Regretting You(24)

Jonah nods in understanding, then asks his mother to pick up Clara from school. He then calls the school and hands me his phone. I let them know his mom will be picking her up.

Clara has met Jonah’s mother a couple of times, but she’s going to be confused, and Jonah’s mother isn’t anyone on the pickup list for Clara. I just don’t want Clara driving up here alone. She’ll be full of worry and panic, and she hasn’t had her license all that long.

A few more minutes pass. Jonah spends it calling the police station, trying to get information about the wreck. They won’t tell him much. He asks what the model of the vehicle is that was involved. It was Jenny’s car. A Toyota Highlander. A male was driving. But that’s all they’ll tell him.

“Why was Chris driving her car?” Jonah asks. I treat it as a rhetorical question, but he mutters another. “Why did she lie about working today?”

I keep watching my phone as if Jenny or Chris is going to call me and tell me they’re fine.

“Morgan,” Jonah says.

I don’t look at him.

“Do you think . . . are they having an—”

“Don’t say it,” I spit out.

I don’t want to hear it. Or think it. It’s absurd. It’s incomprehensible.

I stand up and start to pace the portion of the room Jonah hasn’t paced yet. I’ve never been so irritated by sounds before. The beeping coming from the hallway, the tapping of Jonah’s fingers against his phone screen as he shoots off texts to Jenny’s and Chris’s phones, the paging system overhead calling doctors and nurses from one place to another, the squeaking of my shoes against the hardwood floor of this room. I’m so incredibly annoyed by every single thing, but the cacophony of sounds is the only thing I want in my head right now. I don’t want to think about why Chris and Jenny were together.

“Clara will be here soon. And my mother,” Jonah says. “We need to come up with a reason why Chris and Jenny were together.”

“Why lie to them? I’m sure it was a work-related thing.”

Jonah is staring at the floor, but I can see that his expression is full of doubt. Concern. Fear.

I swipe tears away, and I nod, because he could be right. I choose to believe he’s wrong, but his mother and Clara might begin to ask us questions. They’ll want specifics, or they’ll start having the same thoughts Jonah and I are having. We can’t tell them we don’t know why they were together. It could cause unnecessary suspicion in Clara.

“We can tell them Chris had a flat and Jenny gave him a ride to work,” I suggest. “At least until Jenny and Chris can explain it themselves.”

We make eye contact . . . something we’ve barely done since he walked into the emergency room. Jonah nods while pressing his lips together, and something about the look in his eyes breaks me.

As if Jonah can sense I’m beginning to crack . . . to fade . . . he walks over to me and pulls me in for a comforting hug. I’m clinging to him in fear, my eyes squeezed shut, when the door finally opens.

We separate. Jonah steps forward, but when I see the look on the doctor’s face, I step back.

He begins to speak, but I don’t know exactly what he says because his words mean nothing to me. I can see our answer in his apologetic eyes. In the way his lips turn down at the corners. In his remorseful stance.

When the doctor tells us there was nothing they could do, Jonah falls into a chair.

I just . . . fall.





CHAPTER SIX





CLARA


I used to collect snow globes when I was younger. They lined a shelf in my bedroom, and sometimes I would shake them up, one after the other, then sit on my bed and watch as the flurries and the glitter swirled around inside the glass.

Eventually, the contents inside the globe would begin to settle. All would grow still, and then the globes on my shelf would return to their quiet, peaceful states.

I liked them because they reminded me of life. How sometimes, it feels like someone is shaking the world around you, and things are flying at you from every direction, but if you wait long enough, everything will start to calm. I liked that feeling of knowing that the storm inside always eventually settles.

This week proved to me that sometimes the storm doesn’t settle. Sometimes the damage is too catastrophic to be repaired.

For the past five days since Jonah’s mother showed up at my school to take me to the hospital, it feels like I’ve been inside a snow globe that someone shook up, then dropped. I feel like the contents of my life have shattered, and fragments of me have spilled out all over someone’s dusty hardwood floor.

I feel irreparably broken.

And I can’t even blame what happened to them on anyone but myself.

It’s unfair how one event . . . one second . . . can shake the world around you. Toss everything on its head. Ruin every happy moment that led up to that earth-shattering second.

We’re all walking around like lava coats our throats. Painfully silent.

My mother keeps asking if I’m okay, but all I can do is nod. Other than those words, she’s been just as quiet as I have. It’s like we’re living in a nightmare—one where we don’t want to eat or drink or speak. A nightmare where all we want to do is scream, but nothing comes out of our hollow throats.

I’m not a crier. I guess I get that from my mother. We cried together at the hospital. So did Jonah and his mother. But as soon as we left the hospital and went to the funeral home, my mother became as poised and put together as people expect her to be. She’s good at putting on a brave face in public, but she saves the tears for her bedroom. I know because I do the same thing.