The Rules of Regret

by Megan Squires

  “Are you ready to tell me about her?” he asked again, his question taking on the form of a gentle pleading. “Because your tears tell their own story, but I want your words, too, Darby.”

  His shirt clung to my back, to the bare skin above my towel, and his breath fell softly against my neck. It should have struck me as weird that there we were, Torin fully clothed, and me with only a terrycloth wrap covering my bare body, but nothing about it felt weird, or even remotely wrong. I’d kissed him and that felt all kinds of inappropriate, but standing together in the shower—that was right. At least in this moment, it was right.

  “Do you want me to tell you my story first?” When his mouth moved with the words, his chin pressed in and out of my shoulder, and he didn’t lessen the grip he had around me, but pulled me tighter.

  I nodded.

  “I was the one that found him,” Torin started. “It was in between camps. I had been gone all day cleaning the dining commons—that was sorta my task, and I liked doing it. Mom said I was good at it, but I think that just meant she didn’t want to do it. Whatever. I felt useful, so I didn’t mind. I mean, honestly, how well could a twelve-year-old kid clean an industrial-sized kitchen and 2,000 square foot eating area?” The question was rhetorical, so I just listened and let him continue. “I’d always figured Dad went back in after me to do the real deep cleaning, because they totally would have shut down our camp if we operated it the way I’d left things. But that day I saw him sweeping up after I’d finished up, and for some reason, it totally pissed me off. Like I wasn’t responsible enough to handle a real job. Like I was just going through the motions and still needed Mommy and Daddy to come to my rescue and clean up my mess.”

  The towel around me began to sag, laden with the water that continued to flow from the showerhead. Torin twisted his arms tighter to keep it in place, not what a typical nineteen-year-old boy would do, but Torin wasn’t typical. We’d established that from the get-go.

  “I went back to our cabin and Randy was there, dangling from the exposed beam in the ceiling. And God, he’d used my belt, Darby. My belt. He couldn’t have used his own damn belt?”

  I turned my head slowly, angling into his to offer some sort of comfort, but I doubted it helped much. Gestures like that had never helped me much.

  “You hear these stories where someone is charged with a crime because they left their gun out without a lock on it and someone else fired it. Didn’t matter that the owner had nothing to do with the actual incident. That’s how I felt. Like somehow leaving my stupid belt lying around was the same as handing Randy a loaded gun. ‘Here you go, bro. Feel free to take your life with this thing that I use to keep my pants from falling off my ass.’ “

  “Torin—”

  “The worst part?” he continued as though he hadn’t heard me interject. Maybe he hadn’t. “He left me the letter. Like addressed to me and all. As if I didn’t already feel responsible enough, now I had to be the one to share his suicide note with our parents. And you know what it said?”

  I shook my head.

  “That he decided to clean up his mess so Mom and Dad didn’t have to. The irony wasn’t lost on me, Darby. That just moments earlier I’d been so angry that my Dad was literally cleaning up after me. Stupid worries of a twelve-year-old. And here was my brother, literally terminating his own existence, like that would clean up the ‘mess’ he’d made. He’d slept with some camper and apparently she was now saying he’d raped her. She was going to go to the police with it. Press charges. Threaten to shut down the camp. So instead of telling anyone, he just killed himself. Like that was the best option? Like it would clean up his ‘mess?’ No, it just created an entirely new one. One we had to live out, not him.”

  As he spoke, Torin reached around me to twist the faucet off. My body went instantly cold as the towel hugged my skin, water collecting at the hem of the cotton, trickling down my legs. I turned around to face him, and he drew me into his chest, his fingers tangling in my knotted wet hair.

  “I saw her picture in your book, Darby. I wasn’t trying to snoop or anything. It just fell out when I opened it up,” he confessed quickly. “I want to know everything about you, and she seems like a pretty big part.” With his thumb and index finger, he pulled my chin up and in that instant, the notion flickered through my brain that I might actually love him.

  No one asked about Anna anymore. No one cared. Not even Lance. No—no one cared, except for Torin. So in the hotel shower, wrapped in a towel, streaked with tears, I thought I loved him, because he tried to see me, he wanted to know me. Even if he was right, even if I was just a mirage to him, he tried so hard to make me real. And I needed to be real. More than he knew. “She was a redhead, and she had freckles, but she’s not you. Is there a reason you are trying to be her?”

  I shook my head like I was saying no, but I wasn’t saying no to him. I was saying no to the past six years, to the life I had created, to the identity I’d stolen. He couldn’t have been prepared for what I was about to say, because hell, I wasn’t even prepared to utter it, but when the words tumbled from my lips, he didn’t falter even slightly, almost as though he knew it was coming. As if he knew all along.

  “She was my sister. She’s dead. And she’s sorta the reason I was with Lance.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The reporters had been camped out in front of our house for three weeks. But once they’d found her body, all of that disappeared. The media, the spotlight… Anna’s memory. The case went on for over two years, but it didn’t bring me any comfort in hearing the final verdict. Of course he was guilty. He’d kidnapped, assaulted, and killed three other girls before her. The mountain of evidence was stacked so high against him that he could have suffocated under the crushing weight of it. Too bad he didn’t. Too bad he didn’t have Torin’s belt.

