Picture Us In The Light(95)
I make a deal with myself: in five minutes, I’ll say something. I won’t practice or overthink it like I always do. I’ll just start talking. The truth will come out.
But then five minutes go by—I watch them tick off on his dashboard—and I can’t do it. I make the same deal with myself for ten minutes, then fifteen, holding it there in front of me the whole time we’re talking. But I can’t do it. What if he never wants to see me again?
Around Redding I start to get jittery. It’s flatter out here, more fields and trees and open space than the Bay Area, and Mount Shasta has been expanding in the windshield a while now, massive and looming and covered in snow. We stop at an A&W, where a white man in a hat watches us openly and a white mom with her kids pretends not to, and get burgers and root beer floats. Harry doesn’t finish his.
“I’m too amped,” he says to me, clearing the table for us. “Your sister you didn’t even know was alive, and you’re going to see her—how are you even functional right now?”
It’s twelve-forty-five by the time we leave, and it’s supposed to be just three or four hours from here. We pass through an abandoned mining town, and soon the road drops down to two lanes. It’s not like Redding felt especially crowded, but without all its buildings and roads the land starts to feel naked, kind of, and barren—long fields of dying grass pockmarked with trees. Here the trees are tall and huge and old and leafless, their branches wizened and sort of gothic-looking. The cars come fewer and fewer between, and even though I know it’s not true, it feels like being in a place where no one’s ever been.
We pass through Montgomery Creek, which isn’t a town so much as a few old farmhouse-looking houses that overlook the highway and a speed limit that slows to fifty-five as you go through the fields. The fields give way to forest, and you feel small.
I lose a battle with myself and turn my phone on, wondering if it’s worse if my parents have been calling and calling or worse if they haven’t. Then there are seven new messages—I listen to each one, my mom crying by the last three—and that emphatically answers my question: it’s worse that they did.
I imagine staying home with them next year, dodging endless awkward reunions at Target and Ranch 99, making up stupid excuses when people ask why I’m still here. I imagine being forty and telling everyone how once upon a time I had an acceptance to the best art school in the nation. And I imagine losing Harry. He’d call sometimes, probably, but he’d feel guilty and embarrassed about how crappy my life was turning out—he’d do that loud talking where he tries to get you to laugh, where there’s no room in the conversation for any of your sadness to leak out, and he’d have his roommate and his fratty friends there and he’d be a reasonably short plane ride away from Regina and—
I have to stop. When I really let myself think about not being with him next year, about just fading out of his life, I can hardly breathe.
“I just wish they’d told me sooner,” I say abruptly. “I spent literally my whole life being lied to. They should’ve been honest with me. And then maybe—”
He waits for me to finish, and when I don’t he says, “And then maybe what?”
And then maybe I wouldn’t have spent my whole life pierced by a grief I couldn’t ever talk about; I wouldn’t have carried the guilt of having outlived her with me everywhere. And then maybe I would’ve been more careful at school. And then maybe I would’ve understood why they were so panicked about the principal and I wouldn’t have been as angry as I was, and then I would never have lost control driving. And then maybe it wouldn’t feel like this now, this massive debt I’ll never—because it’s still my fault, I still have to blame myself—be able to pay back.
They shouldn’t have lied to me. And if they’re waiting at home right now, worried, frantic each time they get my voicemail—then maybe it makes them they wish they would’ve just told me the truth, too. I don’t have it in me to spare them that.
But it doesn’t matter, I guess, whether they regret it or not. It’s all too late for that. I pull my seat belt tighter around myself. “Eh, it’s not important. I’m going to withdraw from RISD.”
“You’re—wait, what, what the hell? Why are you withdrawing? Because of your parents?”
“Yes and no. It’s because—” I hesitate. I thought I’d never tell anybody this. “It’s because we wouldn’t have gotten into the car accident if not for me. The accident was my fault.”
“How was it your fault?”
I tell him. It sounds even worse when I say it out loud.
“You definitely can’t withdraw,” he says.
That surprises me, actually—I kind of expected he’d say Yes, obviously, of course you don’t deserve to go, and also maybe and get the hell out of my car. “My parents are pretty fucked, Harry. And I made it so much worse. They had to give the police their car registration, and now they have no car, and my mom got hurt. I have to stay here.”
“Danny—you didn’t know.”
“Yeah, well, when you deliberately crash a car it doesn’t really matter what you know.”
“I mean—okay, yes, I’ll give you that. But what if—what if it really is your sister? If they have their daughter back, doesn’t that make up for literally anything?”