The Rules of Regret

by Megan Squires

  “It might be a long time before that happens.”

  With a reassuring smile that was heavy with love and understanding, Torin said, “I’ll wait for you, Darby.” His fingers trailed slowly up and down my bare arms and I looked deep into his eyes, seeing my own reflection illuminated in his wide open expression.

  That’s when I began to cry.

  “Hey,” he whispered, lifting my chin up. “It’s okay.”

  “I know.” I nodded, sniffing back my tears and pushing the heel of my hand to my eyes. “I just feel crushed.”

  “Of course you do. You have every reason to be, Darby.” There wasn’t anything he could really do to comfort me, but he tried as he wrapped his arms around me and cradled my head onto his shoulder. “I know that Lance and I didn’t have the greatest encounter, but it honestly does break my heart that he’s gone, because no one deserves to die when they’re nineteen.” Smoothing my hair with his palm, he continued, “Or thirteen. Or seventeen.” I knew he was referencing Anna and Randy. “In a perfect world, we’d all grow old on our porch swings with our glasses of lemonade watching our grandchildren run through the yard.”

  The vision brought a smile to my face, even though the tears continued to stream.

  “In a perfect world we’d all die in our sleep, wrapped in our loved one’s arms.” I wasn’t sure if he did it on purpose, but the tightness of his embrace grew stronger around me. “Car crashes and abductions and suicides—that’s not how it’s meant to be, Darby. It’s awful and tragic and unfair in so many ways. And it’s so unfair that you’ve had two people you’ve loved so strongly ripped from your life so early,” Torin said. “It’s unfair, but it’s not unrealistic.”

  I blanched. “It’s not?”

  “It’s all of our fates. We’ll all die eventually, as much as we’d like to pretend we can avoid it. There will be others. Lance and Anna are not it, but you have to keep loving and you have to keep living. It’s the only thing we can do.”

  “I hope I can,” I muttered into his hair.

  “I'll wait for you until you can, Darby,” he assured, his lips pressed to my forehead. “I think I’ve actually been waiting for you all along.”

  We ate our pizza and fell asleep in the middle of the room, just like I had for the past however-many-days-it-had-been. At about 2:30 in the morning, I thought I heard a scratching, like a cat clawing on the door, but I didn’t own any cats and this wasn’t even my actual residence anymore. I awoke slowly, gradually, and the fuzziness of sleep stayed with me even as I opened my eyes.

  Torin was at the wall, a pencil in his hands, the floodlight centered in a circle of light around whatever it was that he was etching onto the smooth surface in front of him.

  “Torin?” I pushed my hand into my eye sockets, rubbing them in an attempt to help find some focus. “What are you doing?”

  “Come look at this Darby.” He waved a hand over his shoulder, all the while continuing in his scribbling on the drywall. “I want you to see something.”

  I rose from the floor and joined him at his side.

  “What is this?”

  There were columns of names etched in graphite, all across the wall. At least fifty, maybe more. It resembled those walls of remembrance that they have at cemeteries that list the dead.

  Turns out, that’s exactly what it was.

  “These are all of the people that I know that have died.”

  “Wow,” I gulped. “That’s an awful lot.”

  “Well, yeah, I suppose it is. But they weren’t all people I was close with. Just people I knew or met that are no longer living.” He scrawled another name onto the wall. “And I’m sure there are hundreds more I’m not counting. Like a grocer at a store that I might have met once. Or someone I sat next to at a red light. Or the garbage man or mailman. That hiker that died a few years back just a couple miles from Summit... what was his name? Gary, I think. No... that doesn’t sound right.” He paused. “Greg!”

  “What’s this all about, Torin?” I scanned the memorial of sorts in front of me and my eyes locked in on Lance McIverson like it was written with blood rather than lead.

