I briefly wondered who it could be but pushed the question out of my head. I couldn’t afford to get distracted; this was hard enough as it was, and being distracted was a good way to give me an out from talking about it. Not that Reggie didn’t already know my history since he had full access to each guest’s file. Butwe were supposed to be pretending he didn’t know, even if his already knowing helped to let me get this out.
“We had a little boy, Mikael,” I explained, and for the hardest part of this entire conversation, I reached out and took hold of the framed picture and carefully walked up to him to hold it out so he could take it in his hands. “He...he was six.”
Reggie’s expression was soft as he took the frame with the same level of care and reverence Isaac had used when he’d carried it. Actually, no, there was something in his eyes that hadn’t been in Isaac’s, something familiar. Isaac had looked sad, heartbroken, actually, and so did Reggie, but Reggie looked more like someone reliving their own pain rather than experiencing mine.
“You’ve lost someone close,” I said softly.
He glanced up in surprise before giving a soft laugh. “I, uh...I was married once too. We got about five years, two of them married.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Aneurysm,” he said, gently handing the picture back. “We had no way of knowing. Most aneurysms give no warning, not unless you’re already digging through someone’s head for other things, and he was the picture of health. The day he died, I got up, woke him up before I left for work, because if I didn’t, he would end up being late. Dumbass always stayed up late, even though we both had morning jobs. He got up that day, poured some coffee, sat down on the couch with his phone, and...never got up. I found him when I got home to pick something up I’d forgotten...it took me a long time not to blame myself.”
There was a pause, the kind that was normally filled by all sorts of stock phrases, genuinely meant, but tiresome after so long. You could only hear so much about how sorry people were, or how, if you needed anything, to let them know, before youstarted not to care about how genuine or fake it all was; you just didn’t want to hear it anymore.
“A fire,” I said, looking down at the picture, my chest aching at their happy faces peering up at me. It had been the last vacation we would ever have together, the picture taken a couple of weeks before the fire. Gina had insisted on having the picture printed and framed the old-fashioned way, even though I had teased her that it was the twenty-first century, and you could get digital photo frames. Now I was glad she won that battle, because somehow having a physical picture both made it worse and better at the same time. “They said that...that it was the wiring. They never found out where the fault was, but deep down, I knew where it started, because there was a faulty outlet in the hallway that we could never use that I swore up and down I was going to fix and never did.”
“Maybe,” Reggie said, surprising me, and I looked up to see him looking thoughtful. “Just like I told Malcolm he was overdue for a health check-up, but I never pushed it. Maybe they could have found something if he had listened to me, and maybe you could have prevented what happened if you’d just fixed that damn outlet. But...maybe they wouldn’t have found anything if he’d listened, and maybe the faulty wiring wasn’t that outlet. Maybe it was another room, or the whole damn house.”
“And we’re never going to know, one way or another, are we?” I asked, strangely reassured by his acceptance that I might have been at fault, or, at the very least, that I could have prevented it from happening.
“Ha! No. Did you ask them to investigate?”
“I wanted to see the reports, but they never concluded exactly where it started. The fire was,” I stopped and swallowed hard, “total in the part of our house where it started, and since they concluded it wasn’t arson, they didn’t dig deeper than that, even when I demanded,neededto know.”
“You did better than me,” Reggie said with a shrug, leaning back against the doorway. “I had the chance to find out if the aneurysm was detectable, and I...didn’t. It used to eat at me, even when I refused to know. I called myself a coward for backing away from the truth when I’d always been someone who believed the truth would set you free. It turns out that sometimes the truth is fucking terrifying and I would rather not know.”
“I never got the truth,” I admitted.
“Neither of us did, by choice on my part, by circumstance on yours.”
“How…” I began, then forced myself to take a deep breath. I remembered the way Isaac looked at me last night, completely calm and without the slightest judgment, just understanding and compassion. It had given me the strength to pull myself out of my emotional spiral, and awakened something inside me that I hadn’t felt in over three years. What we’d done last night hadn’t been misguided lust or a way to avoid what was bubbling, boiling, and hissing away in my heart, but a way to...connect to someone else. “How did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Deal with not having the truth.”
He sighed. “At some point, I realized thatthattruth didn’t matter. Would it have mattered if I had found out that a thorough check-up found the aneurysm waiting to happen? What if it had been? I would have been eaten up by so much guilt I wouldn’t have been able to function, and I was barely functioning as it was after he died.”
“After they…passed,” I muttered. “I haven’t... Well, that’s where I am. I can’t function. None of this has been functioning.”
“Hey, Clay?”
“What?”
“Look at me.”
I did, and a lump formed in my throat at the soft expression on his face as he stepped forward and knelt to put a hand on my knee. “I need you to do me, but mostly yourself, a favor. It’s not going to seem like a favor, but I think in the long run, it will be.”
“What?” I asked.
“What happened to your family?”
“Huh? I said it was a fire.”
“No, that’s what caused what happened to them...have you ever said it aloud?”
“Of course I have!”