  “She ran to the store two blocks away to grab some poster board she’d needed for her history project.” We stared up above us, both of our ankles crossed, our hands stacked on top of one another behind our heads like we were looking up at the stars rather than a hotel room ceiling. I focused on the intricate molding around the fan, how the wood coiled and twisted on the circular medallion ornamenting it. My hair was still damp from the shower, but the pillow soaked up much of the moisture. “Dad would have driven her, but he was at my older brother’s soccer game.”

  Torin nodded and the mattress jolted a bit underneath us.

  “But we did that—fended for ourselves. There were a lot of kids in my family, so we learned to be self-sufficient. We also learned to look out for one another. Anna and I always did. You’re not supposed to have a favorite sister. But she was my favorite. Hands down, Anna was my favorite.”

  Because I’m sure he could sense I needed it, Torin slipped his arm out and slid it under my shoulders, so that his hand and fingers curled around onto the other side.

  “Anna asked me to leave the porch light on, and I totally forgot. Lance had called for her about the project—mistaken my voice for hers at first—and I got stuck on the phone with him. We talked for two hours—all the way into dark—and I didn’t think about her once. I forgot to leave the light on and I didn’t even realize she was missing until my parents woke me up in the middle of the night. She never made it home.”

  My lips didn’t tremble, my breathing didn’t change. Because it wasn’t like this was some emotional confession. These were the facts. The irrefutable facts about the night my sister died.

  “You weren’t supposed to be her lighthouse, Darby. It wasn’t your responsibility to keep her safe.”

  “I’m not saying—”

  “You think I don’t see that? That you think it was your fault?” The bed dipped as he rolled onto his side. His green eyes were huge—wide—and he faced me like he wanted me to look into them. Like somehow he could shake me out of this with just his stare. But I’d been trapped here for six, long years, and it would take more than a convincingly warm look to pull me out. I loved him for w
hat he was trying to do, but the reality was that not much else could be done. “This was not your fault. Forgetting to leave the light on was not your fault.”

  “She didn’t know her way home. We’d just moved to the peninsula. What if she’d wandered all those hours trying to find her way back in the dark?” I fired my responses at him, because these, too, were facts. “She was last seen two miles away from home.”

  He shook his head hard, like he was angry, but not with me. Maybe with the situation. Maybe with the facts. Whatever it was, the emotion it drew out of him made me feel less alone, because no one had experienced my story for quite some time, and I liked Torin being a part of it, even if it was a terribly depressing, hopeless story.

  “The porch light was not your fault,” he said.

  “The belt was not your fault,” I replied.

  Silence, minutes of it, fell around us like flakes of snow, drifting down, coating us with a chilling cold that drew up the fine hairs on my skin. Torin used his arm underneath me to roll me up onto his chest, and I locked my fingers together behind his back, his heart sandwiched against my ear. I listened to it—listened to the way it kept a metronomic beat—and in that moment, it felt like it belonged to me. And when I felt my own beats slow to match the consistent rhythm of his, it felt like it became a part of me, too.

  Lance always said I had his heart. But I didn’t anymore. That was just something he began reciting when we were young, but nothing I’d felt recently. You couldn’t just declare something like that and have it stay true forever, especially when he’d given pieces of it to others along the way.

  There was more to love than words. A relationship had a pulse, a pattern, like the heartbeats written and recorded on an EKG. The ups and the downs, but consistencies nonetheless. Falling out of that pattern, that was when things got dangerous. The flat line was the killer, and my relationship with Lance had already died many deaths.

  What I’d recently found to be true was the idea that giving away your heart was a steady process, one that occurred gradually until all the beats morphed together. My beats. Torin’s beats. They were suddenly the same percussion ramming inside our beings. And so was our guilt. And so—I’d also discovered—were our stories.

  “She’d said once that she would give anything for the chance to date a guy like Lance. All through junior high—he was all she ever talked about. Anna + Lance in big, puffy cursive all over her notebooks and inside her locker.” Torin craned his neck up to look at me as I spoke, his eyes straining against the dark to meet mine. “And he’d called for her that night. After two years, he finally noticed her.”

  “So you fell in love with him as what, some type of tribute to her?”

  “I fell in love with him because he was there for me at a time when I needed love. And Anna never had the chance to fall in love. I guess I wanted to experience that for her.”

  Torin’s heart picked up speed, and for a moment, we were out of sync.

  “You can’t live someone else’s life, Darby,” he said, a hushed whisper.

  “I owed it to her.”

  “You are not Anna.”

  “I know—”

  “But you don’t,” he interrupted, placing a lot of emphasis on that last word. “Because if you did, things would be completely different. You wouldn’t be stuck in this emotionally stunted realm where your sister’s life ended. You wouldn’t have dated a guy that couldn’t be any more wrong for you—like seriously, Darby, he’s all wrong. And you wouldn’t be trying to keep her memory alive by making up some sordid alternate ending to her story,” Torin said, lifting up off the bed to sit. He’d changed into dry clothes, just as ratty and worn as before: a pair of flannel pajama pants and a navy blue shirt that read, “I Survived the Summit” across the front. I joined him, cross-legged, face to face, no longer heart to heart. “Her story—however tragic—ended that night. Randy’s ended at the cabin. That was it for them. They are done. End game.”

