Vengeance (4 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said. She was walking toward me, and I was thinking she was the only person in the world I wanted to see right now. She knew me, she knew him, she knew us.

I was reaching for her, and then I wasn’t.

“He had a heart condition,” I said again, and it was like things were falling into place inside my head as I was speaking them. She had stopped moving, one foot in front of the other, halfway across the room. “Something building up inside of him,” I said, repeating the words my mom had spoken when I found her in the waiting room.

Delaney was looking somewhere past me, somewhere beyond this room, and she wasn’t speaking at all.

“Delaney,” I said, slowly, each syllable of her name a question, and she was looking at the floor, like she had just been caught in the biggest lie of her life.

Please, no
, I thought.
Let me be wrong
. But she still wouldn’t look at me.

Because now I understood the reason she had paled and backed out of my house. Why she ignored my calls for the rest of the day.
She knew
. She stood in the mudroom and my dad walked up to us and she
knew
. She knew and stood there, lying in her silence. She went home and painted her nails. She knew and backed away and never said a word.

“Tell me you didn’t know,” I said. “Yesterday. In my house. Tell me you didn’t know.” And I meant it. If she would just say it, I would believe her.

She stared at the wall behind me. At the space above me. At the floor between us.

There is this saying that you need to know sadness to know happiness. I thought it was a load of crap when I first heard it, and I thought it was a load of crap now.

But the truth is that the only reason I could understand what I was feeling in that moment was because I had spent years loving her.

“Tell me,”
I said, only I yelled it. She jumped. I made her jump.

“Decker …”

I circled around her, switching places, trying to force her out of my room with my will alone.

“Leave.”

She jumped again. Back. Toward the door.

Her fingers gripped the sides of the entrance as she stumbled out into the hall. I could see her thinking, pausing, her brain working through how to fix this, how to make this right.

My dad’s hand on her shoulder.

The chair on its side.

The glass on the floor.

“Wait,” she said, leaning against the hallway wall. “Listen …” Her eyes searched the space between us in desperation.

I waited. I waited. I wanted to hear her. I wanted there to be some other explanation. But she just stood there, like she was begging me for something.

Fifteen deaths. Statistically speaking.

I could forgive her pretty much anything.

She could forgive me pretty much anything.

We had both done it to get to where we were right then.

But not this.
Not this
.

She was staring at me, willing me to listen. But she didn’t make a sound.

I closed the door in her face. Slouched down with my back against it, my head in my hands. Held my breath until I heard her feet racing down the hall.

No dying words.

Chapter 3

She was everywhere.

She was all tied up in my memory of that night. She was everything I was thinking about during my last conversation with my dad. She was who I’d been trying to get to while I was losing him instead. I couldn’t think of any of it without seeing her face, looking innocent. Her face, looking like she didn’t know. I felt the rage fighting its way out.

And now, she was downstairs. In my house.
Everyone
was in my house.

My grandmother was cooking like the survival of our species depended on it, even though half the neighbors had dropped off some sort of baked dish. There wasn’t even enough room in the freezer.

I ordered pizza from my room.

My mother brought it up, leaning her hip against the door. She looked tired. She looked skinny. She’d been a robot, thanking people like she was grateful, accepting condolences like we
were saving them up for something. Like we wanted them. “I take it this is your doing?”

I shrugged. “I was hungry.”

She slid it onto my dresser and said, “Delaney’s downstairs.”

“I heard.” I didn’t really. There were so many people down there, it sounded like a low hum of sameness. But I’d seen her walk across the yard with her parents. She wore a black skirt that I knew her grandmother had gotten her for Christmas.

I hated that she wore it.

I hated that she walked over with her parents.

I hated that she thought she had any right to be here.

“I told her she could come up, but she wouldn’t. So …” She opened the pizza box and pulled out a slice, sniffing it. She took a bite, closing her eyes.

“I don’t want to see her,” I said.

“I see,” she said. She put the slice back in the box. Sat on the edge of my bed. Took a deep breath, then another, like she was steeling herself for something. She shook her head to herself, brushed her hands over her blouse.

