Picture Us In The Light(68)
Art doesn’t change the ending. It doesn’t let you lose yourself that way—the opposite, really; it calls you from the darkness, into the glaring, unforgiving light. But at least—this is why it will always feel like a calling to me—it lets you not be so alone.
That’s what I can do here. I can give form and shape to what everyone’s feeling, a picture of her that feels as true as anything else has this past year. Maybe that’s the only way you heal.
Or maybe that isn’t quite true, either—you never quite heal. But at least you get to say you’re sorry.
I pull Regina aside at the latenight to give her my picture, all nerves. She doesn’t say anything for a long time. Finally I stick my hands in my pockets and say, “What do you think?”
Her eyes go wet. “Oh, Danny.”
I nudge at a rip in the carpet with my foot. “It’s all right?”
“Thank you,” she says. “I mean it. Thank you.” Regina’s not a hugger, but—impulsively—she hugs me. When she does, something lifts off my shoulders, the ground leveling underneath me. She lets go and wipes her eyes, and then I can see her gathering herself, plunging whatever was behind those tears and that hug back down inside. “I’ll go scan it. I’m almost done with the layout.”
We’d talked about all the different things we could include in the center spread, interviews or hotline numbers or a photo collage, but in the end Regina wanted something stark and simple, lots of white space. Before we send it off Francesca guards the door to make sure Mr. Renato doesn’t come in and we all gather around the computer to see how it came out. There’s an essay Regina wrote about the day she watched from across the academic court as they cleared out Sandra’s locker, shoving everything into a garbage bag that they knotted closed, and on the opposite page, the full page, is my drawing of her. We left my name off it, just in case, and it feels better that way, too, less like I was doing it for my own sake.
Our gamble is that the administration will let it go. (And maybe a part of Regina’s gamble, I think, is that they’ll feel shamed by the knowledge that they would’ve stopped us if they’d known about it. Or maybe she doesn’t care either way, maybe she wouldn’t mind getting in trouble for it.)
When we’re finished that night, all the lights off and all of us dispersed through the dark parking lot, Harry drives me home. We still have to look up how to get to my new place.
I’m exhausted. Usually getting the paper sent off to the printer in time is a rush, but it was more subdued this time, and my energy is sapped. Harry’s quiet as we drive down Bubb toward the freeway, and at first I think it’s just because he’s tired, too, but then when we turn onto Stevens Creek he says, “You know Regina knew, right?”
“She knew what?”
“Sandra talked about it sometimes.” He stops at the light before 85, and when we go under a streetlamp the shadows carve deep lines in his face. “She’d say things like she’d rather be dead or how it would be easier to just kill herself. Regina never thought she meant it.”
My organs all constrict. I don’t have to ask why Regina thought that. It seems obvious now, now that we’ve sat through all the assemblies and panicked every time anyone seemed especially down about something or bombed a final or had a bad breakup, but before that I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone say basically the same thing. I probably wouldn’t have taken it seriously, either.
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah. When she told me—it was a few days after—I had this feeling she was just never going to be okay again.”
“You still think that?”
“I don’t know.” The light turns green, and he eases the car onto the freeway. “I think Regina keeps thinking about—you remember that one woman who came to talk to us from Stanford psych or whatever? The lady who made everyone put the crisis hotlines in our phones? Honestly, partly I think she was full of shit because she doesn’t understand what Sandra’s family was like, but I think Regina keeps thinking how she said if you’re depressed enough to kill yourself it’s a treatable illness. So Sandra died of a treatable illness. And, I mean, how do you get past that, right? How do you not just lose yourself in all the ways it could’ve gone differently? I hope—” His voice cracks and he smiles a little, embarrassed. “I hope Regina gets what she’s looking for in this. You know?”
I do know. I say, “You think it’s a good idea?”
“No.” He taps the fingers on his left hand gently against the steering wheel. “But I still want her to have it.”
If they really love each other, if they’re right for each other and they flood all those empty spaces around one another with enough warmth and light to hold at bay all the worst trappings of the world, then if I care about them, that should be enough for me. I know that. And I hope I’d be a big enough person to let it lie.
But I just—I don’t see it. And I know you can see things as you decide, shift the objects in your world so the light falls on them the way you want it to, but there are different ways to love someone and I’m pretty sure Harry feels the same way toward Regina as I do.
We go by the Vallco exit, a few minutes later the exit for the Winchester Mystery House and Valley Fair. “Okay, seriously,” Harry says, his voice lighter in a way that seems not forced, exactly, but something maybe closer to determined. Harry believes in positivity. “How are we still not to your house? We’ve been driving like thirty years.”