Page 51 of Alone With You in the Ether

“Another key,” he observed, adding, “You don’t have to answer.”

“Well, you’ll meet her,” Regan said with a shrug, “so it probably won’t take very long to figure out. I’m sort of a textbook case, you know. Narcissistic mother, high-achieving sister, work-obsessed father. So common it’s nearly Freudian.”

“I don’t believe that. And Freud has been largely discredited.”

“Well, I’m something along those lines, then,” she said. “Every psychologist has seen some version of me before, I’m sure.”

He gave her a long, searching look. “Who told you that?”

Her doctor. Her lawyer.

A judge. A jury of her peers.

Marc.

“No one.” She met his glance briefly, then turned back to the road. “First kiss?”

“Sixth grade, Jenna Larson. Yours?”

“Ninth grade,” she said. “Late bloomer.”

“Probably best. Mine was terrible.”

She laughed. “So was mine. First time?”

“I was sixteen,” he said. “Under the bleachers. She was of those anarchist stoner types.”

“God, of course she was. I was sixteen, too,” she said. “He was captain of the water polo team.”

Aldo chuckled. “Of course he was.”

“His name was Rafe,” she said, and Aldo groaned.

“Of course it was,” they said in unison.

When the laughter had died from her tongue, Regan felt something else take its place, filling the vacancy in her chest. Some other compulsion twitched at her limbs, and she reached over, placing her hand on his knee.

This time, Aldo didn’t flinch. He rested his hand on hers, covering it briefly and running his thumb over her knuckles; satisfied, she retracted it, securing both hands on the wheel.

“How do you feel about dancing?” she asked him.

“My grandmother taught me when I was in high school,” Aldo said. “I know how.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

She caught the motion of him smiling.

“Ask me later,” he suggested.

“Okay,” she agreed.

Six conversations, she thought with another rush of palpable disbelief, and still, she couldn’t wait to know.

part three, keys.

One of Aldo’s considerationswhen it came to time was how long it took, conceptually, before things became ordinary, unspecial. People were so easily desensitized, so helplessly numbed when it came to the repetitive nature of existence. He wondered, first, how long it had taken for Regan to lose her sense of wonder with her own life, but then secondly, whether she’d ever had any to begin with.

Aldo had never experienced an anniversary party, given that his own parents were never married and his nonno had died long before he was born, but he had been under the impression that such parties were generally reasonably-sized affairs. Not so for the Regan family, which consisted of the parents, John and Helen, and the two children, Madeline and Charlotte, along with Madeline’s husband, Carter Easton, and their daughter Carissa. Aldo understood, logistically, why Regan had warned him to call her by her first name, and upon seeing her in context he proceeded to grasp it intuitively. Regan was her usual name for herself, but when she was here she was Charlotte, whom Aldo had begun to see as an entirely separate identity.

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