  “Back before you left—before you took off—you said we are all responsible for one another.” He must have remembered another name because he added it to the list. “And I told you that was a responsibility I couldn’t bear. Which is true. I couldn’t be responsible for keeping all of these people alive. And these are just the people that I knew that had died—the ones I’d had some sort of relationship with.” His explaining didn’t really feel like explaining, because the words he spoke didn’t clarify anything about this cryptic display. “Tony Gonzales,” he said, running his pencil over the tacky paint. “Forgot him. Anyway,” he continued. “This is my list.”

  “It’s a long list. I’m so sorry, Torin.”

  “Right. It is.”

  “I don’t think my list is that long.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” he said in a no-nonsense kind of way. “Your list is probably exactly the same length as mine. Maybe even longer since, as you say, you grew up in civilization. More paths to cross. More interactions. More opportunities to change the course of someone’s life.”

  I combed my fingers through my hair, the nervous energy taking form in my anxious hands. “That really doesn’t make any sense, Torin.”

  “It doesn’t? You sure about that?”

  “I don’t get this metaphor. The paint one of mine, that kinda made sense. But this? This doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Good.” He snapped the pencil between his hands, shards of wood splintering onto the floor. “Because I want you to see just how crazy a statement like that is.” Dropping both palms onto my shoulders, he all but shook me as he said, “The thing is, Darby, we never know how an interaction with someone will change the direction of their life, but inevitably, it will change it.”

  “If you are doing this to make me feel less guilty about Lance, I appreciate it, but I don’t know that it will change things. I’m still part of the reason for his death.”

  “I’m doing this to show you how I think we’re meant to live. I don’t think life should be full of what ifs. What if we hadn’t left a day early out of Boston? What if you’d left the light on for Anna? What if you didn’t pick up the phone that night he called? You’re giving the what ifs too much power.”

  “I don’t know how not to.”

  “You focus on the things you know. The opposite of the what ifs,” he said.

  “What is the opposite of if, Torin?”

  “Truth.” It didn’t take him any time to answer, like the response was waiting and balanced right there on the tip of his tongue. “And the truth of it is, we all play a part in all of this. We’ve all been assigned our roles. I think we’re responsible for the living part, not for the dying part. You can’t look at each interaction as a possible turning point toward death. You have to look at each interaction as something that adds to life.”

  “How do you think like that?” I shook my head at him, completely awed. “Like how does your brain even work that way?”

  “Don’t know. Honestly, sometimes it hurts,” he admitted, rubbing his scalp with his fingers. “But I knew I had to think this for you because you wouldn’t allow yourself to believe it if you came up with it on your own.”

  “That’s probably true.” For only knowing me a short while, he knew me so well. Probably more than I’d ever let anyone know me before. I wondered if that meant that I was giving all of myself to him, at least as much as I had to give. I hoped that’s what it meant.

  “I’m going to paint over this now.” He motioned back toward the wall while turning at the waist. “I just really wanted you to try to see things from another perspective. Don’t live in the what ifs, Darby.”

  “I’m trying not to.”

  “I know. Me too.”

  And with a roll of the brush, the names were gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  One
week later

  I desperately did not want to be that girl again. That girl that stumbles into depression and doesn’t really ever come out of it, just wallows through it, sometimes with greater, more stable strides, sometimes with visible falter. I would not wade through depression like I lived there in its murky waters. I would cross through it. I would come out on the other side.

  I had to.

  I had to focus more on the living, less on the dying. That was good advice.

  Lance’s physical body was no longer here, and neither was Anna’s, nor Randy’s, nor the hundred-some-odd other names hidden under the most recent layer of paint in the townhouse. But their memories were still alive, and how they impacted this world was still present in the form of recollections and footprints and conversations and stories.

  Interactions. When it came down to it, that was all life really was. Sets of interactions. Me interacting with you. You interacting with me. You interacting with someone else. That someone else and the someone else next to them. We were all just a bunch of someone else’s strung together in a network of interactions. Like that whole Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing, only much, much bigger. More like Seven Billion Degrees of Someone Else’s. That’s what we were, and we tangled into one giant, messy web.

