“Who were your loaves?” she asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s fair,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay. Then what do I want to talk about?”
I looked at her. “You don’t know?”
“Of course I know,” said Regina. “Do you?”
“Your kid, maybe? I don’t know.”
“Then find out.”
I sighed and laid my head back down on my backpack. “Fine. What do you want to talk about?”
“You could be a little less blunt about it.”
“You want me to trick you into telling me what you want to talk about?”
“I want us to have a conversation,” she said. “Not just you talking at me, or me talking at you. We’ll talk with each other.”
“The other girls are never this much trouble.”
“Are the other girls married?” asked Regina.
“Up until you came along I used to think none of them were,” I said. “Nobody was always looking for perfection, for the prettiest girl with the best life.”
“And somehow that means none of them are married?”
“She wanted … boyfriends,” I said. “Nice clothes. Lots of friends. She wanted the dream.”
“Most people’s dream is being married,” said Regina.
“Maybe she didn’t want to be trapped.”
“Maybe she wanted a strong relationship with someone who loved her,” said Regina. “That’s not a trap.”
I thought about my own parents. “Sometimes it is.”
“And sometimes you get a stone in your shoe,” said Regina. “That doesn’t mean all shoes are full of stones.”
“I … guess I hadn’t thought about that.”
She smiled. “It sounds like there are a lot of things you haven’t thought about.”
“Not everyone gets to think about the things they want to think about,” I said.
“Now there’s an interesting topic,” said Regina, leaning forward. “What does John Cleaver think about, when no one is forcing him to think about anything else?”
“Honestly?”
“Girls love to be lied to,” she said.
I glanced at her, narrowing my eyes. “Really?”
“Of course not,” she said with a smirk. “Tell me honestly.”
I shrugged, though laying in the grass it was more of a shoulder flop than anything else. I looked back up at the sky. “I think about the next Withered on our list and how to kill it.”
“That doesn’t count,” said Regina. “The mission you’re on is focusing your thoughts down that path. Get beyond that, to just your own mind: what do you think about, when you have nothing else to think about?”
I thought back to my old life, to my quiet times, to the moments between the terror and the pain and the loss, when I could just be myself, with no one else and nothing else, and … that was really it, wasn’t it? That’s what I thought about. Alone in my room, or in the embalming room, in some quiet corner.
“I think about peace,” I said.
“Is your country at war?”
“Not that kind of peace,” I said. “Peace and quiet. The absence of noise and trouble and problems.”
“You think about happy times you used to have,” said Regina, but I shook my head.
“Happiness is just as bad as sadness,” I said. “For most of my life I didn’t even know what happiness was, or joy, or anything else. Feelings were hard for me, good or bad, and it was better to just not feel anything at all to avoid the complication.”
“Then what else is there?”
“I…” I stopped myself. “I can’t talk about that with you.”
“With me?”
“With Brooke,” I said, “or any of the minds inside of her.”
Regina nodded Brooke’s head and stared at the ground for a moment. After a while she spoke again, and her words were almost too quiet to hear. “That means it’s death.”
“Yeah,” I said. Death was the greatest peace I’d ever seen, the greatest calm I’d ever felt. Dead bodies were quiet and still and perfect. I was never more comfortable, more peaceful, than when everything around me was dead. “You understand why I can’t talk about that with Brooke, right?”
“Because she’ll kill herself,” said Regina.
“She’s killed herself a hundred thousand times,” I said. “It’s as much a part of her as eating.”
Regina nodded again. “I remember when Nobody killed me,” she said. “She was convinced that another girl in our village was better—happier, prettier, that kind of thing. That her baby didn’t cry and her husband talked more.”
“She wanted her life to be perfect,” I said again. “She lived a hundred thousand lives and it never was.”
The sky was almost black now, deep as a bottomless pit above us, and I felt a moment of vertigo, thinking I should clutch the grass to keep from falling up, plummeting away from the Earth and out into that vast expanse of nothing. A part of me wanted to go, bracing for the rush of wind and speed and fear. I didn’t grab anything but I didn’t fall away.
“All of her lives were perfect,” said Regina. “She just never saw it.”