“So do you,” she says.
“We have baggage,” you say.
You finally turn around, and for less than a second, you see her smile. This is the one thing you’ve always shared, no matter how hard things got. The same stupid sense of humor. But the smile is short-lived, and it’s quickly replaced with a look of complete exhaustion.
“What do we do, Case?” she whispers.
And the look in her eyes, one of pure question, is a lot different from the Diana you used to know, the one who always seemed to know what to do. She knew what Sean should wear when he was elected to homecoming court but didn’t really care about it. She knew what to do when his car battery died past curfew. She knew how to make a device that eradicated the smell of marijuana smoke when you blew through a toilet-paper tube full of dryer sheets. The Diana you knew before always seemed to understand these things intuitively and live free of the constant worry that made your every moment so tiresome.
Which means right now, standing steps away from this lake, on the verge of a mission for survival, she must be feeling pretty bad. Maybe even worse than you. She isn’t used to all this. She’s a rookie. And she’s asking you for help.
“Hey,” you say, not really paying attention to your volume anymore. “Listen. About the funeral. I…”
“Screw you, man,” she says right away. “We are not getting into that right now—”
Then she stops speaking. She does this because Silas is standing right in front of you, staring at both of you in silence. Neither of you noticed his approach, but he’s definitely standing there now, so close that you can smell his organic deodorant. And he’s definitely not happy about the interruption to his TED Talk about how not to die in the woods.
“Diana,” he says slowly. “Case.”
Neither of you moves.
“Do you guys have something you need to say to me?”
Diana chokes her half-bleached hair into a nervous ponytail and lets it go. She cracks her knuckles. Then she looks at you, hereyes closing to half-mast, and suddenly, she adopts a strong accent with a rising intonation and says:
“Molimo vas.”
Silas’s anger promptly shifts to befuddlement.
“What was that?” he says.
He doesn’t understand. Of course he doesn’t.
Butyoudo.
That’s the thing.
You actually understand what she’s saying.
SEVEN
You don’t remember when exactly the lessons started, but you remember where you were: a Perkins Family Restaurant off the highway, across from a car dealership. It had a broken claw machine, green vinyl booths, and a crew of chain-smoking servers who came mostly from a nearby halfway house. It was the place Diana took Sean to do homework over bottomless pots of coffee and Mammoth Muffins, and the occasional cigarette in the parking lot.
You were asked to tag along, mostly so you could do Sean’s calculus (to his credit, he paid handsomely). But Sean was a rising star on the diving team, and when he was in season, he transformed from a late-night studier to someone who kept the hours of an aging retiree. His dream was to be recruited by a D1 school, and in the past couple of years, this had begun to seem more like a possibility. Starting in his junior year, coaches turned up at his meets, conspicuous in their school-branded half-zips, recording his every pike and tuck on their phones. So when Sean turned in at nine thirty like your grandmother, you and Diana started making the expedition to Perkins on your own.
After she’d spent enough time sitting around Sean’s room, watching him play video games and doing other things with him you preferred not to think about, she would kiss him good night and walk across the hall to knock on your door.
“You fly. I buy,” she’d say each time, and you would grab the keys to the ancient Toyota Corolla you and Sean shared.
Diana didn’t have a car, and though she explained it away by saying she was scared of driving, eventually you figured out that she just didn’t have the money. Your family wasn’t exactly rich either, but you were middle class enough to have an extra beater car for you and your brother. It had a passenger-side door that wouldn’t shut all the way, and a tire pressure light that was always on, but it could make the two-mile drive to an American casual dining chain that never closed.
The first time you went without Sean, it was a little weird. He was a big presence in any room, and it was his steady commentary and running jokes that usually kept the party going. He was effortless with people and always had been. He even developed an unlikely bond with a server there named Geoff who was at least fifty-five years old, had long stringy brown hair, and always read sci-fi novels on his breaks. Once, while you were finishing Sean’s problem set, he and Geoff had a twenty-minute conversation about the painter Hieronymus Bosch, a person, as far as you knew, who Sean had never heard of.
“Maybe you should be dating Geoff,” Diana said when they finally came up for air.
It was a ridiculous joke, and the smile on Diana’s face was a playful one. But Sean immediately responded with:
“Maybe you should be dating Case.”
