His eyes pinch together, unbearably sad. “We don’t know.”
I sit up on an elbow, stare at him.
“She disappeared many years ago. We were on a family camping trip. She wanted to walk over to the lake one morning before our parents were up, but I wanted to sleep longer. So, she got dressed and went alone. We never saw her again.”
My lips part, disbelieving. “But the police—”
“Came and went. Did their level best. And closed the case once it had gone cold. There was no trace of her left. Nothing for them to go on. No one saw what happened, who took her. They dragged the lake, but it was clear. For years my mother swore Tanya was still alive. It’s the only thing that kept her breathing. But Dad and I knew after the first few months that she was probably gone.”
I rise and walk over to her picture, skate my fingers along the frame. Little flutters wing through my mind—rubber soles on a dirt road, the sun like yellow gossamer in the air, the blue truck rumbling up behind with the dented fender. They turn dark, sour, like ash as they drift away. Regis is right. She didn’t live long. When I turn to him, he is watching me with big, tender eyes, unsure what I will tell him, if he wants to hear it. “She loved you very much,” I say, choking back a tear. “And she never blamed you for it, so you should stop blaming yourself.”
His face crumples, and he ducks away from me until he can school his features. I watch him, thinking this is why my family does what it does. For girls like Tanya. To stop the countless menin blue trucks with dented fenders shadowing little girls. To save someone as pure as Regis from such unbearable pain.
“I’ve never told anyone about her before,” he says once I’ve returned to sit next to him on the floor. “Not about giving up on her after those first few months, somehow knowing she was gone, we were already too late.”
“Not even Beth Ann?” I ask.
“No.” He glances toward me. “I didn’t take you for the jealous type.”
I hug my knees to my chest. “You misunderstand. I’m curious. Not about her—about you. About why you hold back, even when it’s unnecessary.”
He rolls onto his back, stares at the ceiling. “Are you sure you weren’t a shrink instead of a designer?”
I give him a playful shove.
His smile is nimble, a flash of teeth, but genuine. His hand wanders across his chest. “Beth Ann was nice. She was really nice.”
“But?” I know one is coming.
He shrugs. “That’s the problem. I don’t know what was missing exactly. I never do. But I can feel everyone’s expectations flung over me like a net. That I should marry, settle down. That someone like Beth Ann should be enough for me. What more could I possibly want? Especially up here. What do I expect?”
“What moredoyou want?” I question. His openness is startling. I’m not sure I’ve earned it.
He laughs. “I wish I knew. I just keep thinking I’ll know it when I find it.” His eyes meet mine, and for a second, they are so frank it’s unsettling. He sits up and kisses me tenderly, then pulls away and says, “Why don’t you want more? From me?Thanme?”
I swallow. The ice is thinning, every step precarious. “I had more,” I tell him finally, voice soft as a rabbit’s foot. “It didn’t agree with me.”
He cocks his head, appraising, runs a knuckle under my chin. “Whoever he is, I don’t like him.”
It might be charming to someone else, but I don’t need to enlistone man in my fight against another. I’m not looking for a hero. Regis knows that. I think he does. “Neither do I.”
“But you must have,” he suggests. “Once.”
I clear my throat, sticky with emotion. How to explain the Henry I first met, to reconcile him with the Henry I left? The first is a man of culture. The second, not a man at all. “He was impressive in the beginning—brilliant, refined, successful. The complete opposite of the men I’d known growing up.” I cringe as Gerald comes to mind—that collared velour shirt he always wore with the cigarette burns pocking the sleeves, cans of flat beer covering the coffee table. “I felt flattered by his attention. More than flattered.Chosen.It made me feel special to be on his arm.”
“And later?” Regis asks.
I hug my knees closer, shrug once. “I found out he was just another bully.”
He is compassionate, but not pitying. He doesn’t scoop me up or wrap me in platitudes. He doesn’t rush to make it right or alter my feelings. He just sits beside me, leaning back on his hands, a borderless land.
“I should get home,” I tell him, rising to find my scattered clothes. Dawn will come, and Myrtle must find me in bed.
He pushes himself up and pulls on his underwear and pants, his T-shirt. I can’t help but feel we look like mollusks redonning our shells, the pieces we have adapted to suit the world.
At the door, he stops me. “My sister… Did you really get that from touching her picture? That message?”
That and more, but the rest shouldn’t live inside him, so I will carry it instead, beside the danger, the cruelty I have been forced to witness, felt firsthand, even delivered. “Yes.”
