14
Veronica
My childhood home is in a quiet neighborhood about five miles from my condo and the town center of Pleasantville. The street and sidewalk are wide and clear of parked cars, because all the houses are luxurious and spacious and have plenty of room for multi-car garages. My parents have four cars, one for each of them plus my sister, and my dad’s sports car. There’s always room for my car too when I come to visit. Which is almost never.
Only the undulating roof of their house is visible from the street because of the thick shrubs shielding the property from view. But through the cracks I can just about make out the guest house at the far end of the garden and the shimmering, lightly lit turquoise water of the pool.
Chance and I have been sitting in the car at the curb for at least fifteen minutes. Neither of us talking or moving.
“Are you going inside?” he asks in a near whisper as though he’s afraid he’ll be overheard. The quiet, careful tone of his voice also makes it sound like such a caring, concerned question that something just breaks and lets loose in my chest.
Tears aren’t quite rolling down my cheeks, but they’ll start soon.
“I’ve already done so many bad things to my family… I’ve already put my sister in so much danger once… how can I go in now and tell her I’ve done it again?” I say before the knot in my throat gets too thick and painful and prevents me from speaking.
Leather creaks as he shifts in his seat, uncomfortably, no doubt. But whatever.
“She’s not in any danger yet,” he says bracingly in a voice I’m sure is meant to make me snap out of it. Instead, it makes hot, fat tears roll down my cheeks.
It’s dark, so hopefully he can’t see them.
The leather creaks again and he clears his throat quietly.
“Why do you blame yourself for what happened to your sister so much?” he asks.
“I was with her when she was taken,” I say. “I didn’t have to stop at that supermarket, but I did because she was annoying me. And while I was in there, they lured her out of the car and shoved her in the back of a van. I tried to chase them down, but I was too late. It’s all my fault. You see? All my fault that she was taken.”
I don’t know if it’s the darkness or the shock of what happened tonight, but the words just rolled out of me. Along with the tears and the sobs. I think it’s more than just the darkness. It’s also his closeness. For some reason he just feels so solid sitting next to me, like a wall that can and will shield me from anything. Like a sun-warmed wall I can lean against and not worry about anything. But even more pleasant than that.
“Fucking bastards,” he says under his breath.
“But I don’t think you have to take on all the guilt for it on your shoulders,” he adds right after, in a more normal voice.
“If I’d just gotten there sooner, she’d be alright,” I sob.
“Or more likely you would’ve both been taken,” he says. “At least this way, your sister had you looking for her day and night and you eventually found her, right?”
He’s looking directly at me, and I glance at his face, afraid to see the disgusted look that was there the last time I cried, but unable to fight the pull of his eyes. They’re burning so bright it’s like we’re not shrouded in darkness. I turn away again, but he takes my chin gently and forces me to look at him.
“Look, this wild guilt you’re feeling isn’t doing anyone any good,” he says. “You’re running yourself into the ground trying to escape it. But you won’t. It’ll just always be there. So you gotta learn to move past it and live with it.”
He sounds like he’s speaking from experience, his tone hurried and borderline angry, but it’s not anger at me, I don’t think. And he’s saying things I know are true, things I’ve been afraid to admit to myself. Yet now he’s saying them out loud and putting them out there where they hang between us, impossible to ignore. The hot touch of his fingers on my chin is impossible to ignore too.
“I don’t know how to live with it,” I admit and blink away the tears still clinging to my eyelashes.
He strokes my chin with his thumb just a little bit before letting go. “Yeah, me either.”
He looks out through the windshield, his eyes like the sea at midnight—alive with things seething just beneath the surface.
“But it’s pretty good advice, don’t you think?” he asks.
“It is,” I say, because somehow just him laying it all out like that stopped my tears and the frenzied fluttering of anxiety and sadness in my chest.
“I almost got my best friend, Hunter… my brother, more like… killed because I’ve been so reckless and angry lately,” he says in a very cracked sounding voice. “Hell, he might still die. At least I was there to do what I could at the end. Now all I probably have left is revenge.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Sometimes I feel like that’s all I have too.”
“Trixie was out for revenge too,” he says. “She’s Hunter’s girlfriend. But it was never going to work the way she planned it out. She knows that and it’s why she broke the deal she had with you. I didn’t scare her off.”