  “But she’s still a part of mine. Even if she’s gone—she’s still a part of mine, Torin. She’s still a part of me.”

  “Of course she is, but she’s not it, Darby. You are your own person. Honestly, it’s a little creepy to think that you could take over her existence.”

  “I didn’t start off trying to do that—I just wanted to keep her memory alive. I joined the basketball team just like she had. I listened to the same music she did. I felt close to her when I was doing the things she loved, you know? Don’t you get that?”

  “Completely. But did you ever begin to love those things on your own? Like apart from loving the idea that she loved them?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Being with Lance made you feel close to Anna,” Torin sighed. He raked his hands through his hair, like saying the statement was exasperating and he had to slough off some of that exhaustion.

  “But being with you makes me feel close to me.”

  Eyes flashing, Torin’s head snapped up with such force that it had to have hurt his neck, even just a little. He paused deliberately, and then said with an apologetic tone fastened to his voice, “He broke up with you, Darby.”

  “What?” I’d busied myself with the mindless task of picking my nails, but my hands fell to my lap as soon as he spoke. “What? When did…?”

  “Lance broke up with you,” Torin continued, pressing up onto his knees. “You’d gotten mail from him before, back at Summit, back in the office. There were a few letters.” My mouth was dry. My tongue ripped up and down it as I forced a swallow. “I kept them from you, because keeping Lance from you felt like the best thing to do at the time.”

  The hotel room blurred around me like the dressing room’s Tilt-a-Whirl antics from earlier. These rooms and their spinning axis’s. I needed everything to slow down and lock back into place.

  “I realize now that was wrong, I do—”

  “Yes, because stealing someone’s mail is illegal in nearly every state I’m fairly certain—” I had to search for the humor in this.

  “But stealing someone’s girlfriend,” he interrupted, “though maybe not illegal, holds a certain moral debasement that—turns out—I’m not entirely too concerned with.”

  I shook my head and a clump of wet hair stuck to my cheek. “What does that even mean, Torin? The letters—when did they come? What did they say?”

  Hearing that my long-term relationship had supposedly ended in the form of a Dear John should have shocked me. At the very least, it should have produced a tear or two, some slight mourning over the unexpected loss. But the only thing that coursed through me was relief. Like someone had pardoned a lifelong sentence. Like I’d done my duty. I finally felt free.

  “It came the first week.” Wow. Lance hadn’t wasted any time. “It said that maybe this time apart was a good opportunity to ‘find himself.’ “ Air quotes.

  “And?”

  “And by letter two, someone named Clara helped him do just that.”

  I wanted to be angry that there was yet another girl involved in whatever this was that Lance thought he needed, but all I could focus on was the sophisticated sound of her name. Clara. A beautiful name; one that fit the McIverson façade so absolutely perfectly. It was like that name had been created and reserved just for their family’s use. Clara and Lance. It rolled off the tongue with a royal intonation.

  Darby and Torin. Honest to God, we sounded like a pair of leprechauns.

  “So why did he invite me here?” The text at the airport suddenly made sense. I’m really glad you still wanted to see me. Because had I actually received those letters, chances are I wouldn’t have. Oh my word, I looked like a total, ignorant fool. “If he wanted things to be over, why invite me here?”

  “The last letter I commandeered…” He seriously just said commandeered. I smirked. “ …said something about a huge mistake. That he knew he’d called things off, but his parents loved you. He loved you. You know, that common, sentimental ‘I’ve-just-given-up-the-love-of-my-life-and-I’
ll-do-anything-to-get-her-back’ crap. It was honestly a steaming load of shit if you ask me—vomit-inducing material. I didn’t bother showing you that one either because I respect you and your stomach too much. You hardly eat—what little you do choke down, you should be allowed to keep there.”

  “So you kept it from me,” I began, grateful for the lighthearted turn our conversation took. Lighthearted, I supposed, in contrast to our earlier dead sibling discussions, because the termination of six year relationships didn’t feel altogether lighthearted when I really considered it. “You kept Lance’s letters from me because you were worried about me maintaining a reasonable weight.”

  “It was purely a health concern.”

  “Then in that case, I forgive you.” I smiled at him, grinning a little and slivering my eyes the way I did when I attempted to flirt, for reasons unknown. “Had you kept this life-altering information from me for your own selfish gain, then I might have to deliberate a bit longer.” I smirked again and Torin returned it instantly. “But what you did sounds absolutely selfless, so I think I should actually be thanking you.”

  “I know you’re joking,” he began, slipping back down onto the mattress, propping his hands behind his head, “but I know a part of you is mad at me for it. You should be. In fact, I demand that you be.”

  “Why would you demand that?” I bit at my thumbnail, pulling it back and forth between my teeth until a small piece of it broke off. I spit it over the side of the bed and pushed my thumb back in my mouth again.

  “I want to be that finger of yours, Darby.”