Regretting You(86)

“This . . .” I suck in a series of quick breaths, attempting to choke back tears. “This is the worst birthday. The worst. Can you . . .” I suck in more breaths. “Come over?”

“On my way.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE





MORGAN


I pull a few of Chris’s shirts out of the closet and remove the hangers from them. I drop them into a trash bag I’ll be donating to a church.

Lexie showed up half an hour ago. I debated on not letting Clara have her over, but I’d almost rather Lexie be here than for Clara to be alone right now. I was relieved to see her when I opened the front door earlier because I could hear Clara crying from my bedroom, and she refuses to speak to me. Or maybe I don’t want to speak to her.

I think it’s best if we just don’t speak until tomorrow.

Now that Lexie is here, Clara is no longer crying, which is good. And even though I can’t make out what they’re saying, I can hear them talking. At least I know she’s home and safe, even if she does hate me right now.

I pull two more of Chris’s shirts out of my closet.

Since the week after Chris died, I’ve slowly been getting rid of his stuff. I’ve been doing it a little at a time, hoping Clara doesn’t notice. I don’t want her to think I’m trying to rid this house of the memory of him. He’s her father, and erasing him isn’t my goal. But I am trying to rid my personal space of him. I threw his pillow away last week. I threw his toothbrush away this morning. And I just finished packing up the last of his dresser.

I expected, in all my digging around, that I would find something he was sloppy about. A hotel receipt, lipstick on a collar. Something that would show he was a little careless in his affair. Aside from the letters he kept locked away in his toolbox, I find nothing else. He hid it well. They both did.

I should probably take the letters out of my dresser and put them away before Clara accidentally runs across them.

I pull a box of his things down from the top closet shelf. After I got pregnant with Clara, Chris and I moved in together. We didn’t have much because we were just teenagers, but this box is one of the few things he brought with him. At the time, it held little mementos like photographs and awards he’d won. But over the years, I’ve been adding other stuff to it. I consider it our box now.

I sit on the bed and look through loose pictures of Clara from when she was a baby. Pictures of me and Chris. Pictures of the three of us and Jenny. I inspect every picture, assuming I’ll find some kind of hint of when it started. But every picture just paints a portrait of a happy couple.

I guess we really were for a while. I’m not sure where it went wrong for him, but I do wish he’d have chosen any girl in the world other than Jenny. That was the least he could have done.

Or maybe it was Jenny who chose him.

I pull an envelope out of the box. It’s full of pictures developed from a roll off one of our old cameras. Jenny isn’t in many of the pictures because she was the one who took most of them, but there’s a lot of me and Chris. Some include Jonah. I stare hard at the pictures of Jonah, trying to find one where he looks genuinely happy, but there isn’t one. He hardly ever smiled. Even now, it’s a rare thing. Not that he wasn’t happy. He seemed happy back then, but not like the rest of us. Jenny would light up around him, Chris would light up around me, but no one made Jonah light up. It’s as if he was stuck in a perpetual shadow, cast by something none of us were aware of.

I flip through the final three pictures, but something about what I see causes me to pause. I pull the three pictures out, taken in sequence, and study them. In the first picture, I’m in the middle, smiling at the camera. Chris is smiling down at me. Jonah is on the other side of me, looking at Chris with a desolate expression.

In the next picture, Chris is smiling at the camera. I’m looking up at Jonah, and Jonah is looking down at me, and I remember that moment. I remember that look.

In the third picture, Jonah is out of the frame. He had broken our stare and walked off.

I’ve tried not to think about that day or the ten minutes before that picture was taken, and I haven’t. Not in a long time. But the pictures force me to recall it in vivid detail.

We had been at Jonah’s house because he was the only one who had a pool. Jenny was on a towel laid out on the concrete, trying to get a tan near the shallow end of the pool. Chris had just gotten out of the water to go inside the house because he was hungry.

Jonah was holding on to a raft a few feet away from me, his body submerged in the water, his arms stretched out over the raft.

I couldn’t touch, and my legs were tired, so I swam over to him and grabbed onto the float. The raft was poorly inflated and probably a few summers old, so it wasn’t very reliable. Especially with both of us hanging on to it. I started slipping, so Jonah grabbed my arms, then slid his leg around the back of my knee to anchor me in place.

I don’t think either of us expected to be jolted by the contact, but I could tell he felt it too. I could tell because his eyes changed shape and darkened at the same moment I shuddered.

I’d been dating Chris for a while at that point, and in all the times he’d touched me while we dated, I had never felt that kind of current pass through me. The kind that not only left you breathless but left you fearing you’d die from lack of oxygen if you didn’t back away. I wanted to slip with Jonah under the water and use his mouth for air.