Chapter Thirty Five
THIRTY-FIVE
Finally, it’s time to sleep.
No one else wants to be in Silas’s tent that night, so eventually you volunteer.
Partly, it’s for the extra space. But mostly it’s for the privacy.
A half hour ago, when you finished talking about Sean, everybody seemed to look at you differently.
There were pats on the back, and I’m-sorrys, and I-can’t-imagines, and the kind of looks that most people save for puppies at a shelter.
And while it felt good to let these people know who you really are, it also felt a bit like you were stripping down to your underwear in front of them.
So it’s oddly calming now to zip yourself into the tent of your dead counselor and be alone until morning.
Only it isn’t morning that interrupts your shallow sleep.
When your tent flap unfastens in the middle of the night, every part of you tenses, ready to fistfight a vengeful bear if necessary.
But this time it isn’t a predator; it’s a person who looks remarkably like Diana.
She enters the tent quietly, and once inside she fumbles with the zipper again, struggling to get it closed.
The wind has picked up, and before she can get the flap closed again, a biting gust makes its way through the mesh.
“Damn,” she whispers. “It’s getting cold out there.”
Then, while you watch through barely open eyes, she does the unthinkable: She gets into Silas’s abandoned sleeping bag and lies down next to you.
“What are you doing here?” you ask.
She’s quiet for a few seconds, which gives you time to wonder if she even knows what she’s doing here.
“He told me about the race,” she whispers.
Your eyes open wider, a spike of cortisol flushing away your sleepiness.
“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 got my 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.
“Or both of us.”
It’s unclear if either of you really believes this.
But even making room for a version of things where you’re not the sole cause of what happened to Sean feels lighter.
Saying it out loud feels important. But if you’re not to blame—and it’s not clear if this is true just yet—then why did it happen?
Why did he take such a risk? And why did he start pedaling in that moment where the whole world seemed to be screaming around him?
Why did he propel himself into the eye of the storm?
You think back to the night he was so angry on the stairs, after he found your letter, and what he said.
“It must be so easy for you.” It was a hurtful thing for him to assume, that your anxiety gave you some kind of free pass in life.
But given what Diana has told you, maybe it wasn’t so much anger as it was longing.
What was it like for him to have to be the “normal one”?
Did he refuse to get help for problems of his own because he thought there wasn’t any more room in the family?
Because you were filling the quota? You wish you could go back and tell him that if things were hard, there was space for him too.
“You were there,” says Diana, tucking her head against you. “Do you think he did it on purpose?”
It’s hard for you to picture clearly now. And you’re not sure if the view you had of the crash is even accurate, obscured as it was by passing traffic and the rain. It seemed, in that moment, like he was just taking off to get a jump on the competition, but he knew the light was red. He must have.
“I don’t think I’ll ever know,” you say.
She moves closer to you, and then both of you sit there for what feels like hours—but is probably minutes—in the semidark tent. Outside, the cold wind finds little openings to get in, but your combined breath warms the small space.
“Did you actually come here because of me?” you say. “Was that true, what you said?”
Diana is quiet for a second or two.
“Partly,” she says.
“But does that mean you’re just, like, here as a spy? Or did you actually need help?”
When she uncrosses her arms, her hand brushes against yours.
“I wanted the help too,” she says.
For just a second you’re disappointed it wasn’t all for you, one giant ploy to be close to you. But that’s quickly overridden by real concern.
“It started after he died,” she says. “I’ve been depressed before, but this was different.
Not just the numbness and lack of energy; suddenly I was on edge all the time, hearing noises in the night.
And drinking was the only thing that helped, but I didn’t want to do that all the time.
I wasn’t sure how to handle it. It’s part of the reason I called you all those times. I thought you might know what to do.”
The unanswered calls bring back a current of shame, but you manage to set it aside.
Diana stays in the sleeping bag next to yours, a softly breathing caterpillar.
And for a moment, it feels like anything could happen.
You’ve never been further away from your lives than right now.
But the wind howling outside reminds you that you’ve also never been closer to losing them. Diana starts to move.
“I should go,” she says.
She pulls her legs out of the opening, but when she’s removing her feet, something leaves the sleeping bag with her. It rustles in the dim light. You catch a glimpse and it looks like some papers, wadded into a ziplock bag.
“Whoa,” you say. “What is that?”
Diana opens the tent flap to a window, letting in more moonlight. She gathers up the ziplock and turns it around in her hands.
“I don’t know,” she says, opening the bag. “I can’t believe we never checked his sleeping bag.”
She takes out the contents and unfolds them, turning them in the soft blue light. There’s enough visibility now to see her expression, which is one of quiet awe.
“I could be wrong,” she says softly. “But it looks like a map.”