Authors: Megan Miranda
Vengeance
For my family. All of you
.
Contents
Back when everyone believed Delaney was going to die, I made a bargain with God.
Correction: I made a bargain.
I didn’t really believe in a god. I didn’t even know how to pray. But I closed my eyes and thought:
Not her
. We were in the hospital. The doctors were talking to her parents. Machines monitored her, breathed for her, lived for her.
Anyone but her
, I thought.
Everyone but her
.
Six days later she woke up, and for a little while I forgot about that bargain. She smiled when she saw me. She came home.
Our neighbor was old when she died the next day. I didn’t think anything of it. But then Carson died—he was seventeen and probably my best friend, other than her. Then I remembered my words.
Anyone but her
.
Everyone but her
.
Someone had been listening.
The lady in room 2B was about to die. I didn’t even need Delaney to tell me that. Her eyes were open, and I was pretty sure she had just blinked, but she wasn’t breathing. I leaned over the bedrail, my fingers tightening on the cold metal, and whispered, “Hello?” She sucked in a violent breath, and I tripped over the garbage can at my feet. Her eyes darted around the room, landing on me.
I crouched below the bed and pushed the trash back into the container. Collecting the trash: this was what I was here for, anyway. My hands trembled, like Delaney’s would if she was here, but for a very different reason. She should be here—not me. I checked the clock on the far wall. She should really be here.
I stood up, about to leave, about to get help, get anyone, get out of here. The lady’s eyes were open, but she wasn’t breathing. Again. I watched, waiting for her to blink. Waiting for some sign of life.
Nothing.
“Hey,” I said, shaking her by the shoulders. And then she sucked in another giant wheezing breath.
Not dead yet.
But definitely almost dead.
“Hey!” I said, louder, but this time I was calling for someone else. Anyone else. I was not this guy. Not the guy who sat beside people as they died, not the guy who held their hands or promised them everything was going to be okay when everything definitely was not going to be okay. I was not the person who volunteered at the nursing home so I would be there for them when no one else could.
That
was Delaney.
I
was the guy who worked at the assisted living facility for the cash, partly, but mostly to be around his girlfriend. So shoot me.
I stared at the empty doorway. Where the hell was Delaney? Her shift started thirty minutes ago, and if she was anywhere in the area, she’d know that this was happening. She’d feel it. She’d be here, because she was a better person than I was.
I jabbed at the buttons on the side of the bed, assuming one of them was to call for help. Though I hoped I hadn’t inadvertently given her some lethal dose of morphine or something. Not that it would matter. “I’ll be right back,” I mumbled, but her fingers gripped onto my wrist as I turned for the door.
Delaney said some people go gently, and some people fight death all the way, like Delaney had, trapped on the other side
of the ice. I fought it with her, breathing air into her lungs, forcing her heart to pump blood.
From the feel of this lady’s grip on my wrist, she was about to fight it.
“Where …,” she whispered, like an exhale, as she stared at the open door.
“I have no idea,” I said, realizing we were having two very different conversations.
She turned her head to face me, and I was sure that the effort alone would kill her once and for all, but instead it seemed to make her stronger. Her fingers dug down to the bone in my wrist as she pulled me closer. Her eyes reminded me of Delaney’s: hazel; familiar. They were the only parts of her with any color now. White hair, pale face, lips that faded into the skin around them.
“Listen,” she said, but it came out like a rasp.
I listened: a ticking clock, a door shutting somewhere down the hall, the air-conditioning rattling the vent. She stared at me, like I had the power to read her mind. She held on tight, as if I had the power to do anything at all.
And then I watched as the blacks at the center of her eyes grew, eating away at the color that remained.
No dying words. She was dead.
“Oh no.” My boss, Marlene, stood in the doorway. “Am I too late?” She reminded me of my mom—tall and thin and to the point. Her dark hair was tied back in a bun, and she had a plastic bag in her hand, some sort of tubing. She left it on the counter and walked over to us, looked down at my hand, which was
now gripping 2B’s wrist, instead of the other way around. She put her fingers to the lady’s neck and then pulled my hand away as she folded the woman’s arms across her unmoving chest.
“Are you okay?” Marlene asked.
“She just died,” I said. What could possibly be okay about the situation?
She looked at me from the corner of her eye. Looked at 2B. Looked at me again. “They’re all going to die,” she said.
“She was looking for someone.”
“Hon, she had Alzheimer’s. She was probably looking for someone who doesn’t exist anymore.” I looked at the empty doorway. The empty hall.
“She was going to tell me something,” I said. I stared at my wrist, at the red marks from her fingers, which had force and life and will less than a minute earlier.
Marlene shuffled her feet beside me, put a hand on my back, leading me out of this room. “Hey, let’s call it a day. Take the rest of today off, okay? Go home and do something fun. We’ll see you Monday.”
