The Rules of Regret

by Megan Squires

  I dropped my eyes down to my lap and twisted my fingers. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I do, and I think it’s beautiful. And the irony is the most beautiful part, Darby.”

  I lifted my face up to him. “What irony?”

  “That you were this empty shell.” He didn’t look at me when he spoke, and I was grateful for it, because my cheeks were hot and red, coated with my emotion. “You were this empty shell that needed life breathed into it.” He switched lanes and caught my gaze on the way. “I’m honored I got to be the one to do that.”

  “Oh my word,” I gaped. “Seriously, who are you, Torin?”

  “Is that going to be your go-to every time I say something that blows your socks off?”

  I giggle-snorted again, because, I realized, that was the type of laugh that Torin elicited from me.

  “Because if it is, I'm going to have to get used to hearing you ask me that, since I plan to blow your socks off quite frequently.” He glanced down at my feet. “You might as well just wear flip flops from now on.”

  The signs on the freeway indicated our turnoff for the airport, and Torin guided the car the direction of the closest exit.

  Part of me worried that things would change once we got back to camp. I had no idea what the next couple of weeks would hold, but I was certain they would be different than our last twenty-four hours together. They couldn’t be the same—not with the strict limitations on boys and girls cabins and with our responsibilities to our campers. I wouldn’t see much of him, and I wondered what that would do to our newly created us. It was obvious what the distance did to Lance and me; I hoped that wouldn’t be the case when it came to Torin.

  “What do you say we get a one-way ticket outta here,” I blurted without reservation.

  “Are you quoting a movie? Or are you serious?”

  “I’m serious, Torin,” I said quickly, before I had the chance to come to my senses. “What if we just pick some random place and go there? Start a life. Start over. I know it sounds crazy,” because it was, “but I think we should do it.”

  His smiled. “You’re right, it is crazy. But I’ve told you, I kinda dig crazy.”

  “So let’s do it!” I straightened up in my seat and pressed a hand to the dashboard to brace myself under my illogical excitement. “Let’s do this, Torin. Let’s create our own adventure and just go wherever. Just start over.”

  “Are you asking me to run away with you?” I supposed I kind of was.

  “Yes,” I admitted playfully. “Torin, will you run away with me?”

  “I would, Darby,” Torin began, but I couldn’t help but feel the let down in his tone. “I would run away with you... if I was sure it was because you wanted to run away with me, and not from something.” A thick pause. “But I’m not sure, so that’s why I hesitate.”

  “I’m not running from anything. I’m running to something, and I want you to run with me.”

  I could see the airport parking lot up ahead, the car rental return sign telling us where to go. Our vehicle curved along the indicated path.

  “See, I don’t think we need to run anywhere. I’m happy walking. Hell, I’m happy sitting. I’m happy just being with you, Darby. Just like this. Driving ten hours together and ending up absolutely nowhere. I don’t mind being nowhere with you, Darby, because you make even my nowhere feel like somewhere.” He tossed a glance my direction and quirked up the corner of his mouth. “Go ahead, take your socks off.”

  “You really are too much, you know that?”

  “I actually think I’m just enough.”

  ***

  The plane taxied on the runway several minutes before the seatbelt sign shut off and a chorus of metallic clicks filled the cabin. Torin reached a hand across my lap to unhook my belt.

  “Was I successful in keeping you distracted?” I smirked, my lips still buzzing from our mildly inappropriate airplane make out session.

  “More than successful.” Torin pressed his mouth to mine once more. His lips felt warm and pliable like always. “And I think we distracted a few others, too.” He flicked a finger toward an elderly man two rows up who stared unabashedly at us, scorn held in his eyes. “I think we gave that guy a heart attack.”

  “I think you gave me a heart attack,” I admitted, still feeling the aftereffects of his kiss surging throughout me like the warmth of that first sip of alcohol. The subtle hint of impending intoxication. “Your kissing skills are total heart attack worthy. You nearly killed me.”

  But as it would turn out, I’d used that statement too early on in our day.

