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“No. But I think you are.”
“Where do you get that from?”
“I think you feel guilty about your mistakes before your parents died, about the bad choices you made. I think you feel guilty, as if everything that happened to you, to them, was a result of whatever you were doing that you didn’t want them to know about.”
Hannah stood up and looked down at him. She knew he was intentionally poking at her, trying to get a rise. But she couldn’t stop herself from responding.
“What didn’t I want them to know about?” she asked accusatorily.
“I couldn’t possibly know,” he said. “Probably nothing; maybe sneaking off to a keg party in the woods, smoking weed in the bathroom during lunch, letting that guy with the tattoos feel you up behind the bleachers, stealing makeup from the department store. That kind of thing.”
“You think I did all that stuff?”
“I don’t know what choices you made. But I think you feel like you were punished for making those kinds of choices, like you deserve what’s happened to you, like your parents paid the price that you owed.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, pretending not to notice the tears that burned in her eyes.
“Probably,” he conceded. “I usually am. Just out of curiosity, what exactly am I wrong about this time around?”
“You’re wrong that I feel guilty about what happened to them,” she said, her voice quiet as she spoke aloud for the first time what she’d thought silently many times before. “I feel guilty because I don’t feel bad about what happened to them. I know I should. But in the spot where the sadness and the guilt should go, there’s nothing. I don’t feel anything at all, at least not for them.”
She couldn’t help but notice that Garland had stopped feeding the fish.
