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Two foreheads pressed together, just the shapes like an outline. Two cuts, both across our eyebrows. My lips form the same words again.
We match.
Had it been something I said then? Was it that night that made Toren go? Or was it what my dad had done to him?
We were children, in a way we still are, kids on the cusp of the final fall of adulthood. And nothing of what we thought we’d be.
Was there some penultimate sacrifice I was meant to pay for everything I’d done? And was this, finally, it? The real and total loss of him.
There’s a memory I keep heavily tucked near the back recesses of my mind. Of a boy pushing me behind him in my living room, my hands pulling out my hearing aid as if that would stop it all. It was the one time I was sure my dad would hit me.
But he hadn’t.
And it was only then I realized, as Toren tucked his body around me like an instinct, that there was a sure chance my dad was hurting Toren.
For years after Toren left me behind, I thought about it. Until I’d convinced myself that it didn’t happen. That my dad wasn’t easy to deal with, that he was hard on me, but he wasn’t a bad man—that anything Toren had been subjected to was my fault, because I wouldn’t let either of them go.
Why can’t I just let him go?
Only when I lift the bit of charcoal barely formed between my fingers off the third page I’ve sketched over, it’s not Toren. It’s sad eyes of black and white but I can imagine them in color—navy blue and disappointed.
My parents’ story was one I heard from everyone but my own family. It was town legend, and though I was sure Toren tried to shield me from it, I knew the basics.
My mom struggled after I was born. Maybe before, too, but I’d never know. And my dad couldn’t fix her like he wanted to. She died by suicide when I was five. I’d found her and then . . . I don’t remember what happened after.
I didn’t remember finding her either. But that’s what people whispered.
It felt like a story about people far away in some made-up town, not the origins of my birth and family. I’d never been able to reconcile the two.
“I lost your mother because I wasn’t strong enough to do what she needed. I won’t do the same for you.”
The words my dad said as I lay in my bed for the week after I’d woken up in the hospital again. The kindest version of it, as I stayed in that room, in that bed for weeks and weeks, until his words turned to sharpened knives.
“You’re being selfish, Lillian.”
“This has to stop, Lillian. I won’t tolerate this laziness.”
“Get up.”
The paper shreds in my hands easily now, desperate to erase him from this room. From the sanctuary of this one place that no one will ever see but me.
A wet spot forms across the next drawing as I finish adding lines over the shedlike house in the woods. Built by my father soon after my mother died, white and pink—but grown over with ivy by the time Toren Kane turned up in my backyard. We’d play house in there, before it became like an art studio. Then a haven.
One that wasn’t the inside of my bedroom.
I press my finger over the usual dot-and-line-style charcoal work, giving it that same effect that makes my brain quiet as I stare at a Van Gogh, smearing the spot of my tears against the rough paper as it smudges the lines.
Happiness is relative to us LaBlancs. Maybe my father is right.
Maybe this is all I will ever feel.
Happiness always just a little bit out of reach, the easy warmth of giving up always nipping at my heels. Even when I’m here, in this space I’ve made, doing the one thing in my life that makes me the happiest, there is a subtle bitterness to everything. Like I’m breathing in clean air and breathing out toxins, poisoning myself with what’s rotten within me.
Maybe this is it.
• • •
Toren doesn’t show up for math, both days for the week. I don’t ask, and I don’t expect to see him, but every time I enter the classroom early, it’s with the hope that I can see him. Explain.
