“That you’ve experienced loss. That it’s changed you.”
I swallowed another sarcastic response. She clasped her hands together and took a deep breath.
“Tell me, Ari. Why is it that you can’t seem to talk about your parents?”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Anything.”
“But I barely remember them.”
“What do you remember?”
You could fit all the memories I had of my parents into six bars of music. “My mother had thin straight hair, like me. My dad had a goatee.”
“Okay.”
“We listened to a lot of music together.”
Music in the car, music in the house, music out in the backyard. Classical, indie rock, pop, showtunes. When I pictured my parents, I pictured them singing.
“Is that what drew you to dance? The music?”
“Maybe.” I remembered the day my dad gave me my first iPod—one of his old ones. He’d left a bunch of his music on it, but I was so thrilled to add my own. I used to fall asleep with the headphones on.
I didn’t know if this was true and I had no one to ask, but I suspected that was why I didn’t hear the smoke alarm. That was why the house was burning so strongly by the time my dad got me out and then went back for my mom.
But since I’d forgotten that day, I didn’t have to know for sure.
“Interesting. Is there anything else you remember about them?” Dr. Pitts asked.
“See, I have to disagree with you. I don’t think it is interesting. It’s the only stuff I remember but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly important. We listened to music. So what?”
“Do you feel guilty?”
My mouth went dry. I hadn’t said anything about the headphones to her or to anyone else, ever. “No. Guilty about what?”
“That you survived and they didn’t.”
“I’m not guilty. Stop trying to make me fit some grief checklist.”
Dr. Pitts offered me a Kleenex. I wasn’t crying, but my face must have looked like I was on the verge. Her gesture only made me swallow painfully, then take a breath and hold it, more determined than ever never to break.
“I’m not trying to impose a theory on you, Ari,” she said softly. I didn’t need her softness. Didn’t need her sympathy. “I’m giving you another way to look at your situation.”
“Other than the one where I’m the weak, pathetic jerk who erased her beloved boyfriend and then lied about it? We’re going to blame the dead parents instead?”
“There’s more than one way to look at everything. If you know why you feel the way you do, you can better know how to deal with your emotions.”
“But I don’t want to know,” I said without thinking.
Dr. Pitts sat silently for a long moment, letting the words hover in the air.
“You don’t want to know what, Ari?”
“Nothing. I was being contrary.”
“What don’t you want to know? Yourself?”
“Doesn’t mean anything. It just came out.”
“Please tell me. You don’t want to know . . .”
“I don’t want to know why I did it! Why I erased Win. I don’t want to know any of it.”
Dr. Pitts’ composed expression shifted, and I think she was genuinely curious when she asked, “Why?”
Because I was scared if I looked too closely, I would discover I’d changed in ways I had no control over. Old Ari seemed like a different person from me. Abandoning Diana, choosing a boy over everything, including dance. Even Older Ari—the little Ari, the one with a hand-me-down iPod and singing parents—she wasn’t me, either, since I’d taken away the memory of the fire. But those were changes I’d planned for, changes I’d chosen, even if I no longer understood why I’d made the choice. I didn’t want to know what other changes had taken place without my knowledge or permission.
I wanted to be a predictable set of reactions to a finite set of situations; I wanted to know that I was a girl who would always make the same choices she’d made before. The thought of changing suddenly and randomly scared me down to my marrow.
I smiled at Dr. Pitts, even though the smile hurt my face. “Because it’s better in the dark.”
The late summer light cast long shadows onto the deck. Diana lay curled in a ball in the hammock on one end, and Ari had pulled a deck chair next to her. Out on the lawn, the automatic sprinklers ticked as they shot tiny rainbows into the sky. My mother was somewhere near the edge of the property in her dirty gardening outfit, which she practically lived in. She’d be out there until it was too dark to see. My dad, who spent most weeks in Boston being a CEO, joked that the garden was her third child, only the real joke was that the garden was her only child.