The first thing she did when she got home from the church was pull out a piece of paper and begin her regret list for the week. It wasn’t even close to Friday, but with the funeral tomorrow and Kristyn and her family due anytime, Tabitha decided to get a jump on things. She would start the list with the way she’d broken down and cried in front of the pastor while planning the memorial service, her makeup staining his white dress shirt as he comforted her. He’d looked down at the shirt and said, “Occupational hazard,” and they’d both laughed. But still, she’d vowed to save her tears for when she was alone.
She wrote:
What next? She was poised over the paper, pondering regret number two, when she heard someone tap at the back door. She put down the pen and went to peek through the gauzy curtains covering the window and saw the outline of a familiar face. She pulled open the door and greeted Larkin, knowing Larkin had not come to see her. She watched as Larkin’s eyes swept the kitchen, then all but stood on her tiptoes to see beyond it.
“I’m sorry,” Larkin said. “For interrupting you.”
“You’re not interrupting me,” Tabitha said. “But if you’re looking for Thaddeus, he isn’t here.” She looked around and shrugged. “I think he went on one of his walks.”
“Oh, well, I was just going to tell him something,” Larkin said. “We had a sort of . . . disagreement earlier, and I”—she waved her hand—“Well, it’s stupid.”
“He was important to you,” Tabitha said, surprised at the words as they came out of her mouth. “I mean, back when you were kids.” She raised her eyebrows in question.
Larkin ducked her head and gave the smallest of nods.
“I didn’t see it back then, but I see it now,” Tabitha said. “I didn’t see a lot of things.” She gestured behind her, where her regret list lay. “You know what I was doing before you showed up?”
Larkin shook her head, her expression curious.
“I was writing a regret list. It’s something I do every week. I usually write it on Fridays, but I decided to get an early start on this week’s list since we’ve got so much going on.”
Larkin nodded as if this made sense when it couldn’t possibly. Saying it aloud, Tabitha heard how foolish it all sounded. Still, she felt the need to explain it to Larkin, or at least to try to.
“I started it the Friday after Davy disappeared. It had been such a terrible week, and I kept thinking of all the regrets I had. I needed somewhere to put them, something to do with them, so I wrote them all down. Then I read over the list a few times and threw it away. The next Friday I did it again, and I just kept it up. For twenty-one years, I’ve kept it up.”
Tabitha glanced over at the list, waiting to be filled. There were always regrets; there always would be. It was impossible to get through life without them.
“The thing about that list—and the thing I would tell you—is some of the regrets are of things that happened to me, things I can’t help or change. But there are some I could’ve prevented. Through different choices, or words, or actions, I could’ve avoided them completely.” She raised her eyebrows.
“Thaddeus being here—the two of you being sort of thrown back together like this—must be conflicting. And that’s fine—it’s normal to have jumbled emotions about the past. Just don’t let it mess up what you’ve got now—that man I saw on the computer screen the other day, that little girl.” She pointed at Larkin. “This new baby on the way.”
Tabitha watched as Larkin’s eyes filled with tears, and she reached out to embrace the young woman.
“It’s all so precious.” Tabitha spoke low, her lips close to the girl’s ear. “You can’t appreciate now just how precious it is.”
And that was the biggest regret of all. That was what each week’s list was saying again and again. I missed it. I missed it. I missed it. She hadn’t appreciated how rare and fleeting it would all be, that the simplest moments were actually remarkable. She’d looked right past them, her eyes always scanning the horizon for something else. She’d had it all, and then it was all gone. She would regret those oversights for the rest of her life, no matter how many times she wrote that she regretted nothing.
She let go of Larkin and stepped back to look at her.
“So,” Larkin said, wiping her eyes. “I guess don’t tell him I came by.”
“I think that’s best.” Larkin mustered a smile. “See you at the memorial tomorrow?”
“Of course,” Larkin said. “Of course, we’ll be there.”
