“No.” I shook my head, just millimeters to either side.
“You’re helping her,” said Regina. “Of course you’re good. You’re helping me, and you’re helping all the other girls.” I’d explained the situation as well as I could, and she’d understood it as easily and innately as all the other personalities that surfaced in Brooke’s mind: they accepted the core reality of their fractured existence. On some level it felt right to them, even in a case like this, where none of the memories had transferred. The reality had. I suppose that on some subconscious level they’d had centuries to come to terms with it.
I hadn’t.
“I’m not helping Brooke because I’m good,” I said, “I’m helping her because it’s all my fault. I can’t make it go away, so I do what I can to make it … endurable.” It was the only word that worked.
Regina raised her eyebrow. “Is that how she sees it?”
“She’s broken,” I said. “She can’t see it for what it is.”
“You don’t give her enough credit.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, staring up at the sky. I wanted one star—just one star—to peek out. None did.
Regina shifted, turning to face me, forcing Boy Dog to get up and reestablish himself in a new spot, his body pressed against her legs. “How can you spend so much time with the woman you love and know so little about her?”
“I don’t love her.”
“She loves you.”
“I thought you couldn’t talk to each other.”
“I love you,” she said. “And I’ve never met you until this morning. Who else could that emotion be coming from?”
I closed my eyes. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Aren’t you married?” she asked.
“Of course we’re not married.”
“It’s hardly proper of you to spend all this time alone together, then.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, and squeezed my eyelids tighter together.
“You’re sharing your life with her,” said Regina. “How can you do it so … coldly?”
“Because I’m cold,” I said, opening my eyes again but carefully, purposefully, not looking at her. “I don’t connect with people, and the people I connect with are dead.”
“That’s a contradiction,” said Regina.
“How do you even know that word?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“How do you even know English?”
“We’re speaking French,” said Regina. “Now: you said you don’t connect with people, and then say that you did. Just because the people you connected with before are dead now doesn’t mean you can’t do it again.”
“You don’t know me—”
“Am I wrong?”
I stopped, not daring to answer. She was right, about part of it at least—all the people I’d connected with were dead.
“Am I?” she asked again.
“It’s more than that,” I said. “It’s like…” I stopped, trying to put it into words. “Okay, imagine that you wanted to bake a loaf of bread. You’ve baked bread, right?”
“All the time.”
“And you had … I don’t know what kind of resources you had. A market or something where you could buy flour and yeast and all that.”
“What’s yeast?”
“The stuff that makes it rise,” I said. “What’s it called—leaven.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “We bought all of that at the market.”
“So imagine that everyone else in town can just go to the market and get whatever they need and bake bread all … willy-nilly. All the bread they want, all the time. But you can’t. You have to plow your own field, and grow your own wheat, and harvest it, and grind it, and then build your own oven out of stone or clay or whatever you built your ovens with, and then raise your own trees and chop them down for firewood, and then you get you own leaven from … wherever the hell leaven comes from—”
“We’d starve,” said Regina.
“You would,” I said. “You’d spend your whole life making two loaves of bread—just two loaves—and they would mean everything to you. All the effort it took to make them, all the time and the struggle and the thinking it would be impossible, watching everyone around you make bread every day all the time like it was nothing, and you just sit by yourself and wonder how any of it can even make sense, thinking maybe they’re all just lying to you, like it’s some huge joke that the whole world is playing on you, and then one day you finally do it. You make your two loaves. And then…” It was too much, and I trailed off.
Regina nodded and her voice was soft. She stroked Boy Dog’s fur as she spoke. “And then you make another loaf, and it’s easier than the first two, and it feels wrong, and you don’t dare to touch it because the first two were special, and if you treat this one the same it will make the first two seem less special.”
I stared at the sky, watching for stars that never came out. “Yeah.”
She sat in silence for a moment, and we watched the clouds drift slowly overhead, dark shapes against the dark sky.