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After a minute, she pulls her marshmallow from the flames, standing up to put together her s’more.
“Are you ready for yours?” She sets hers on the bench wrapped in a napkin.
“Yep.” I pull my stick from the flame.
She holds out the pieces and uses them to scrape the marshmallow off my stick, squishing it all together and handing it to me.
We sit next to each other, eating in sticky silence.
When we’re done, she tosses her napkin into the fire. “Aria and Jake, they were twins.”
I can’t read her profile, cast in shadow.
“That’s rough.” I finish my treat, wiping off my hands and chucking my napkin in the fire on top of hers.
“Yeah. It gets worse. He was with her when she died.”
My heart aches, the s’more turning into lead in my gut thinking about what he must have gone through. What he’s still going through.
“Not long after she died, our dad got sick. Jake took care of him. It helped distract him from the reality of Aria’s loss, but then after Dad died . . . .” She stands suddenly, moving to the fire, holding her hands out in front of her.
She swallows, the delicate muscles of her throat bobbing with the motion. “A couple of years after Aria passed, Taylor came to stay with me. I had just graduated from college and Taylor had just graduated from high school. She came so we could celebrate.” She crosses her arms. “She told me—” her eyes fall shut. “She came to me for comfort. She admitted a mistake she had made. It had to do with Aria. What she told me made me really angry. It was a big mistake. A lethal mistake.” She opens her eyes, her gaze pleading to understand.
I nod.
“I lashed out at her, and we had a huge fight and . . . I don’t know.” Her arms drop to her sides. “She wants to be absolved. She wants me to tell her it’s not her fault and that it’s all okay, but I can’t do it. And now, I don’t know if we can ever forgive each other. Every time I see her, I get so angry I can barely think straight.” She frowns. “Am I a terrible person?”
“No.” My answer is instant and unequivocal.
“How do you know that? You don’t know the whole story. I left out a lot of details.”
“Your feelings are valid, even the bad ones. It’s okay to feel angry. It’s okay to be upset. There’s nothing wrong with experiencing the gamut of human emotions, even the negative ones. The trick is to understand where they’re coming from. Is your anger masking something else?”
She stares at me for a long minute. “I don’t know.” The words are whispered so softly if her mouth hadn’t moved I might have questioned if she even spoke. She clears her throat and speaks louder. “It’s just—I-I wish I could be around her without feeling so wretched. It’s like I can’t control it.”
I understand all too well how grief can trigger uncontrollable anger. “When people we love die, we feel helpless.”
She walks back over and sits, no more than a foot away. “Yes.”
“When Kevin died, I blamed Granny Bea. I was incredibly angry with her.”
She shifts slightly, angling in my direction. “Your grandmother? Why?”
“She’s not really my grandmother, she was Kevin’s. I felt like she should have known. She should have seen it coming. I didn’t understand that I was actually mad at myself, becauseIshould have seen it coming. I had so much guilt I couldn’t deal with it. I had to project it onto someone else. Which I did, onto more than one person.”
“What happened?”
I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees. “When I went back to school, one of my good friends pretended like nothing had happened. He said nothing about Kevin because he was worried that bringing him up would upset me, but instead, the fact he didn’t bother to ask made me irate. Later that day, another friend stopped me in the hall to see how I was feeling and talk about Kevin, and I almost decked him.” I shake my head, chuckling softly.
She leans closer, her hand resting on the bench between us. “A tad conflicting.”
“Exactly. I realized then that the irrational anger I felt toward everyone was covering up my other emotions. Grief tosses our entire world into turmoil, and anger is safer than guilt and fear. Anger is easy to use as a shield when someone you love is suddenly gone and you have to deal with the fact that you have no control over the world around you. It’s all just . . . meaningless.”
She’s staring at me, eyes wet. A tear slips down her cheek, and she dashes it away with a hand. “It is.”
Our eyes lock, the moment stretching between us, a mutual understanding. Mindy has a lot of hard edges on the outside, but they mask so much pain. I want to take it all away and somehow make it better, gather her in my arms, and tell her it will all be okay.
But I don’t have the right.
