Sandy wasn’t one to shy away from this topic; she’d talked to Rain even when her own parents were still too raw to process, too sick with fear and anger and grief and all the things that might have happened to Rain but happened to Tess instead.
But Sandy always took it head-on, never turned away from the brutality of it. She found some reserve within herself to comfort Rain even though she’d suffered the most unimaginable possible loss.
“Eugene Kreskey was a very sick man,” Sandy said, bowing her head. “Deeply, terribly disturbed.”
A psychiatric nurse, Sandy had that way about her—the one Rain saw in law enforcement, health professionals, soldiers. These were the people who stood on the front lines of humanity. They knew something about life, about the human condition that other people couldn’t grasp. It either made them hard, or it filled them with compassion. Sandy was the latter. “He was the victim of terrible abuse and psychic trauma as a child. I forgave him long ago.”
Sandy had mentioned this before, that she’d forgiven Kreskey. It was a thing that Rain didn’t understand. How do you forgive someone who did what he did? It was part of that whole Zen thing that eluded her. Forgiveness. It might be overrated.
“And you three were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I look back and think you all had too much freedom. We thought the world was a better place than it was. We thought you were safe—no, we knew you were safe. And we let you go too far, too young. That was our failing.”
It was a similar thing she heard from her own parents, how they’d failed. But it was Rain who hadn’t followed the rules, Kreskey who’d lain in wait for them. Rain who’d hidden while he took them away. How could she forgive him? How could she forgive herself?
“Do you remember when he was released?” asked Rain, pressing the conversation forward.
Sandy nodded, leaned back against the edge of the couch. The sun from the window danced on her hair. “You and Hank were in your twenties by then.”
“Kreskey came back here,” said Rain. “To a halfway facility not far from his childhood home.”
She nodded again more stiffly this time, her face gone grim and still. “That’s right.” Then, “Why this? Why now?”
She told Sandy about the story she wanted to investigate and write, one that reached into a past she’d sought to bury. When she was done, Sandy sat a minute, staring at a picture Rain had seen so many times that she’d stopped seeing it. Tess, Hank and Rain, lying on the ground, heads together, Hank smiling broadly, Tess squinting, Rain laughing with mouth wide. Sandy had stood over them and taken the shot from above—green all around them. She remembered the bright blue day, their laughter. They’d been bored and told Sandy. She suggested they go outside and join the Cloud Appreciation Society.
What’s that?
It’s when you lie on your back and notice how beautiful is the world.
The air was warm that day, the breeze light. Those high cumulous summer clouds towered, growing gunmetal gray inside as they watched. Later it would storm. All those days were so vivid still.
“I always found it interesting,” she said. “The work you and Hank chose for yourselves. You an investigative journalist, Hank a psychiatrist. Like all these years, you’re still just trying to understand what happened that day. What do you think will happen if you can put together all the pieces?”
Rain didn’t have an answer for that.
“You were working that day,” she pressed instead. “We were supposed to go to the mall. But you got called in to the hospital. What do you remember?”
Sandy pulled her legs in, wrapped her arms around them so she sat in a ball.
“I remember kissing my daughter goodbye in the morning, sitting on the edge of her bed, touching her hair. Remember how silky it was? I told her what I told her every day—be good to yourself. Be good to others. Be careful and kind.”
She stared down at the floor a moment, then went on.
“Then I went to work, resentful as hell that I couldn’t spend the day with you two,” she said. “It was days like that when I hated her father the most.”
Sandy was still in college when she’d had Tess and married Tess’s father—a drummer in a local band. The marriage imploded while Tess was still a baby. Tess’s dad was mostly absent, showing up now and