  The truth of it was, we were all responsible for one another, just not like I’d thought. Maybe not in the dying so much (though inevitably we did hold some responsibility there, even if we didn’t want to believe it, because life ultimately pointed toward death), but in the living. The way I lived affected the way you lived, and the way someone else lived affected others because that’s what we did. We interacted and we lived our lives and we rubbed off on others and hoped that the mark we left was a positive one.

  That was why I couldn’t allow myself to drown in the depression of grief. Because I would continue leaving my mark—even if I tried not to—and I wanted it to be more than I’d left these past six years. I had to work at leaving a better mark.

  “I still think about her everyday.”

  “I know.” Mom took another sip from her martini glass, swishing the cool contents in her mouth, her eyes held shut.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning.

  “Does that help?” I waved a hand toward her glass and could see the reflection of Sesame Street playing for my littlest sister on the television in the adjoining room. Big Bird’s long neck looked even longer, and his oversized beak appeared even more pointy and sharp like a razorblade. I felt drunk just looking at it, and I’d only had a glass of orange juice. “Drinking... does it help?”

  Mom let out a soundless huff of a laugh. “No, Darby. Nothing helps.”

  “Why do you do it then?”

  She tipped the empty glass to her lips and sighed so loud I worried she’d momentarily run out of air. “Because it allows me to hide, Darby.” It was an honest statement, and I wondered if whatever she’d been drinking gave her the ability to speak it so freely. “It hides me from the things in my life I don’t want to face.”

  Sitting across the kitchen table from my mom, watching her drain her liquid courage, it dawned on me that maybe that’s what we all did. We hid behind famous people’s words and the buzz of alcohol and even another person’s memories because we were afraid of what would happen if we didn’t provide some type of shield against the hurt that would, inevitably, come our way again. So we crouched in our corners and drew up our defenses and cowered from the things that scared us. Losing Anna scared me, so I didn’t allow myself to lose her. I held onto her with all I had.

  And holding onto Anna when it seemed like everyone else was letting her slip away was the only way I could protect myself from the hurt of that reality. That life moved on. That people died, and yes, it was sad, but people also lived. And moving on, and even forgetting to an extent, was part of that living.

  I thought, finally, that I really wanted to start living. And I thought, maybe, that letting go of Lance might be the right, and only, thing to help me do that.

  “I’m so sorry, Darby.” Mom twirled the stem of her glass back and forth between her fingers, studying the drop of clear liquid that pooled at the lip of the rim. It matched the ones that balanced at the edge of her eyes. “About Lance, about your sister. God. It’s all so awful. It’s like the universe randomly drew your name and you’ve been dealt these horrible cards.”

  “It doesn’t feel random.” I knew when I spoke it that I was beginning to sound an awful lot like Torin, but I was okay with that. I was okay with believing—however guardedly—that maybe it wasn’t random. And it didn’t make me feel depressed or anything, it just made me feel like maybe there was a picture. A bigger blueprint. There was comfort in thinking that, and more than comfort, there was reason. A reason why some people experienced so much tragedy, while others skated through life without ever really living in the valley. I’d been in the valley for longer than I liked. I was ready to reach the summit.

  “I met a guy.”

  I expected a 'Seriously? Already?’ but instead Mom just said, “What’s his name?”

  “Torin.”

  “Goofy name.” She laughed, and I realized how much I missed the sound of her laugh because she didn’t allow herself to do that much anymore.

  “So is Darby.”

  She smiled, another thing I missed. “What’s he like?”

  It really had only been a month since Lance died, but my mom didn’t make me feel horrible for talking about Torin. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to show her how grateful I was for her not judging me for that.

  “He’s quirky. He quotes movies and philosophers and books.” I’d never really described Torin to anyone, but the characteristics came out effortlessly. “His brother died when he was twelve.”

