Noel could see Darby looking at the fire too, wanting to make it easier for him to talk, he supposed.
‘Karen, my parents … I don’t have any memories of them,’ he said. ‘Karen was pretty much out of the picture by the time I was old enough to understand I had a sister, and when I met her – every time I met her, it was like I was sitting down with a stranger. I never really knew her, or my parents. They were my family, but after that night … I’ve always felt like he’d stolen memories from me. All these years, I’m mourning ghosts because it’s what I’m supposed to do, you know?’
Darby nodded encouragingly, listening.
‘Whatever Karen asked of me, I’ve either done it or tried to do it. But, as time wore on, it felt like I was doing it out of a sense of obligation. Now that it’s over, I …’
‘You feel guilty for having survived,’ she said. ‘Again.’
Her words felt like a kick to the stomach. The truth often felt that way.
‘I was on the phone with Vivian right before you came over,’ Noel said.
‘She called you back?’
‘After she found out about Karen? She most certainly did.’ He saw that her glass was empty. ‘You want a refill?’
‘No. I’m all set for the moment. Keep talking.’
But he didn’t want to talk. He never saw the benefit of talking about himself with shrinks because they loved to pick apart your words. And the pill-pushers didn’t want you to talk. All they wanted was to write prescriptions that sent him to a chemically induced half-life state where he felt like he had one foot in the real world, the other in some purgatory in which he was a zombie, his brain dead.
Darby, though, was neither. She was simply someone who understood the complicated wiring of the human brain.
He licked his lips, looking at his empty glass. He wasn’t drunk but on his way to it – and the booze had liberated something in him, a need to unburden himself. He’d always joke with his therapists that if they really wanted to get their patients to open up they should have a well-stocked bar in the waiting room.
‘I feel –’ Noel sucked in air through his nostrils and exhaled loudly. ‘The truth? About Karen? I feel relieved. So fucking relieved.’
‘I know how you feel.’
He opened his mouth, about to call bullshit on her, that she was giving him lip service; then he remembered something he’d read in her file, an event she had endured when she was a teenager: she had been home alone one night while her mother was at work and someone had broken into her house and tried to kill her.
Darby watched the fire. ‘My mother was a nurse and she had to work a lot of night shifts at the hospital,’ she said. ‘I was home – I was fifteen at the time – and someone broke into my house and tried to … I think he came there to abduct me. Anyway, I managed to escape to my mother’s bedroom, where I locked the door. Then I heard the doorbell ring.’
‘Your friend, whatshername, Melanie something.’
She was about to ask the question and he said, ‘It was in your file.’
‘So you know he took Melanie instead of me.’
Noel nodded. And she was never seen again, he added privately.
Darby looked at him, her eyes full of the same sad understanding. ‘It’s normal, what you’re feeling,’ she said. ‘Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to carry. There were times early on – Christ, there were weeks when all I did was wish someone would come along and carry it for a while, you know, give me a break so I could rest up.’
‘What do they call that? Wishful thinking?’
‘That, or magical thinking. Indulging in it is what traps you.’
‘What did you do?’ Noel asked, surprising himself. He never talked about this except with a handful of soldiers who had become close friends. He never expected to talk about it with a civilian – and a woman, no less. But Darby was a soldier. He was sure of that.
Darby considered the question. He stared at her artlessly perfect profile in the firelight. She was ridiculously beautiful – definitely not the sort of woman you’d picture running all over the country chasing madmen. For some reason he thought back to that moment yesterday evening when he told Darby to take the seat at the front of the helicopter, Bradley shooting him a look like Noel had stolen something from him. Beauty made many men envious and jealous. Treacherous. But beauty could also help you forget about the present and the past, allow you to get lost in the possibility of a life where you woke up every day greeting the sunrise instead of dreading it.
‘It doesn’t change,’ she said.
‘What doesn’t change?’
‘The outcome. No amount of wishing or fantasizing about how, if you could go back in time to the event, you would do such and such and save the person’s life and emerge the hero – no amount of praying or talking about it in therapy – there’s nothing you can do to change the outcome. It’s fixed. Done. Over. The only thing you have control over is your choices, whether you want to accept what happened and carry it, or choose to ignore it. I always chose to carry it, because it gave my life shape and purpose. At the end of the day, our choices are what define us. Our ability to choose is the only control we have.’
Darby put her empty glass on the coffee table beside her and stood.
He didn’t want her to leave. Wanted her to stay, keep talking.
‘You sure you don’t want another drink?’ he asked.
‘No. I definitely don’t want another drink.’
Noel got to his feet, trying to hide his disappointment.
‘Darby –’
She leaned forward and kissed him.