Fun. I shook my head. “I’m waiting for Delaney.”
She looked down the corridor toward the double doors at the end. “She called in sick. I thought you knew.”
I nodded. “I forgot,” I said. But that was a lie. The door to room 2B was still open. The light was still on. The lady was still in the bed. I felt something rising in my throat. No, something closing it off. I needed out.
“Go on,” she said. And then, as I started to go, she said, “Hey, you did good.”
But I hadn’t done anything at all. And all I was doing now was racing toward the exit, toward the air. I didn’t even know her name.
I stood in my driveway, leaning against the hood of my parents’ old minivan, my current car. It was hot—hotter than the air around me, and it was record-breaking hot today. Had been all week. My hands were still trembling slightly as I dialed Delaney’s home phone. Her cell had gone to voice mail three times straight.
“I thought she was with you,” Joanne, Delaney’s mother, said after I asked if she was home, and I could feel the growing tension in her voice. Delaney lived next door in a house nearly identical to mine—hers was gray; mine was beige. My eyes drifted up to the window over the door, to the left: her room, same as mine. Her blinds were pulled shut. The front curtains to the living room were open, I was pretty sure—they usually were as soon as Joanne got up in the morning, but I couldn’t see in. The reflection of the sun glared back at me instead. I wondered if Delaney’s mom was looking out, watching me.
“Decker? Didn’t you pick her up for work this morning?” Joanne’s voice was higher than normal. Tighter. I felt something inside of me doing the same.
No, I didn’t pick her up, because I had to be in at eight, and she had to be in at nine.
It wasn’t like Delaney to call in sick if she wasn’t sick, and
it wasn’t like Delaney to lie to her mom about where she was, unless it was with me.
I cleared my throat. Felt everything relax inside me. I knew exactly where to find her. “I called in sick,” I said. “I was just making sure she got a ride in.” It really wasn’t like me to lie to Delaney’s mom, either, since she’d been my babysitter and some figure of authority in my life since as long as I could remember. But I wasn’t about to tell Joanne where Delaney really was.
I walked down our street—the morning was hazy, as if something was moving across the road, across the grass, across everything. It’s like the heat didn’t know what to do with itself here in Maine, so it wandered restlessly, looking for somewhere to go. I saw it sliding across the lake in the distance, like fog. I walked toward the crest of the hill—where the sidewalk ended and the ground lowered into a pit, a dirt trail cutting through evergreens, the lake at the center.
Nobody touched Falcon Lake anymore. Not last winter, after Delaney fell through, and not in the spring that followed. Nobody sat on the pebbled shore, watching the sunrise together under a blanket. There were no boats out there now, even though it was summer.
The lake was dead.
Or the lake was alive, depending on whom you asked.
Either way, dead or alive, it’s the type of thing best left alone. And alone we left it.
Except for her. I’d find her there, on the days she felt powerless, her feet at the edge of the lake, her toes touching the
water, like she was tempting it. This was where I’d find her, I knew it. I closed my eyes before I crested the hill, seeing her in my mind, her bare feet an inch from the water.
Be there
, I thought.
But Delaney wasn’t toeing the edge today. She was knee-deep in it, her skin pale above the unmoving surface of the water. Her blond hair tied up, her shirt hanging loose over one shoulder. Her shorts still dry, a few inches above the water.
I knew she heard me as I strode down the embankment, kicking up rocks in my wake, but she didn’t so much as flinch. She looked like a ghost, rising up out of Falcon Lake.
No. She was here. She was fine.
“So,” I said, walking toward her, “on a scale of one to ten, how sick are we talking? Like too sick to go to work? Too sick for pancakes? Or too sick to tell me you were calling in sick?”
She didn’t crack a smile. Didn’t even look at me. “Do you believe in reincarnation?” she asked.
“Delaney—”
“Heaven?”
I thought of 2B’s fingers on my wrist. Shook the thought. “I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat.”
“Some sort of afterlife?”
I thought of dead arms folded against her unmoving chest.
I took my flip-flops off, felt the pebbles slide under the soles of my feet. Heard the splash as my foot hit the surface.
She stared at my foot, like she didn’t understand why I was doing this. “I want to know what you believe,” she said, raising her eyes to my face. “So that I can believe it, too.”
“I don’t believe in curses,” I said, stepping closer. “I don’t believe in this.” My arm skimmed the surface of the lake.
“Shhh,” she said. I stood still, listening for what ever it was she heard. Or maybe she thought the lake could hear us instead.
Here’s the thing about curses: we know they aren’t real. Nobody thinks twice about taking a cruise through the Bermuda Triangle. Name one person who would give away the Hope Diamond. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Hell, even the Red Sox eventually won the World Series.
Nobody
really
believes in a curse.