“Why?”
“I like knowing I can come here to think. That when I do, I’ll be completely alone.”
“Alone is right.” I looked around again. A few meters out in the middle of the lake, a family of trees gathered on a small island, surrounded by a moat of algae, and the only other signs of conscious life here were a couple of ugly brown ducks. “It’s very… private here.”
“It originated as hunting land.” He tucked his hands into his pockets, squinting as he observed the landscape.
“What did you hunt?”
“Hunt?”
“Yeah. You just said it was hunting land.”
His jaw rocked. “I did, didn’t I?”
I nodded.
“It was…” He laughed to himself. “Foxes.”
“Foxes?”
“Yeah.”
“And… what about now? Do you still hunt here?”
“Only if the foxes stray onto the land—disregarding the warnings around the border.”
“What!” I laughed. “Last I checked, foxes couldn’t read.”
“Well, then they die,” he stated, then sat down on the plaid picnic rug, his back against the rock. “Don’t be shy.” He patted the spot next to him. “I won’t bite.”
I folded my arms, remembering suddenly why he brought me out here.
“Come on, Ara. You know you wanna talk to me.” The arrogant smile on his lips filtered out through his voice. “You also know I’m not going to let you go until you do.”
“You can’t keep me here.”
“I can. And I will, and no amount of kicking and screaming is going to help you. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, ma petite, but I’m a lot bigger than you.”
“What does ma petite mean?”
He smiled to himself, looking down at his outstretched legs. “Roughly? Little girl.”
I huffed. “I am not a little girl!”
“Good. Then stop acting like one. Sit down.”
I wanted to sit there so badly, but letting him in to my world meant opening it, and I wasn’t sure I even could anymore. The thing about pain is that, once you lock it away, it hurts more to bring out again.
David shrugged, and then rested his hands behind his head, keeping his smiling eyes on me. “I’ve got all day.”
Slowly, with his conceited stare melting my icy exterior, my frown dropped, my arms following until, with a low sigh, I wandered over and sat down about a meter across from him. And he waited, saying nothing. I was happy to let time just pass around us; happy to be this nice, sweet girl he thought I was for just a little longer. But I knew it would come to an end. It had to eventually. He had to know the truth about me.
“I’m sorry, David.”
“Why would you need to be sorry?”
“I think I might’ve given you the wrong impression about myself.” I lowered my gaze. I didn’t want to see his face as I said this—the way any compassion would dissolve from his eyes, and the smile that seemed to be reserved only for me would vanish under newfound repulsion. “Actually, I deliberately gave you the wrong impression.”
“So, you’re not a schoolgirl with a broken heart?”
“Is that all you see in me?”
He shook his head when I looked at him. “You know what I see in you.”
I nodded. “And that’s exactly what I wanted you to see—wanted everyone to see. But I’m not nice. I’m not sweet, and I’m not this golden child that organizes benefits and listens to people talk about their day. I—” I laughed coarsely to myself. “Half of the time, I really don’t care what Emily thinks about the latest books she’s reading and, most of the time, I cut her off—talk about things I want to talk about.”
David laughed. “And your honesty is one of the other things I like about you.”
I shook my head. “But it’s not honesty. It’s horrible. I mean, it’s not like I don’t care about people, but I… I never really put them first.”
He exhaled. “And you think that makes you a bad person?”
I shrugged. “Maybe just selfish.”
“Okay, so maybe you’re selfish. I still like you.”
I couldn’t help but smile at that, but dropped it quickly. “What if… what if my selfishness went so deep it cost someone their life?”
He rose to his knees and shuffled closer. “Then you have to take a risk. Right now. You have to put faith in our friendship, and just know that when you tell me what you’re going to tell me, I’m here. For you. Not for anyone else. I don’t care about Emily or her trivial conversations either, Ara.” He grabbed my hand. “Right now, I’m here with you, my little friend, and you’re going to tell me what’s breaking your heart.”
