?When they banished the names, well, by then I already knew the reasonable parents were never returning, so I went back to calling them Mum and Pop. But that fantasy got me through a tough patch.” She weaves her hands together and looks at me with a hesitant sideways glance. “So I understand why you would make something like that up, Des. When the world’s unreasonable, sometimes it seems like the only thing to do.”
I look at Mira, staring straight into her eyes like I have never done before, looking in a way that most would deem impolite or uncomfortable, but it is neither. It makes me wonder why I have never done it before. I finally nod. “That’s right, Mira. We do what we have to do.”
“A fantasy for a few months is one thing,” Aidan says, “but you never stopped. Didn’t you have, um, like, therapy?”
I shake my head and grin. “You don’t know the half of it, Aidan. Poor Mr. Farrell. He was my father’s best friend and attorney, but I didn’t really know him because he lived far away in the city. I was so young and he was just a shadowy figure who came in and out of our lives. I still remember when he came to the house and tried to explain to me that he had been named my guardian and—”
“Your guardian. So that’s why you call him that,” Seth says.
I smile. “I was logical, even then.” I tell them about my move hundreds of miles away to the city where Mr. Gardian lived, but I didn’t do well there. Not that Mr. Gardian didn’t try, but he was an inexperienced bachelor and I was an angry, mixed-up seven-year-old. He thought that going back to the house in Langdon might help, so he actually moved back there with me, hiring yet another nanny to help him. But I didn’t like strangers in my house, where my mother and father and Gavin should have been. When we returned there, I only got worse. I withdrew and stopped talking and eating. I remember Mr. Gardian always on the phone, always taking me to doctors, often taking me to the park just to get away. Finally it was decided I needed a special school that was all about therapy.
“It took a while,” I say. “But it eventually helped. Some. I’m at least talking, aren’t I? But all the therapy in the world might be able to convince you of the truth, but it doesn’t change how your brain has learned to work. Or maybe how I chose for it to work.”
Mira leans back and folds her arms. “But why did Mr. Farrell bounce you around from school to school? It wasn’t your parents who kept switching you, like you told Mrs. Wicket.”
“You eavesdrop far more than I give you credit for, Mira.”
She shrugs and grins. “Sorry.”
“I kept switching because—” I remember all the long talks with counselors where I listened but didn’t speak. “When you witness your whole family die and you think it’s your fault, you”—my breath shimmies in my lungs and I feel my cheeks grow hot. I slide my hands beneath my knees and hug them. “You think that maybe there’s something bad about you. Something that makes people disappear. It makes you afraid—”
“You were afraid to get close to anyone again,” Seth finishes for me.
I nod. “When I found myself looking forward to seeing someone the next day and the next at a school, I’d do something to put an end to it. By the time I was ten, I knew exactly what sorts of behaviors would have me packing my bags the next day. It got to the point that when the boarding school called, Mr. Gardian knew just what was coming. He never showed his displeasure.” I turn and look at Mira. “I suppose with him it was sort of like bonus points too. After what I had been through, he thought I had earned a certain dispensation, I guess, and he just accepted that I was destined to have my . . . difficult periods.”
“You said you thought it was your fault. Why would you think that?” Seth asks.
I look at Seth. Didn’t I already make that clear at the cemetery? I refused to say good-bye. Ever since that day, I’ve thought of that word over and over again and the difference it might have made—a fraction of a second, and a lifetime of wondering kind of difference. “When I didn’t say good-bye,” I tell him, “I felt like I helped to make all the seconds add up wrong.”
Aidan snorts. “That’s craz”—he catches himself. “I mean—”
“Of course it’s a crazy way to think, Aidan,” I say. “But sometimes the way life plays out is crazy too. At the very least, it defies explanation. Maybe one insanity balances out the other.”
Aidan nods.
“Why were your parents going somewhere without you in the first place?” Mira asks.
“They had to. My baby brother, Gavin, was born with a hole in his heart. I didn’t really understand back then. My parents tried to explain it, but he looked healthy to me. I remember his tiny perfect fingers. But when he cried, he’d lose his breath, and I remember my mother doing anything to keep him happy. There was a special doctor they wanted to see, but he was very busy. He was booked for months.”
“Except for your birthday,” Mira says, holding her cheeks like she is astonished all over again.
“That’s right. My birthday and my mother’s. And that’s where the other things went wrong. It was the wrong day, by all accounts.” I explain about the appointment changes, flight changes, and that my parents weren’t even supposed to be at that airport in the first place. My father had planned to fly his own plane, but Gavin’s appointment was more important than convenience or birthdays. It was all so last-minute. Mr. Gardian relayed some of this information to me over the years; some I knew because I was there, but other bits came from therapists and counselors who unwittingly helped me piece together a warped logic of numbers and timing. And of course the worst timing of all happened right before my eyes.
“Another plane that was coming in lost an engine,” I explain and then correct myself. “No, it didn’t just lose it—it was a catastrophic failure. The engine exploded, and they were so close to landing, the pilot didn’t have a chance to veer away. He flew straight into my parents’ plane. Esme, my babysitter, pulled me away from the window, but it was too late. I saw everything. What are the chances? The day that brought my mother took her away again, and everything that could go wrong, did. Maybe it is the Law of Truly Large Numbers. But when it happens to you, it doesn’t feel like a statistic.”
Seth sighs. “And now today. Escrow closing on the same day as they died.”
“That part wasn’t a coincidence. That was my doing. Mr. Gardian has wanted to sell the house for years, but he always deferred to me, and I always said no. I know everyone thought he was crazy for listening to a child, but he did. One time a Realtor even contacted me directly. Mr. Gardian was furious. I guess he thought that so much had been taken away from me, he wanted to give me some power back. He loved my parents. I never really stopped to think about how much he had lost too. A few months ago, he asked me about the house again. He told me it wasn’t wise to leave it standing empty. He said someone should be living in it. A family. I finally agreed. On one condition—”
“That the sale was final on October 19,” Aidan finishes.
“I thought that maybe—” I look away.
“The numbers again,” Seth says.
I nod. “I still”—I look at my open palms in my lap—“I still hoped there was a key. Something I had missed. A way to turn back time, maybe. If everything added up just right, the way everything had added up just wrong that day . . .” I look away from my hands into the rafters of the barn. “I know it’s not possible. I know. But sometimes the world makes no sense anyway.”
“It’s unfair.”