emancipated when I was seventeen,” I said at last, dropping my hands into my lap to keep from breaking my nails on the wooden table. “I took custody of my sister, Jenny. Our mother was a junkie, in and out of prison all the time, and after our auntie died… Well, it was just me and her. I thought I had my shit together. I thought that I was the best thing for her. I thought that she’d see me working hard and playing by the rules and she’d want that for herself, too. I refused to believe that the fifteen years she’d spent watching our mom shoot up and smoke crack would tempt her to do the same thing. She’s a good girl, I told myself. She’d never do that shit. ”
Nathan had put his fork down, just listening intently.
“So when Jenny started going to parties and not coming back for a few days, I told myself she was just troubled and going through some hard times. When I saw track marks in her arm, I told myself that there had to be some other kind of explanation, though I never even bothered to come up with one. When she lost so much weight that she was sometimes too weak to walk, I insisted it was the fashion magazines I bought her and not the fact that she was so obviously a goddamn junkie.”
“That’s not your fault,” Nathan offered, but I continued despite his petty attempt to stem the flow of words.
“And when she ODed in her room while I was cooking dinner? You’re trying to tell me that wasn’t my fault? That was when I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. That was when I finally had to look at her and see what she really was, what she had been for damn near a year. I finally had to see her bruises, the punctures in her arm and between her toes, the way her body had so obviously been used by the men supplying her with the drugs that took her life. But by then it was too late. I’d already put her in the ground with all the lies I told myself.”
I went quiet for a moment, the memories drifting through my head, taking a little piece of myself with them. “Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault.”
A silence fell between us, uncomfortable and heavy.
“So, yeah,” I whispered, my voice hoarse and quavering. “Yeah, I get it. Sometimes we don’t want to see the truth, because it would mean we’re the monsters. And that’s not an easy thing to look in the mirror and accept.”
“But we can’t change the past,” Nathan said, his voice warm and tender. “We can’t go back in time and undo the damage we caused with our willful ignorance. The only thing we can do is…”
“Change the future,” I finished for him. “Yeah. I know. But it doesn’t make it better.”
“Not if you don’t let it,” he said. “Chandra… what I did… what I didn’t do… that’s going to take a long time for me to forgive. And I’ll work through it, someday. But what happened to you and your sister? That was a lifetime ago. That’s something you’ve paid for time and time again. I can see it in your eyes. Haven’t you punished yourself enough? What would Jenny say?”
“Jenny’s dead,” I said. Even though it had been years, tears sprang to my eyes like I’d lost her just yesterday. “She can’t say anything.”
“But you can,” he insisted, standing up from the table and walking to my side. He knelt down on the ground and took both my hands in his, and I gasped audibly. “You can tell yourself you’re forgiven. You can stop telling yourself that you’re worthless and to blame. You can tell yourself it’s time to move on and that you’ll never make the same mistakes again. And you can tell yourself that you’ll always be there for young people like Jenny who got lost along the way, and that you’ll use your position in the police department to offer them a way out.”
I looked down at our hands, my vision blurred by my sorrow. The shades of our skin nearly melded together, forming a gradient that made us look like some kind of