I stole my hand back, swallowing the tight lump in my throat.
“Ara,” he said softly, cupping the side of my face. “Don’t hold back your tears.”
“I have to. If I let them go, I’m not sure they’ll ever stop.”
He clicked his tongue. “Can I tell you something? A legend I once heard.”
I nodded, resting my hands in my lap.
“They say that the tears one cries for loss are the Tears of the Broken, or the Devil’s Liquid, because, for each one you shed alone, you sacrifice a piece of your soul.”
I sniffled, looking up at him.
“And they also say that for each tear shared, you give a piece of yourself for someone else to safeguard until you’re ready to notice the sun again.”
Hot tears doubled my vision. I blinked them out. “And you want to be that someone?”
He stared at me, his round eyes unmoving. “Ara, I am that someone.”
Only a short sniffle passed before it all fell to pieces—all of that heartache and guilt just so ready to finally come out. “She shouldn’t have been there.” I covered my face as inaudible gusts of explanation dribbled through my lips.
“Your mom?”
I nodded into my hands. “It’s my fault she’s dead.”
“Why?”
“It was the middle of the night.” I swallowed. “I called her to come get me. I could’ve walked home, but…” I wedged my thumbnail between my teeth, holding my breath as I tried not to cry. I had no right to cry. “It was so stupid. I’m seventeen. I’m not a child. But I was angry and… really hurt. I just wanted my mom. I just wanted to go home.”
“So you asked her to come get you?”
“Made her.”
“And that one act makes this your fault?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I looked over at the ducks splashing about without a care in the world. I wanted to be them: brown and ugly, but free. “Don’t you get it? If I hadn’t called her, she’d still be here.”
He sat back, his feet flat to the ground on either side of my legs, our faces almost touching. “Put all that aside for a moment, and tell me about the accident.”
“Why?” I screwed my nose up.
“Because you haven’t spoken to anyone, and you need to—it’s a part of the healing process.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to recall the details I’d tried so hard to block out.
“Okay, if you’re not ready for that, start by telling me how you feel. Right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tell me what your emotions are in this moment.”
“Why?”
“Call it a distraction technique. It’ll help you calm down, make you more coherent.”
With my eyes closed, I searched inside for the words to describe that tight, hollowed-out feeling. I knew that every word I’d said so far came out a mess, but focusing on that immediate sensation in my body actually did help to calm me. “I just feel so, so empty and so full of this incredibly strong… I don’t know. I guess… regret.”
“Regret for calling her or for what you’ve suffered?”
“For Harry.” My voice completely broke on the end, drowned out by a new wave of pain.
“Who’s Harry?”
“My baby brother.”
“He was in the accident?”
I nodded, trembling all over. “He’d been sick for a week or so, and I made Mom get him up—take him out in the rain to come get me. But it was like…” I thought back to that gummy smile he flashed me as I hopped in the car, but it was like he’d faded somehow and I couldn’t really see it anymore. “He didn’t know. He couldn’t understand that I was selfish for bringing them out there, and he just smiled at me like I was his whole world.”
“And how do you feel to look back on that memory?” he asked, sounding way too much like a therapist.
I closed my hands around my face. “Dark. Hollow. I can hardly see his face now. It’s just so dark. And a part of me still feels scared, like I’m gonna get in trouble from my mom when I get home, you know—for all the bad decisions I made that night. But, for that one moment, when I got in the car and she smiled at me, I felt like I’d made one right choice. Just one. And then…” I couldn’t say it. I just couldn’t bring myself to say the words out loud. It wasn’t until right then that I realized I’d never had to. My dad broke the news to everyone, while I stood numb and silent.
“Keep talking,” David said with the insistent tone of an adult.
“All I remember was feeling this incredible jolt as we pulled away from the stop sign. Mom’s hand grabbed mine for a second, but… everything moved—like the most violent hard turns on roller coaster. My arms, my head, everything just…” I searched for the words. “I felt pain, but it was the rush—the speed of things I really remember. I saw the front windscreen turn red; heard my mom’s scream get cut off suddenly, but that’s it. I shut my eyes, praying for it to end, and when I opened them again, we’d stopped. The crying had stopped. The noise, everything.