  And about the wrong person.

  “Darby.” Torin shook me awake, my back pressing in and out of the lumpy mattress. The bent springs creaked with each jolting movement. “Darby, wake up.”

  I knew better than to bolt upright this time. The faint scar on my brow was a clear reminder to rise gradually from my slumber. But Torin obviously didn’t want me to wake up slowly. No, his firm grip on my shoulders totally indicated otherwise. He was wrestling me out of sleep like a ravenous lion batting at its prey.

  “The campers!” I shouted, disoriented and dazed. We’d gotten into Sacramento after midnight, and then headed back up to the Trinity Alps immediately after. I’d slept the entire car ride, and all but zombie-walked to the cabin, only to find it completely empty. “Where are my girls?”

  “On their overnighters,” Torin clarified. The latest set of campers were out with their parents for the weekend, and I’d known that, but the fog took a while to lift from my eyes and my brain. “Darby, last night...”

  “Was amazing.” That much I remembered. “Who would have thought making out at 30,000 feet could be such a rush? I can think of a few other things I’d like to do at that elevation—”

  “There was a car crash, Darby.” Torin’s eyes were bloodshot; spider webs of red wove in and out of the whites surrounding his pupils. He had to be so tired. It was a miracle we’d made it back to camp without him falling asleep at the wheel. Something was clearly looking out for us.

  “Oh my God.” I paused. “Are we dead?” I knew it was stupid to think—even stupider to say—but maybe this was death. Maybe the afterlife was just another extension of this life. Maybe that’s all it was. Or maybe I was deliriously sleepy.

  “No, Darby. We’re not dead,” he said softly, the way a mother breaks bad news gently to her child. His hand was at my cheek, and he held it there in a way that made me nervous, because the look that draped across his face matched the desperate feeling that pulsed from his fingertips onto my skin. “But Lance is.”

  My stomach twisted violently, and my eyes swirled round and round, following the whirlpool of water that pulled back down into the base of the toilet. Before it had even finished flushing, I filled it with vomit again.

  “It’s okay,” Torin whispered against my clammy forehead, his hand wrapped around a makeshift ponytail. “Shhhh... It’s okay, Darby.”

  We did this for a while, Torin shushing and me puking. It might have been a few minutes; it might have been a few hours. But it was hard to tell because it felt like a dream, and time wasn’t something you could register in a dream. I wanted it to be a dream. I prayed for it to be one. But it wasn’t. It was a very real, very tangible nightmare.

  “What the hell was wrong with him?” I shouted, gripping Torin’s chest as we sat, curled up on the chipped tile bathroom floor. “Why did he come after me?”

  “Because you were running from him.” It felt like a slap in the face. I would have preferred that actually, had Torin physically punched me with his fist rather than backhanded me with his words.

  “I wasn’t running from anything, Torin!” I buried my face into the fabric of his flannel shirt and it stuck to the wet slope of my cheek. The fibers scraped my skin like the scratching prickles of a cactus.

  “But you were. We were. It wasn’t right for me to let you leave without talking things out with him once more.” Torin shoved the heel of his hand to
his nose and wiped it quickly. “It was like I was kidnapping you or something. Like I had to get you out of there and away from him before you had any second thoughts.”

  “That’s not what you were doing, Torin.” I looked up at him. His head tilted back against the stall wall, his neck stretching completely, his face directed toward the ceiling coated with splotches of mold and dirt-filled cracks. “We both know that’s not what you were doing.”

  “Maybe not consciously, but my subconscious is apparently an insecure prick that feels threatened quite easily.” Torin brought his lips to my forehead and dropped a hesitant kiss onto it, like maybe it was something he shouldn't do. He kept his mouth there as he said, “Because in all honesty, Lance wasn’t that much of a threat, having cheated and possibly gotten another girl pregnant and all.”

  It felt weird to be talking about him like he was still alive, but I supposed it felt even weirder to acknowledge he was dead. So far, I hadn’t been able to do that. Maybe my body had, the way it retched and convulsed, emptying my insides of any sustenance it might have held. But I had a much harder time expressing it with my words.