“Some of your other friends are downstairs,” she said. “Sure you won’t come down?”

I looked out my window and saw Kevin’s black Explorer at the curb. Behind it was Tara’s red sports car, which never used to bother me—it just seemed like an extension of her, demanding attention. But now it seemed so wrong, so out of place. Justin didn’t have a car, but if Kevin was here, he probably was too. I’d known them all for almost as long as I’d known Delaney. Not counting Delaney, Kevin and Justin were the
closest friends I had now. We grew up together. We’d gone through the hell of last year together.

“Delaney’s still here,” I said. “So no thanks.”

She stood in the doorway, her eyes wide. “Don’t be this guy,” she said. And before I could ask her what guy she meant, before I could tell her not to think too highly of the innocent girl next door, she stepped into the hall.

“Good call on the pizza,” she said, backing out of the room. “You should’ve seen your grandma’s face. Priceless.” She pulled my door shut behind her.

The scent of pizza was overwhelming, sickening really, and I was opening my window when there was another knock. “Yes, take a piece,” I said. But it wasn’t my mother who stepped into the room. It was Delaney. Guess she changed her mind about not coming up.

“I know you’re mad,” she said, her hands held up, like she was surrendering.

“Really,” I said, staring at the box of pizza. “How observant of you.”

“But yesterday,” she said. And then she shook her head. “That’s not how we leave things.”

I looked at her then, and everything twisted inside of me. “You didn’t even turn on your phone,” I said through my teeth.

She shifted her lower jaw around and whispered, “You saved my life, and I didn’t save his.” It’s why everyone turned on her last year at Carson’s funeral.

“No,” I said. “
No
.” I stuck my finger out at her. “You didn’t say
anything
. Like, ‘Hey, Decker, don’t be a jerk to your dad.’ Or, ‘Hey, Decker,
call 911
.’”

“No,” she said, waving her hand at me from across the room. “Listen. It wouldn’t—”

“Don’t,” I yelled. “This is the part where you stop talking.”

Delaney’s eyes went wide, and she narrowed them a fraction of a second later. “No, this is the part where I remember that nobody, not even you, and not even now, gets to treat me like this.” And then she waited for me to apologize or agree or argue. Anything. But I gestured toward the door behind her.

It was a small miracle she didn’t slam it on the way out.

It stayed closed until my mother knocked on it the next morning. Or maybe not. I looked around the room, and the pizza box was gone, including the uneaten pizza. I bolted upright in bed. I didn’t remember falling asleep. I didn’t remember waking up. “Wear the blue shirt,” she called through the door. “The one with the stripes.” Which was really unnecessary. It was the only dress shirt I owned.

I stared at the double doors at the back of the service, waiting for Delaney to show so I could be furious, but she didn’t. Which somehow made me even more furious. Her parents sat directly behind us, and Joanne squeezed my shoulder. I looked away before I could demand to know where the hell Delaney was.

Everyone else was there: Kevin, in his designer suit, with his parents, in their designer clothes—looking somehow completely out of place and perfectly in place at the same time; Justin, looking like a knockoff of Kevin in every way, from the clothes to the haircut—but his hair was curly, so it didn’t fall right; Tara, in a dress cut way too low for a funeral, but I
thought that was probably for Kevin’s benefit and not mine. It also looked like she brought friends. To my dad’s memorial. She was also trying to look happy.
At my dad’s memorial
. Kevin had unceremoniously dumped her earlier this summer, and she did not seem to be taking it well. Still.

Next came the part where I was supposed to stand next to my mother and grandmother and let people walk by and shake my hand or pat my back or kiss my cheek and tell me how sorry they were. I was planning to hide out with Justin and Kevin until I was dragged away. But Kevin was consoling his new girlfriend, Maya, who was
sobbing
even though I was 99 percent sure she had never met my father, and as I approached, I heard Justin say, “I’m getting really fucking sick of funerals.” And instead of hiding out with them, I sat on the floor of the bathroom, trying to remember how to breathe.