  Mom nodded knowingly, like that statement spoke volumes. I supposed it did. “He sounds good for you, Darby.”

  “He gets me, and right now, I think I need someone in my life that gets me.” I paused. “But I still miss Lance.” I had to add that. I was pretty certain I’d always be adding that.

  Standing up from her seat at the table, Mom came behind me and wrapped her arms over my shoulders. “You will always miss Lance, sweetie. He was a huge part of your life. Like family.”

  “We didn’t end things well.” I really didn’t like admitting that out loud. It was easier to pretend that I was the grieving girlfriend that had lost her knight in shining armor. That’s what others believed and that’s what I wanted them to believe. Just because he wasn’t perfect, it didn’t make it necessary to tarnish his image that way. Allowing people to think that he was nothing but a stand-up guy felt like one final gift I could give him. Maybe I couldn’t save his life, but I could at least save his image. Deep down, I knew he’d have done the same for me, and I think my own image needed just as much saving. “We didn’t end things well. We both made a lot of mistakes. Honestly, we probably should have broken up years ago, just so we could have ended things better, you know?”

  Mom squeezed me tighter, then drew in a sharp breath. “Did you know that Anna and I had a huge fight that day?”

  I shook my head, surprised by the turn in our conversation and her tone.

  “She had been asking all day to take her to get something she needed for an assignment that she’d waited until last minute to start.” Mom’s grip lessened and she stood back a few feet. I rotated in my chair to face her, feeling like I was looking at my partner in crime. Like she was confessing to part of the responsibility I bore on my own for all those years. “I was so angry that she’d procrastinated and Joey had a game and Sarah had ballet and then there was dinner and baths and bedtime for the little ones. I yelled at her and told her she wasn’t the only child in this family.” The tear that refused to fall earlier skimmed down her cheek. “The last words I said to her were, ‘You need to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around you.’ ” Mom closed her eyes and paused before saying, “That was the last thing I said. What mother says something li
ke that?”

  “Every mother on the planet.” Which was true. I think it was in some script that they’d all been given with comebacks and one-liners that would stand the test of time. “Seriously, Mom. I think every single mother has said that.”

  Mom sighed. “It doesn’t make it right.”

  “No, but it makes it okay. I think there’s a difference.” I reached out to take her hand in mine. It was so much more frail than I’d remembered. The knobby bones of her knuckles dug deep into my fingers and her once-manicured nails were jagged and rough. “Maybe it’s not right to say or think things like that, but it’s okay to do things that aren’t right sometimes. We’re human.”

  “Yes we are.” Mom shook my hand free and grabbed my head and kissed me on the crown of my hair. “Being human is hard.”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “I feel so awful for Paul and Sarah.” I’m sure she did. She knew exactly what it was to lose a child. “And Lance. Poor Lance.”

  “I think out of all of us, he’s got it easiest. He doesn’t have the hard work of being human anymore.”

  She smoothed down my hair with a palm and tugged me close to her chest. “Being human is hard, but I do think it beats the alternative.”

  I shrugged visibly, and let her hold me there for a bit, leaning into her, knowing she needed this just as much as I did. “That honestly depends on what you think the alternative is.”

  ***

  It was all tucked neatly into two shoeboxes on the top shelf of my closet. That was it. It all fit in there: a half dozen dried corsages, two albums of photographs, a couple of letters (he wasn’t a big letter writer), a small stuffed animal we’d won at a carnival junior year, and a handful of newspaper clippings featuring Lance and his parent’s image in black and white print.

  What I had left of Lance fit into two boxes. What was physically left of him fit into a box buried six feet underground. Had he been cremated, that box would have been even smaller. And what of those people whose bodies weren’t even in tact when they died? Like if you died in some explosion, there wouldn’t even be anything left of you to even have a box. That thought, however horrifically morbid, really made me sad. Everyone deserved at least a box.