Just like you always have been. Tabitha watched as Larkin turned to make her way back to the house next door, then she closed the door and went back to the regret list. Instead of writing, she seized the paper, closing her fist around it, the crumpling sound loud in the quiet house. She held the ball of paper in her hand and studied it for just a moment, then walked over and tossed it into the trash. She stood over the bin and knew that she would never again write a regret list. The one she’d written last Friday had been her last.
She tried to recall that last list, what had been on it, but she could not. And she guessed that was the point: Je ne regrette rien. I regret nothing. Though, if that were true, wouldn’t she have stopped the practice long ago?
The truth was, she regretted everything, all the time, beginning with the moment she allowed Thaddeus and Davy to go play night games. For the second time that day, the tears came, unrelenting and unavoidable. She turned to the counter—the same counter where she’d assembled peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and written checks and yelled commands—as sobs wracked her body. At least she was alone this time.
And then she wasn’t. Arms went around her, pulled her in. For a moment she thought it was Daniel. Then she heard a voice that was not Daniel’s, but close.
She looked up to find her son’s face. But not the son she lost. No, this was the one she had left, the one who, God help him, had regrets of his own, regrets she’d left him to wrestle with alone.
“I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’m so sorry.”
He stepped back and looked at her quizzically. “Mom, what are you sorry for?”
“I left you with him. That night. And when you came back without him, I blamed you. I made you responsible. But it was only because I couldn’t accept my own responsibility.”
He had stepped away from her, yet his hands still gripped her arms, just above the elbows. They were a man’s hands, but she still saw them as the hands of a boy, a boy who’d had to grow up overnight, a boy who had been cheated out of so much because his brother disappeared.
“It wasn’t your fault, honey.” Her words were less of a statement and more of a plea: Please believe it. Please move forward with your life.
He pulled her back to him, crushing her against his chest as he hugged her. He spoke into her hair, and she remembered when it was the reverse, when it was her speaking into his hair, baby curls damp from sleep as she softly sang a lullaby.
“Mom, you don’t understand. I sent him away.” Thaddeus began to sob, and she wanted to soothe him as she once could.
But she couldn’t promise that it was just a bad dream, that the sun would rise in the morning and chase away the darkness. That was what made her the angriest—that she’d been robbed of something most mothers have: the assurance that there was no bogeyman. Her children grew up knowing that was a lie.
“He wanted to be with me and my friends, but I sent him away,” Thaddeus moaned. Still sobbing, he crumpled and she bent with him, sinking to the floor together.
“Shh,” she said. “Shh.” There, cradling him as best she could, she let herself recall the party they’d gone to that night and the phone call that ended it. On the way home from the party, she’d practiced what she’d say to Thaddeus about being more responsible after they located Davy. She’d brooded the whole ride home, not absorbing the severity of the situation, refusing to think it could be anything other than a misunderstanding that would quickly be resolved.
She hugged Thaddeus tighter, as if the sheer strength of her grip could communicate the force of her love for him. She’d gotten so much wrong. This, she thought, this was her regret. Though the words had never made it onto a single sheet of paper in all these years, this was what she regretted most—the mother she hadn’t been to Thaddeus after they lost Davy.
And then Daniel was there, crouching unsteadily on the floor with them, his arms encircling them both, gathering them like chicks under his wings. They remained, the three of them, like that for a while.
Until another voice, familiar but out of place, joined them.
“Mom? Dad?” Kristyn called as she wandered through the house to find her father, mother, and older brother in a damp heap on the kitchen floor. With a nervous laugh she asked, “What are you guys doing?”
The three looked up to see the baby of the family standing there, all grown up and a mother herself. Behind her, her two children and husband stood clumped together and cast uncertain glances at her, at them. What had they walked into?
What indeed. Tabitha couldn’t help but think of how they must look. And soon Kristyn’s children, Tabitha’s grandchildren, began to giggle. Soon everyone else, with a kind of relief, laughed too.