Lying awake in the dark or wandering around the neighborhood at night; running around blind, looking for someone, anyone, to take away my blame.
“Look, Isabelle. I’m sorry,” Valerie says at last, sighing. “I really am. But you are looking for answers in places where they just don’t exist.”
I pick at my nails, eyes cast down to the floor. I’ve heard that so many times. Suddenly, I think of my father, creating that story about Margaret’s death because it was just easier for everyone to accept. I wonder if that’s what Waylon did, too. If he simply created a story he needed to believe: that Allison never would have done it. That she never would have taken her own life. Maybe he’s been spending the last eight years trying to prove it, dedicating his own life to learning about death because the truth of his own sister’s is too painful to accept.
Maybe he’s just looking for someone to be responsible, the way I am, too. Maybe we’re both so desperate for answers, we’re willing to believe anything.
“I won’t tell Ben you came here,” Valerie says. “He would be heartbroken if he found out you were thinking about him like this.”
I nod my head gently, too ashamed to meet her gaze. Then I stand up and take one more glance around the room, ready to apologize and step back outside, when something in the corner catches my eye.
It’s that wall of pictures. I realize now, standing closer, they’re almost entirely of Ben.
I walk toward the wall, away from the door, and scan them all hanging there, one by one. I see Valerie and Ben sitting in the grass downtown, Spanish moss draped behind them like a stage curtain being whipped back. There’s another of them in the stands of a concert, colorful lights dancing across a stage in the distance, and one more of them lying on the beach, their sunglasses reflecting a phone held high in the sky.
“Isabelle,” Valerie says, trying to nudge me along. I can hear her walking closer, sidling up behind me. “I don’t think it’ll help for you to look at those.”
But I don’t turn around. I can’t turn around. I’m too focused on Ben and the varying shades of stubble on his cheeks; on Valerie’s subtle highlights slowly growing out, a finger of dark roots pinching at her scalp. Visible signs of the passage of time that shouldn’t be possible for a relationship this new.
“You didn’t meet at that grief counseling group.”
It seems so obvious to me now, I hate myself for not seeing it sooner. After all, we had a story, too. Ben and I. But it wasn’t real. It was something he had concocted; something he had created to paint himself in the most flattering light. Our relationship had started long before we announced it to the world, and I remember that first night together after the memorial now, the two of us tangled between the sheets of my childhood bed. The sickness that settled in my stomach after he stood up and walked away, like I knew I had just consumed something that was bound to hurt me.
“You know we can’t tell anybody about this. Not yet.”
I twist around now and look at Valerie, standing right behind me, eyes wide and afraid. He really did do to me what we did to Allison.
Ben and Valerie were together long before we were apart.
“How long?” I ask, taking a step closer. “How long have you been together?”
Valerie shakes her head, a little quiver in her lip, and takes a step backward, putting some distance between us.
“How long?”
“I felt so bad for the longest time,” she says at last. “Doing what we did behind your back. But the things he told me about you…”
I remember that feeling: the justification of it. The guilt, the indignity, overridden by the stories I told myself. The stories about Allison I decided to accept in order to make myself feel better: that they weren’t us. It’s a form of self-preservation, really. We are nothing but what we choose to believe, but it’s all a mirage, bending and warping and shimmering in the distance, changing its form at any given second.
Showing us exactly what we want to see when we want to see it.
“How long?” I repeat, my resolve settling back in and hardening in my stomach. “How long have you been with Ben?”
The house is quiet in a silent standoff. Finally, she sighs.
“Two years.”
Two years. Two years. For two entire years, Ben has been seeing someone else. Before Mason was taken. Before he even took his first steps.
I count back in my head now, trying to determine how old he would have been.
“Six months,” I say, muttering to myself. Mason would have been six months old when they first got together: the age he was when I started working again. When I took off for a few nights every month, driving to North Carolina and Alabama and Mississippi, trying to chase those little moments of meaning that were ripped from me all those years ago.