“When?” you ask.
“A couple of days before,” she says. “He called me in the middle of the night on Baba’s landline and told me he was done with all the self-help and religion. That it wasn’t working. And he just needed to get out of his head for a while. He said he needed to get back to the surface.”
“Surface?”
“I don’t know what it means exactly. But he said he was having these intrusive thoughts. He didn’t know to call them that, but that’s what they were. Like: violent things he wanted to say and do. Basically, the destroyer was back, but this time, wholly focused on himself.”
Your eyes are adjusting to the dark. Clouds must have moved in, because the moonlight is dim, but still, Diana is only inches away from you so you can see that she’s just looking at the ceiling of the tent. She blows a tangle of hair off her lips.
“What did you say to him?” you ask.
You hear a slow exhalation in the dark.
“I told him… I didn’t care what he did,” she says.
She wipes at her eyes.
“A few days before that, that girl from the ice cream shop gotmy number somehow. She called and screamed at Baba on the phone. I don’t know what it was about, but I was embarrassed and jealous and when I told him about it, he barely acknowledged it. He just kept talking about this bike race. I still loved him as a person, Case, but I couldn’t be the one to help him this time. I was done.”
She was really crying now.
“I knew how bad things were and I didn’t do anything.”
“You were upset.”
She manages a full breath.
“So many people I’ve loved have disappointed me. It’s happened again and again. I knew he needed someone, but I couldn’t risk getting pulled back in.”
She seemed to get herself under control, if only for a moment.
“I didn’t know that you guys had a fight,” she says. “I didn’t know he didn’t have you. I left him with nobody.”
You sit up entirely now, and even though you’re cold outside your sleeping bag, you don’t want to feel trapped by it anymore. You put a hand on Diana’s shoulder.
“The last thing he said to me was so weird,” she says.
“What was it?”
“He said, ‘I am not an Atlantean.’ Do you know what that means?”
“I don’t,” you say. “I have no idea.”
She’s not crying anymore, but sometimes it’s worse when your body can’t purge it, and you’re just living with the clamp of guilt. You sit in silence for a while, listening to the night wind, until finally a single thought occurs to you. And you say it out loud before you even know for certain what you mean.
“We can’t both be right.”
She turns to you.
“What are you talking about?” she says.
“We both think what happened to Sean is our fault, right? We both think we caused it. But we can’t both be right. It’s not possible. At least one of us is wrong.”
It takes a moment for her to respond. You assume she’s thinking it through, but you don’t know for sure. You don’t know until she speaks again.
“Or both of us,” she says.
You nod.