“I didn’t even know I was upside-down until I tried to undo my seatbelt. But it was stuck, and all the blood was making my head tight until I couldn’t breathe.”
“Breathe now,” David said, placing his palm firmly against my ribs.
I took a long breath and it shook my whole body as it left my lungs again.
“That’s it.” He kissed my head. “Just breathe.”
I let myself cry for a moment, just trying to focus on breathing, and when the wave of pain subsided, I looked up at David’s incredible green eyes. “I haven’t really thought much about the accident. I forgot a lot of things, you know—things I’m remembering now.”
“Like what?”
“The silence.” My eyes narrowed into the memory. “After we stopped rolling, it was like the world stood staring on, completely hushed for a moment, maybe waiting for our souls to leave the earth.”
“And Harry? Was he conscious then?”
“No.” My lips turned down tightly, quivering. “And I didn’t want to hear him cry. I didn’t want him to be hurt—lost somewhere I couldn’t get to him. I was glad he was quiet. But I didn’t know what that meant…” My words flaked away as the thoughts that rushed through my head, when I looked into the backseat and saw nothing, came flooding back.
“Where was he?” David asked.
“He was… gone.”
He sighed, his hand coming up on my shoulder as he pulled me in, cradling my face against his chest.
“His blue beanie—the one Mom knitted when we found out he was a boy—it was laying on the roof among the glass. It came right off his head. It… I wanted to grab it, but I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t really know. Maybe that I’d see blood or… maybe worse.”
David held me tighter.
“I didn’t know what to do. No one came. I thought people would come running, but no one came. So I… I just screamed. I knew it wouldn’t help, but I couldn’t stop it. And”—I looked up into David’s eyes—“I never knew before, but it doesn’t matter how loud you scream. There is no such thing as the worst things can get. There is no rock bottom. There is only a deep, endless pit of hell that you can fall through. You always imagine, like the movies, that you scream and someone comes, and they save you and they stop you from screaming. But… I stopped because my throat went dry. I screamed so long, and I only stopped because my body couldn’t scream anymore.” Tears lensed my eyes again. “Where’s the humanity in that?”
“There is none, sweetheart,” he said, drawing me into him again.
I closed my eyes and pictured the eerie dimness of the streetlights outside the car window, how, in the cold, the glow seemed to settle on the footpath like fog; the endless silence broken only by the hollow ticking of an indicator lamp—distant and lonely in the dead of night.
“If it had happened on another road,” I said, “maybe where there were houses, we would’ve… someone would’ve come sooner. But the drive home was down this freeway. If I’d walked, I could’ve cut through. I could’ve—”
“Shh.” He stroked my hair. “Don’t go there, Ara. Just don’t let yourself go there. What’s done is done and—”
“I didn’t mean for any of this. I didn’t mean for them to die.”
“Of course you didn’t, sweetheart.” He wrapped me in his arms, turning me slightly so my shoulder rested against his chest. “Of course you didn’t.”
“But even still, it was my fault, and I know I shouldn’t think like that, I really do. But I feel like a murderer. I—” I looked back on the memory of the empty backseat and the feeling of everything being gone. It was like lying flat on a steel bed, having someone hit your soul with a rubber mallet, sending it in black splatters everywhere. I had no control. I didn’t know where Harry was and couldn’t get free to make him okay.
“He was just a baby, David. What if he was awake? What if he was cold and wondering why we’d left him there? What if he wanted to go home?” I burst into tears. “I just wanna take him home.”
“I wish I could make you better. God knows, I do. But I know so much better than anyone what that feels like—to lose something precious—and that there’s nothing I can even say.”
I nodded. “I just… how can he be gone? I was there. I was squeezing my mom’s hand when he was born. I named him, David. How could all that be gone?”
