Oh.
The truth is what I wanted to say.
My words are so soft I’m not sure he hears them. But his shoulders move. A flinch, or a breath pulled in too fast.
He doesn’t turn around. “I shouldn’t have… brought money for ice cream.”
My throat constricts. I’ve never heard him say that.
I’ve replayed the ice cream truck incident over in my head a thousand times, a hundred thousand, dissecting every choice, every word, every second where one of us could’ve done the thing that would have saved Eli’s life. But I’ve always done it alone. The guilt has been mine and his to carry and we’ve carried it in separate rooms of the same house for twelve years.
We didn’t even speak about it at the funeral.
We’veneverspoken to each other about it.
“I told him it would be fine,” I say. My voice cracks on fine. “I looked him in the eyes and said I promise. I promised him everything would be okay. Why did I say that?”
Dorien finally turns around. His face is a mess, but not the way I imagined it would be the handful of times I’ve let myself think about this conversation. I imagined he’d have at least some of his normal, distant composure. I imagined the unreadable version of himself he gives the rest of the world. But his eyes are so red, so wet, and his mouth is pressed into a line that keeps trembling.
This isn’t the Dorien I thought I knew.
“I called him lame,” he says. “He didn’t want to go. He said no and I called him lame because I wanted to impress you.”
A sound leaves me that I don’t recognize. It comes from my stomach, not my throat, from somewhere I’ve kept locked away. My knees bend. I press my palms against my thighs to stay standing.
“He was scared,” I say. “He was scared, and I held his arm and smiled at him, like climbing into a stranger’s van was okay.”
“I told him we wouldn’t hang out with him anymore if he didn’t go. I was a bully.”
“God.” The word rips out raw. “We were kids. We were such stupid kids.”
“Kids who should’ve known better.”
“We were kids.”
“He knew something was wrong with that van. Why didn’t we listen to him?” Dorien’s voice breaks in the middle and he stops. His hands are shaking because he doesn’t have gloves on tonight. I’ve only seen him without gloves when he’s making art. His hands are bare and trembling, and I want to reach for them, but I’m trembling too.
My hands are so cold I wouldn’t provide him any warmth.
“I should’ve gone for help,” I tell him. “After the van drove away, I wanted to run back to the cabins and I should’ve fought you harder.”
“I held you there because I was too scared to move.”
“I know.”
“I told myself it was to protect you. That the man would circle back and shoot us. I believed that for years.” He swallows. “But I was just scared.”
“I know,” I say again, and I do. I’ve always known, like the way you can see the underpainting of a person even when they’ve glazed over it with years of fake indifference.
His face crumples, and it’s so alarming I gasp. The muscles around his mouth give way, his eyes squeeze shut, and a sobcomes out of him that sounds like he’s dying. His whole body folds forward.
I close the distance between us. My arms go around him, and his go around me. And we stand there in front of Eli’s grave and come apart. His face is against my hair and mine is pressed into his shoulder, the leather of his jacket cold against my cheek. I can feel the vibration of his crying through my jaw, into my teeth. My own tears soak into his collar.
We hold each other and we finally, after years of fighting, let the grief do what it wants.
I don’t know how long that lasts either. When we finally pull apart, my arms hurt from gripping so hard. We end up sitting on the ground in front of the headstone, facing each other with our knees touching. The grass is cold and damp through my jeans.
Dorien wipes his face with the back of his hand. In the moonlight his eyes look more gray than copper, washed out, the warmth drained from the color. I’ve never seen him like this. Every layer of charm and sarcasm has been stripped away so he’s just the boy who lost his friend and never forgave himself.
