whatever needs to be done, putting one foot in front of the other without taking time to actually think about the real emergency, because that’s the one thing you don’t have: time. So you go on autopilot because that is the only choice you have to survive. You understand that, right?

But then, once the immediate danger has passed, all the emotion comes.

And for me, lying there in bed, that’s when I began thinking: What if my dad is wrong? He seems to think he can patch things up quickly, like putting a Band-Aid on a skinned knee. But what if he can’t? And what if my mom isn’t just mad for now but mad forever—is it really possible that she will never come back?

That’s when a dreaded word entered my brain and that word is

Divorce.

Sure, I’ve heard of people getting divorced before. But those were always made-up characters like Michael and Claire on As the World Turns. Or celebrities, like last year, Frank Sinatra the singer got divorced from Mia Farrow the actress after just two years of marriage, which my parents said was no surprise, since their age difference was about the same as that between Delores Doyle’s parents.

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