“Sometimes, my love, life just doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s cruel. It’s like…” I thought about it for a moment. “It’s like creating something; like crafting it and painting it then, in one stupid move, dropping it to the ground.”
He rubbed gentle circles over my back. “I know, but I also know that by talking to me, you’re taking the first step toward healing.”
“I don’t know about that, David. I just feel like I’ve made it all worse now. Like I’ve been lashed with something big and hard, and I can’t make that go away.” I touched my chest where it always hurt. “I tried to tell myself it wasn’t my fault. I tried to make amends, pray for forgiveness, but it doesn’t matter what I do. This pain, it doesn’t go. I feel choked-up and so damn sad all the time.”
“That’s the guilt making the pain worse. But, Ara… this wasn’t your fault.”
My face crumpled. I truly wished I believed that. “I’ve been through every one of Vicki’s books, trying to find a way to make sense of the guilt. I know all the facts. But science doesn’t measure grief, David. It can’t, and it can’t make sense of it. In my heart,”—I touched the base of my ribs—“way down here, I think, maybe in my soul. I can’t put the guilt away. And it’s changed me. I’m bitter and snarky and moody…”
“Time, Ara.” David laughed softly, holding me close again. “Time is all that can heal.”
“But I get so angry. Sometimes I really think I’m okay, and… sometimes the anger is so much stronger than the grief.”
“What are you angry about—just that you called her?”
I shook my head. “So many things. I think the powerlessness, you know, the feeling like I had no control…” I bit my teeth together, folding forward as the feelings I’d pushed down rose up in me again, making everything tight in my core. “They took me
away. They came, and they leaned into that car, and all they said was this one’s alive. Then they took me away. They wouldn’t let me go; wouldn’t let me find Harry. I was fine. I wasn’t hurt. Just glass and cuts, but I was fine. If I could’ve… if they just let me look. I might’ve found him.”
“Did…” He paused, hesitant. “You say that like they never found him.”
“They did.” I nodded. “They found his seat on the side of the road. Harry wasn’t in it.”
“What happened to him?”
“They wouldn’t tell me. But I heard a nurse say the cop was having counseling—the one that found him.”
He clicked his tongue and squeezed me tighter. “You shouldn’t have had to hear that.”
“I know. And it made me so mad. I mean, I was over sixteen. Legally old enough to make my own medical decisions. Legally old enough to be told what was going on. But they stuck me in that bed, drugged up on who-knows-what and left alone until my dad arrived. From America! They let him tell me my mom was dead. They let him tell me I’d been horrifically scarred. And he didn’t even say it. It was the way he looked at me, David. He hadn’t seen me in nearly a year, and the first time he laid eyes on me was when my face had been ripped apart. What do you think I saw in him that morning?”
David’s throat shifted. “I know. But you’re safe now.”
“I don’t want to be safe. I feel like I owe a debt.”
He tilted my face upward with both hands. “A debt?”
“I’m not stupid. I know it was an accident. But I feel like they’re coming for me. Like I gave my family to them, and now they want me.”
“Who wants you?”
“I don’t know. The Other Side. Death. Karma, maybe. I don’t know.”
David’s teeth slid slowly over each other as his jaw came forward and his eyes flicked to the place of deep thoughts. “Do you… do you ever think of taking those matters into your own hands?”
“Mm-hm. Like, maybe I could trade places. You know—offer myself in exchange. If I could go back, maybe I could—”
“Ara, my love, there is no going back.” His hands tightened on my face. “We make mistakes, we have regrets but, sweetheart—” He opened and closed his mouth a few times, his eyes searching my face for any words he could say to make it all okay. “It was selfish of you to make her come out in the middle of the night, and it if it weren’t for that, she would never have been there when that truck tire blew out. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t her time to go. You can’t control everything, Ara, and what matters is that, if you were to go back, you’d do it differently.”
Dark Secrets Box Set Page 14