  Lance is dead, I spoke in my head. But just because I forced myself to think it didn’t make it feel real. Just like reciting the phrase, It’s not your fault, never felt real to me, either. It didn’t feel real these past six years, and it definitely wasn’t real now. I wasn’t sure what was actually real anymore at all.

  “He’d probably been drinking because of our fight.”

  Torin’s arms pulled tighter around me, a vice grip that refused to let go.

  “You can’t say things like that, Darby. You can’t blame yourself for something you didn’t have control over.”

  “Then what is the point, Torin?” My volume raised and my ears flooded with the angry pounding of my heart. “What is the point in any of it? Because ultimately, we don’t have control over anything at all!” I pulled from his hold and stood to my feet, turning my back to him, and bracketing my hands on either side of the cracked porcelain sink. The tormented reflection that stared back at me from the mirror should have caught me off guard, but it didn’t.

  This was what I deserved to look like; this was how I deserved to feel. “He got in that car because I left. There is no other reason that he should have been heading to the airport last night. He would have stayed in D.C.” I dragged my fingers down my face and clenched my eyes shut. “Me.” I pushed a finger into my chest. “I’m the reason he got drunk, got in the car, and died. I’m responsible for it, Torin.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” His voice quivered with a shaky unsteadiness. “There is no way we can know what he was thinking.”

  I flipped around to face him, pressing my backside against the ledge of the sink. He looked so vulnerable, so childlike, with his knees tucked to his chest, his eye sockets pressed into the caps of them. Torin rocked back and forth in a disturbing rhythm that was probably meant to soothe, but it didn’t appear to be working. The way his shoulders rose and fell betrayed any attempt he made at covering up his emotion.

  “Torin...” I muttered his name, but he continued to rock without acknowledgement. “Torin.”

  “I can't bear the responsibility implied in that statement, Darby.” He didn’t look at me. He didn’t even lift his eyes from his knees. He spoke into the floor. “I can’t.” He shook his head, but since he was still balled up, his whole body shook, like those Weebles from back when we were kids. What was it? Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down. Torin never seemed to fall down. He swayed back and forth, and caught himself at the last moment before angling to the other side every time.

  But my statement—that was enough to knock him completely over. His head slammed against the solid frame of the stall.

  “You saying things like that?” With uncharacteristic frustration, Torin’s eyes impaled mine. “You blaming yourself for the choices Lance made? God, Darby. Do you realize what that means if that’s what you honestly believe?” I didn’t. He continued. “If you really think that way, that our argument with him last night resulted in Lance’s death... do you know what that means?” There was a fury that pulsed in that bathroom, and it scared me. Not that Torin scared me; I wasn’t afraid of him. But he was scared, and something I’d said brought that fear out in him.

  “I don’t know what that means.” My hands were so drenched with sweat that they started to slip off the counter. “I don’t know, Torin.”

  “It means that we’re all ultimately responsible for one another.” He cracked his head against the paint chipped wall again, intentionally. Intentionally ramming into the blunt surface, like he was trying to hurt himself. Or maybe replace one hurt for another, something I’d mastered long ago. “And that is more responsibility than any one of us is strong enough to bear.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Two weeks later

  “This still smells like him.”

  I knew that. In reality, it probably smelled more like me, because I’d had it pressed to my nose for the past week. Pressed to my cheek as I slept at night. Pressed to my skin as I walked around campus, retracing our daily path we took to O-Chem from last fall. But maybe there wasn’t much difference. We shared so much else. Maybe we smelled the same. In some odd way, I almost hoped we did.

  Lance’s mom held the sweatshirt to her face, smothering herself with it like she could somehow still feel him inside it. Like Lance’s arms filled the armholes and wrapped around her in a cotton-coated embrace.

