Almost
“Oh my god,” Shane says. “I’m so sorry, I never—”
“I was mad at her for so many years,” I say mechanically. “Willa. Mad at her for leaving without saying goodbye after Graham’s service. I couldn’t understand why she was so cold to me.”
I’d thought Willa was wrecked over Graham’s death. But I could never understand her just vanishing, drowning in Mexico.
“She did it, and she couldn’t tell me, and it’s why she left. Why she...” Willa had carried the burden of the shell trail, all alone, for two years. Until she couldn’t anymore. I’d never accepted her suicide, but now it made sense. “It’s my fault.”
I wait for disgust, accusation. For Shane to judge me, because it was my idea. I wait for him to flee.
Instead he pulls me close. “I’m so sorry.”
But all I can hear is Willa’s voice, up in her bedroom, small and lost, asking me to sing for her as we waited for news.
Willa’s voice on the beach, when I told her she should banish any thoughts of guilt, mystical responsibility, of flinging the idea of Graham getting lost into the universe.
What if I had tempted nature? Would you hate me?
“She tried to tell me. She wanted to tell me.”
And if Shane hadn’t told me about the little figure he’d assumed was Angela, up here all alone carrying her mother’s newsboy bag, hair tucked under her mother’s green hat, doing what I’d asked her to do, I’d never have known the real reason she ran away.
She’d tried to protect me by keeping it to herself.
“I can’t bear it,” I whisper to Shane. “Willa. I let her down.”
He says all the right things, the comforting things. That we were kids, that it was an accident, that we never planned for anyone to get hurt. That he was to blame, too, for racing into the night and covering for Angela after he overheard the sheriff tell his father that people were trying to find Graham. Instead of telling the sheriff what he’d seen, that Graham was lost in the woods.
He has a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t feel so guilty.
But no words can bring Willa back.