Picture Us In The Light(102)

We make it to McArthur, eighty or ninety minutes, without talking. I’m too drained to worry about what that might mean. In the soft early night the rocks and scrub brush rise against us, hemming us to the road. Harry, who’s been still and subdued, finally clears his throat.

“Well,” he says, “at least you know, right?”

“I mean, whatever.” So I know. But comparing how I feel right now to how I did just hours ago—I should’ve just let myself stay in limbo forever. It hurt a lot less.

“Maybe someday she’ll change her—”

“She’s not going to.” If she felt nothing when I was there with her, if all the years I mourned her meant nothing to her, it’s never going to be any different. I feel tears pricking at my eyes, and I reach up and swipe at them roughly. “You don’t have to try to make it seem better. It sucks. End of story.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know. I’m just—I really wanted it to go differently.”

“I know you did.”

He shifts in his seat and looks around like he’s afraid someone might overhear us. I know him well enough to guess what that means. I wish he’d just say nothing, though—I don’t need a panicky, awkward speech where he tries to let me down gently.

“Listen,” he says. He stares straight ahead at the road as it climbs an incline. “You’re really important to me. I don’t want you to think—damn it.” He works his jaw and thuds his fist gently against the dashboard. “We’re always going to be friends, right? We’ll always—”

“You can stop.”

Out of the corner of my eye I see him flinch. “I don’t mean it like that. I swear.”

“What do you mean it like, then?”

“I mean it like—I can’t imagine what it’ll be like next year without you. And I wish—”

He stops. I say, “You wish what?”

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Wishes don’t count.” He lets his foot off the gas abruptly. When I glance at the speedometer it shows nearly ninety. He lets the needle drift back down to seventy. “You don’t hate me, right? We’re good?”

I turn my head away. “You know how I feel about you.”

The road flattens, returning us to the hold of the earth again. There’ve been more cars the past ten or twenty miles, brake lights gleaming red like dragon eyes. I have never been so tired in my life.

“Can I ask you something?” he says.

Who cares anymore. “Yep.”

“How long have you—how long?”

I think about lying, but there’s no point. “Always.”

He bites at his lip. “Really?”

I shrug. What else is there to say? Maybe someday I’ll look back on this night, too, as something I wish I could have back. Maybe someday I’ll dissect it a million times and trick myself into thinking if I just said something differently it could’ve changed everything. But the truth is that Harry knows me. There’s nothing I haven’t told him or shown him, and there’s nothing else I have left to offer him. That was the rest of it.

I’m exhausted. I lean my head against the cool glass of the window and watch the night pass by.



My parents throw the door open before I even take out my key. They must have been spying from the peephole. I come in and then they both hover over me, not touching. I can feel their waiting pulsing in the room. My mom says, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I—”

“We were so worried. We didn’t know if you’d—”

Her voice breaks, and she puts her hands over her mouth. My dad drapes his arm around her shoulder. It’s nearly three in the morning, and from the way they’re both watching me I know that the whole time I was gone they were waiting for news, that likely neither of them slept or ate.

And I understand something else then, too, for the first time, something cocooned inside this mini welcome-home brigade of theirs: why both my parents treated me the way they did after the crash. I should’ve recognized sooner how intimately they understand guilt and how it’s shaped them and shaped me, too, both the choices they’ve had to make and the stories they tell themselves. I’ve lived my whole life inside their guilt.

“I didn’t mean to make you worry. I was all right. I just needed to see her. And I thought if I went to talk to her there—I thought it would change things.”

My mom takes my face in her hands. “Daniel—”

“Wait. I also wanted to say how sorry I am about the crash. Um—” I can’t look at either of them. “I know everything’s so much worse because of that and because of me and I would do anything to take it back. And I know it’s too late to change anything, but I think you made the wrong choice when you chose me over her. Over my sister, I mean.”

“Daniel, you can’t think of it that way,” my dad says. He looks pained. “We never have.”

Haven’t they ever, in the dark moments they wouldn’t tell someone else about? But if they have, I know, they’ll take that to their graves. I say, “But—”

“No,” my dad says firmly. “No. We are so lucky to have you. We’ve always felt that way.”