I kept picturing my dad saying, “
Something’s not right
,” the second before he fell. And Delaney’s face as she backed away. And I couldn’t separate the two. It was like his death was stretched out, filling the hours between those moments, filling every memory in between—dying over lasagna, dying while I snuck out, dying over a glass of water.

His mouth had formed a word, my name, as he sunk to the floor. Like I had the power to save him.

I had my head between my knees, and I was slouched in the corner of the handicapped stall. A couple of people came in and out, and if they noticed me in the corner, gasping for air, they didn’t say anything.

And then I saw designer shoes turn toward the stall. Another person hop up on the sink. “I can’t stand this part,”
Justin said. Because we’d all been here for Carson’s funeral—had to walk through the line, look his parents in the eye, look his sister, Janna, in the eye, and tell them how sorry we were, which seemed completely insulting. “And no offense, but you need to get Maya out of here. She’s making a goddamn scene.”

Kevin didn’t respond at first. I heard the faucet turn on, imagined him splashing water on his face. “Probably thinking of her mom,” he mumbled. “I’ll get her out.” Maya’s mom was sick—no, she was
dying
. It’s how Delaney and I met Maya in the first place—caught staring at her house, wandering her yard. This should’ve been
her
funeral, Maya’s mother’s. Not my dad’s.

I wasn’t breathing. No, I was breathing too fast. Couldn’t catch my breath. The lines of the tiled floor grew wavy, fading in and out of focus.

The door to the stall shook and then gave way as Kevin forced the door open, even though it was locked.

“Oh, crap,” Justin said, looking at me over Kevin’s shoulder.

Kevin half pushed, half shoved him away. “Go find Delaney,” he said. Then he rolled his neck and pulled me by the shoulders, and at first I thought he was trying to pull me up, but he wasn’t. He knelt on the bathroom floor beside me and was pulling me forward, toward him. Toward his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around my back and stayed there.

Justin came back in, a second or a minute or an hour later. “Can’t find her.”

“Then get
someone
,” he said.

“I can’t breathe,” I said into his shoulder.

“You’re breathing,” he said. And the weird thing was that as soon as he said it, I felt it, the air in my lungs, the oxygen moving, my heart pumping.

But I was still gasping for air. No, I was crying. And I was ruining his jacket.

I stood up quickly, wiped my sleeve across my face. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m fine. God. I really fucking hate funerals, too.” I looked around the bathroom, thinking there was no way this was really happening. Caught sight of myself in the mirror, in the same clothes I’d worn to Carson’s funeral eight months ago. Carson, who was gone, but still existed in the awkward gaps in our conversation—like we were waiting for him to say something. I could almost imagine what he’d say. But he never did.

“I can’t stay here,” I said. “Tell my mom I took the car.” She could get a ride with my uncle. With anyone.

“I’ll drive you,” Kevin said. Sad thing was that in the last year, we’d had enough experience with hospitals and funerals and grief to understand each other, even now.

“I want to be alone,” I said. He’d understand that, too.

I pushed through the double doors, and Maya was sitting on the bottom step, the heels of her black shoes scraping at the concrete. She looked up at me as I passed, but I pretended not to notice. “Decker?” she called. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” I said, moving toward the parking lot, but she had already stood and was walking toward me.

“Wait,” she said. She had this perfectly straight, long brown hair and perfectly shaped big brown eyes. They looked even
larger because she had been crying. I didn’t want to wait, and it must’ve looked pretty obvious because she gripped my wrist like she needed to hold me there. She scanned the packed parking lot, then looked back at me with glassy eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. And then she hugged me, awkwardly and unexpectedly—her forehead resting against my shoulder for a second before she released me. She cleared her throat. “You have a lot of people,” she said.

But I didn’t know what to say to that, because I was thinking of the one person who wasn’t there instead. “Kevin’s looking for you,” I said, already walking away.

I pulled into my driveway and barely had the car in park before I was stripping out of the suit jacket, throwing the tie on the front seat. God, it was sweltering. I unbuttoned the blue shirt with the stripes, tore that off too. Would’ve stripped off the undershirt, too, except I saw Delaney standing on my front porch.