Picture Us In The Light(9)

When he pulls onto Regina’s street he looks in the rearview mirror like he’s making sure no one’s in the back seat listening and says, “Has Regina seemed kind of—off to you lately?”

“What do you mean off? You see her more than I do.”

“Yeah, but you guys talk. Maybe I’m just imagining it.”

I don’t think he’s imagining it. “We don’t talk that much lately.”

“Ah,” he says. “Did you know she stopped going to her church?”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. And, I mean—the one year’s coming up, so—”

I feel that same old catch in my heart. “Right.”

“On March seventh.”

“I know when it is.”

He glances at me in a way I can’t quite read. I feel the color rise in my cheeks. He says, “Regina wants to put something in the paper.”

“Yeah, no, they will definitely not let us put something in the paper.”

“You don’t think if—”

“No. Definitely not. Zero chance.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” He sighs. “Such bullshit. She really wants to. You know how she is.”

I do know how she is. Except maybe that isn’t true; I know how she used to be.

He gets out of the car to go knock, and they come back together. Regina looks put together as always, in bright lipstick, tight dark pants, a billowy white top, and a dark floppy hat that makes her look vaguely 1920s-ish. She has a model’s high, angular cheekbones and full lips—she’s striking, and I’ve always liked drawing her. (For her part, she dislikes being drawn. I think it makes her self-conscious.) She’s pretty in that way that makes people assume your life is going well.

I open the door to give her the front seat, but she waves me off. I smile hello, hold my breath a little. She slides into the back seat.

“Congratulations on RISD, Danny,” she says in a way I can’t call anything other than nice, but that also doesn’t exactly flood the car with warmth. “You’ve wanted this for so long.”

I say, “Thanks, Reg.” And I think how last year I would’ve told her right away about all those files I found, too.

Then, like she read my mind, she leans forward and touches my elbow. “I knew you’d get in.” And maybe that’s the most she has right now. Maybe I shouldn’t read into it.

“You think this’ll be the kind of talk where they have like donuts or anything?” Harry says. “Or you think we have time to stop somewhere?”

Regina rolls her eyes. “No and no. We can’t be late. Everyone probably hates me already for making them go to this.”

He grins at her in the rearview mirror. “Technically it’s not too late to cancel.”

“The talk sounds important, right?” Harry was teasing—he’s careful around her a lot these days—but Regina says it as if he wasn’t. “I just want to make sure we know we have the right to say what we want.”

“Pretty sure people are mostly still writing about, like, their buddies on the tennis team,” I say lightly. Harry glares at me. I must have gotten the tone wrong.

“Mostly, sure, but what about the times they’re not? It’s like that stupid story about starfish,” she says, adjusting her seat belt. “There’s hundreds stranded on the beach and you throw a few back because it makes a difference to those particular few.”

“Aw, you think that’s stupid?” Harry says. “I think it’s kind of nice.”

“It’s a parable of rampant apathy. Why is there only one guy out there rescuing millions of suffocating starfish? It’s a story about how horrible things happen because ninety-nine point nine percent of people can’t be bothered.”

“Not you,” Harry says cheerfully. He twists around and backs out of the driveway. “There is nothing too small for you to be bothered by.”

If I’m being honest, I still don’t totally get the two of them, and they’ve been together since sophomore year. I will concede that in a way it felt weirdly inevitable, a mash-up of ambition and popularity and attractiveness, a test-tube match, all roads leading to each other. Harry asked her to homecoming—a flash mob, a bouquet of peonies because that’s her favorite flower, a platter of chocolate-covered strawberries with letters that spelled YOU + ME?—and then after that they just kind of stayed together, swapped all their profile pictures to ones of the two of them, and in a way it felt weird that they’d ever been separate entities altogether.

But then I always wondered, always still wonder. All that time last year when they were ensconced together—what all happened between them? I can’t exactly imagine her breaking down in front of him, pouring her heart out to him, and from comments he makes sometimes I don’t think she ever really did. And, like—does he think of her first all the time? She’s who he imagines calling first when he gets his letter from Princeton, the audience he pictures when he’s collecting all the important and also the stupid insignificant parts of his day to give to someone? When he imagines disasters happening, cancer or nuclear fallout or the Big One we’re supposed to get in California, at night when it’s quiet and he feels all the weight of his own life pressing in on him, she’s the lurch in his stomach and the hand he gropes around for in the dark?