82
I REMEMBER THIS like I am living it as I sit on the steps of Windemere, still staring at the spot where Gat disappeared into the night. The realization of what I have done comes as a fog in my chest, cold, dark, and spreading. I grimace and hunch over. The icy fog runs from my chest through my back and up my neck. It shoots through my head and down my spine.
Cold, cold, remorse.
I shouldn’t have soaked the kitchen first. I shouldn’t have lit the fire in the study.
How stupid to wet the books so thoroughly. Anyone might have predicted how they would burn. Anyone.
We should have had a set time to light our kindling.
I might have insisted we stay together.
I should never have checked the boathouse.
Should never have run to Cuddledown.
If only I’d gone back to Clairmont faster, maybe I could have gotten Johnny out. Or warned Gat before the basement caught. Maybe I could have found the fire extinguishers and stopped the flames somehow.
Maybe, maybe.
If only, if only.
I wanted so much for us: a life free of constriction and prejudice. A life free to love and be loved.
And here, I have killed them.
My Liars, my darlings.
Killed them. My Mirren, my Johnny, my Gat.
This knowledge goes from my spine down my shoulders and through my fingertips. It turns them to ice. They chip and break, tiny pieces shattering on the Windemere steps. Cracks splinter up my arms and through my shoulders and the front of my neck. My face is frozen and fractured in a witch’s snarl of grief. My throat is closed. I cannot make a sound.
Here I am frozen, when I deserve to burn.
I should have shut up about taking things into our own hands. I could have stayed silent. Compromised. Talking on the phone would have been fine. Soon we’d have driver’s licenses. Soon we’d go to college and the beautiful Sinclair houses would seem far away and unimportant.
We could have been patient.
I could have been a voice of reason.
Maybe then, when we drank the aunties’ wine, we’d have forgotten our ambitions. The drink would have made us sleepy. We’d have dozed off in front of the television set, angry and impotent, perhaps, but without setting fire to anything.
I can’t take any of it back.
I crawl indoors and up to my bedroom on hands of cracked ice, trailing shards of my frozen body behind me. My heels, my kneecaps. Beneath the blankets, I shiver convulsively, pieces of me breaking off onto my pillow. Fingers. Teeth. Jawbone. Collarbone.
Finally, finally, the shivering stops. I begin to warm and melt.
I cry for my aunts, who lost their firstborn children.
For Will, who lost his brother.
For Liberty, Bonnie, and Taft, who lost their sister.
For Granddad, who saw not just his palace burn to the ground, but his grandchildren perish.
For the dogs, the poor naughty dogs.
I cry for the vain, thoughtless complaints I’ve made all summer. For my shameful self-pity. For my plans for the future.
I cry for all my possessions, given away. I miss my pillow, my books, my photographs. I shudder at my delusions of charity, at my shame masquerading as virtue, at lies I’ve told myself, punishments I’ve inflicted on myself, and punishments I’ve inflicted on my mother.
I cry with horror that all the family has been burdened by me, and even more with being the cause of so much grief.
We did not, after all, save the idyll. That is gone forever, if it ever existed. We have lost the innocence of it, of those days before we knew the extent of the aunts’ rage, before Gran’s death and Granddad’s deterioration.
Before we became criminals. Before we became ghosts.
The aunties hug one another not because they are freed of the weight of Clairmont house and all it symbolized, but out of tragedy and empathy. Not because we freed them, but because we wrecked them, and they clung to one another in the face of horror.
Johnny. Johnny wanted to run a marathon. He wanted to go mile upon mile, proving his lungs would not give out. Proving he was the man Granddad wanted him to be, proving his strength, though he was so small.
His lungs filled with smoke. He has nothing to prove now. There is nothing to run for.
He wanted to own a car and eat fancy cakes he saw in bakery widows. He wanted to laugh big and own art and wear beautifully made clothes. Sweaters, scarves, wooly items with stripes. He wanted to make a tuna fish of Lego and hang it like a piece of taxidermy. He refused to be serious, he was infuriatingly unserious, but he was as committed to the things that mattered to him as anyone could possibly be. The running. Will and Carrie. The Liars. His sense of what was right. He gave up his college fund without a second thought, to stand up for his principles.
I think of Johnny’s strong arms, the stripe of white sunblock on his nose, the time we were sick together from poison ivy and lay next to each other in the hammock, scratching. The time he built me and Mirren a dollhouse of cardboard and stones he’d found on the beach.
Jonathan Sinclair Dennis, you would have been a light in the dark for so many people.
You have been one. You have.
And I have let you down the worst possible way.
I cry for Mirren, who wanted to see the Congo. She didn’t know how she wanted to live or what she believed yet; she was searching and knew she was drawn to that place. It will never be real to her now, never anything more than photographs and films and stories published for people’s entertainment.
Mirren talked a lot about sexual intercourse but never had it. When we were younger, she and I would stay up late, sleeping together on the Windemere porch in sleeping bags, laughing and eating fudge. We fought over Barbie dolls and did each other’s makeup and dreamed of love. Mirren will never have a wedding with yellow roses or a groom who loves her enough to wear a stupid yellow cummerbund.
She was irritable. And bossy. But always funny about it. It was easy to make her mad, and she was nearly always cross with Bess and annoyed with the twins—but then she’d fill with regret, moaning in agony over her own sharp tongue. She did love her family, loved all of them, and would read them books or help them make ice cream or give them pretty shells she had found.
She cannot make amends anymore.
She did not want to be like her mother. Not a princess, no. An explorer, a businesswoman, a Good Samaritan, an ice cream maker—something.
Something she will never be, because of me.
Mirren, I can’t even say sorry. There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.
And Gat, my Gat.
He will never go to college. He had that hungry mind, constantly turning things over, looking not for answers but for understanding. He will never satisfy his curiosity, never finish the hundred best novels ever written, never be the great man he might have been.