  “I don’t ever want to lose that.” She closed her eyes and swayed back and forth, the red hoodie draped across her chest. “When I would get him after his nap,” she said, her eyes still drawn shut, “his curly hair would be so sweaty. He’d bounce up and down in his crib with his arms stretched up to me.” She lifted hers to the sky as she replayed the memory. “I would scoop him up and just hold him in my arms.” She rocked again, side to side. “I would keep him there and just nuzzle my nose against him—breathing him.” She took a deep, prolonged breath. “But I can’t breathe him anymore.” The sobbing started. “I... can’t... breathe.”

  Lance’s dad wrapped his hand around Sarah’s heaving shoulders, rotating her body away from me, like seeing her cry would trigger the waterworks of my own and he somehow wanted to shield me from it. But you couldn’t shield someone from death. We started experiencing the effects of it the moment we were born. Life, as I’d come to find out, began its process of ending with our first newborn cry. And then we continued to cry over the deaths of others that impacted our lives. Death was sad. It involved a lot of crying. I figured the only death that you couldn’t cry over was your own. I longed for that day when there would be no more crying.

  Lance’s dad was muttering something into Sarah’s ear. She nodded. They left.

  Three minutes went by.

  He came back.

  I was still in the same position, still sitting on the empty floor of our apartment, staring at SW7036 on our walls.

  “Darby.” Lance’s dad shut the door into its frame, leaving his hand there for a moment on the oak that encased it. I didn’t know what he did with Sarah, but I assumed she was waiting in the car. He slipped down to my level and crossed his legs underneath him.

  “Paul.”

  He let out one of those breaths that would lift the hair from his face, had his hair been long enough to lift. Instead he had a closely shorn cut that masked the fact that his hairline receded nearly all the way to the back of his skull. “You don’t have to pretend that he was a saint just because he’s gone.”

  I kept my eyes to the wall.

  “You don’t even have to pretend that you still love him. I know what he did, Darby. Lance was my son, and as much as I loved him—worshipped the ground he walked on, practically—I know he had his faults, and how those faults greatly affected you.”

  Even though I didn’t want to, I turned to look at him. “But I do still love him,” I whispered, my chest tightening as I spoke the heartbreaking words
.

  “I know all about Clara and how she thought she was pregnant.” Turned out she wasn’t. What an awful twist of fate that was, to find out that the girl partially responsible for our breakup had no claims to him either.

  So there it was. Lance had died completely alone. That broke my heart even more than anything Lance had ever done to me, the thought of him alone in his final moments here on earth.

  It was Paul’s turn to memorize the color of my apartment now as his gaze switched from me to the beige expanse opposite us. “That’s why we told him to fly you out for the weekend. To be honest with you. Come clean.”

  You would think we were both looking at the Mona Lisa based on our intense scrutiny of the blank wall before us.

  “You blame yourself.” His body tilted and his shoulder pressed mine. “You think he drank because of your fight. And that he got behind the wheel because he was coming to see you. Because you left.”

  It wasn’t necessary for me to nod, so I didn’t. I just stared.

  “You were not responsible. Lance chose to drink. He chose to get in that car.”

  “Okay.” It was all I had. I wanted to say more, to truly believe him, but guilt and grief had taken ahold of me so strongly that they even stole my words.

  Grief, I’d learned, didn’t just occur when something was taken away, like when my sister died. It didn’t end there. It continued to take as if it owned you and fed off your being for survival. Like a leech, it siphoned from you—things like your hope and hunger and your chance at living a normal life—it took all of those things into its bloodthirsty possession until you were only a shell. Then it was up to you to fill it back up.

  I’d spent way too long trying to figure out what I was supposed to be filling it with, and losing Lance felt like another parasite attaching itself to my existence. It hurt beyond belief.

  “Please, Darby.” Paul slipped his hand into mine. It was weird, because it felt like Lance’s, just rougher, older. Slightly more calloused. “If you need someone to blame, blame me. I told him to go after you after the gala. I didn’t know he’d been drinking. Or at least not that much.” There was a distinct tremble in his voice. “Let me take that from you.”