Vengeance (26 page)

Delaney’s laugh carried from the next room. Alive. She was alive.

But that’s what I’d been picturing in the car, driving home with her. Delaney, instead of Tara.

“Decker? You still there?”

“I gotta go,” I said, hanging up.

Tara said the doctors thought she was disoriented.

But
I
had been disoriented. I saw Delaney instead of Tara when I pulled her from the water, her blond hair floating around her.

I saw Delaney
.

“Delaney?” I called, pushing open the door. I needed to see her. I needed to talk to her alone. I froze just outside the office door. Holden was standing in the living room like he belonged here, and Delaney was smiling at him.

He did a double take when he saw me. “Oh, hey,” he said.
“I didn’t know you were here.” He held up a plastic bag. “On a shoe-returning mission,” he said.

Delaney smirked. “I appreciate it,” she said. “But I borrowed them from Maya.”

He let the bag drop. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Sorry to waste your time.”

I went into the kitchen so she wouldn’t notice that I was starting to panic.
Why her and not me?
Delaney had asked, like she could sense it, too. It was supposed to be her.

“Not a waste,” I heard Holden say. “Hey, listen. I have to leave to night. But I was wondering if you wanted to grab something to eat first?”

I pushed back through the kitchen door, panic or not. “Are you asking her
out
?” I asked.

He looked between the both of us. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maya told me you guys broke up.”

I guess he could tell my thoughts on that from the look on my face. “But no,” he said. “I just wanted to talk to you,” he said to Delaney. But she could tell something was wrong with me.

“Some other time,” she said. And she started walking for the door. Holden, thank God, got the hint.

After she closed the door and locked it behind her, she said, “What? Decker, what?”

“Describe Tara,” I said.

She put a hand on her hip and looked at me sideways. “Please,” I said.

She held up her hand and started listing opinions as she
tapped each fingertip. “Likes to be the center of attention. Flirts with everyone, especially you …”

“No, I mean, the way she looks.”

Delaney paused, and I could feel the look she was sending me. I could hear it in the tone of her voice. “Tall. Big boobs. Dark hair.
Beautiful
… Decker? What’s the matter?”

I had to close my eyes. Had to see her in my head, like I saw her last night. I had to breathe.

This was how I’d describe Delaney: taller than average, curvier than average, beautiful. Mine.

They don’t look alike side by side. But Justin was right. Last night, Tara was a pretty blond girl draped over me on the couch. Last night, Tara fit Delaney’s description perfectly.

“What?” she asked. She reached out and touched my arm.

“Nothing,” I said, but it came out as a whisper. I fell back on the couch, my head between my knees.

I had to get out of here.
We
had to get out of here. Out of this town, away from what ever was happening here.

“Nothing?” she asked, almost yelling at me. “Don’t tell me
nothing
when you’re sitting on the couch trying to breathe and we just visited a girl who thinks the lake called to her when she was unconscious.”

I couldn’t catch my breath and when I tilted my head to the side to look at her, she looked like she was going to be sick too. I remembered saying the words to her in the bathroom.
“In my head, I see you die.”

I wondered if she was seeing it too. Whether the vision in
my head transferred to her, and she saw herself floating, just under the ice, mouth open, eyes open. Perfectly still.

“In my mind, you’re still dead.”

“It was supposed to be you,” I said, immediately regretting it, like I had in the bathroom when I told her I saw her dead all the time.

“Excuse me?” she said. “You just said she was drunk. You just
said
—”

“I know what I said. But you don’t know what I saw. Tara, I mean. In the water. She looked like you.”

“So the lake was coming for me?” she whispered. “You believe it? That the lake wants me dead?”

“No, Delaney. Not the lake.” I swallowed. Steeled myself to say the words. Make them real. “A person.”

How to put to words the way I could feel everything connecting? The way we feel about the lake, the way we let ourselves fear it and believe—that it wants us. That it could hurt us. The way a person could use that fear. Could hide something inside of it.
It’s just the lake; it’s what it wants
.

Except it’s not the lake.

It’s what
someone
wants.
Someone
wants her gone.

I was mumbling to her, frantically trying to explain, using my arms and pointing toward the lake, at everything, at nothing. And she was following my hands, like they made more sense than my words.

“Who would want me dead?” she asked when I finished. Her hands were clenched between her knees, like she was willing herself to hold on. And she didn’t ask me like it
seemed so far out of the realm of possibility. She asked me in the saddest way possible. Like she was asking
which one
.

“No, wait,” she said, shaking her head. Breathing a sigh of relief. “People know Tara. She might look like how you’d describe me, but she doesn’t look like me. Someone would know it was the wrong person.”

“It’s not someone who knows you, then,” I said, which didn’t make sense either. “I mean, they know
of
you. They don’t
know
you.” I thought of the article after Troy drowned, of the picture of me, reaching off the page for something that didn’t exist. Of her name, whispered around town like a legend. Of the way the cops looked at me when I mentioned her name. Everyone knew
of
her. But not everyone
knew
her.

“It doesn’t make sense, Decker.” Delaney was picking through the logic of each step. She didn’t rely on the way things felt connected. The way I knew it made sense, even if I wasn’t sure how exactly. “Because it’s not too hard to find out who I am. And Tara fell. She fell and hit her head. Nobody pushed her.”

My mind was racing, trying on possibilities, running scenarios, searching for one to fit what I felt. The truth wasn’t facts. I mean, it was. But it was also something else. Something I could feel. The facts would fill in around it later.

This was how my dad and I were so different. Everyone thought we were the same, but he was more like Delaney, needing facts. Without facts, it didn’t count.

This counted.

Someone was coming for her. I could feel it.

It counted.

My mom, Joanne, and Ron were unloading all the bags from their two cars directly into my garage. “Oh good, you guys are home,” my mom said. “Few hours of daylight left … get moving.”

Delaney and I started with my room. We worked in silence, moving my dresser where it used to be, putting clothes back in the drawers. We both knew this room by heart. She helped my mom hang the curtains downstairs, lay out a throw rug across the new, darker wood floors. Delaney’s parents were cleaning the surfaces throughout the house—everything was coated in a layer of white construction dust.

But by late afternoon, the sun didn’t cut through the windows at the right angle, and the rooms closed off, one by one, in darkness.

I was helping my mom clean the windows in her room when Joanne knocked on the door. The hallway was dark behind her. “Dinner in an hour, okay?”

My mom balled up the paper towel and tossed it in the trash bucket beside me. “I’m going to take Decker out to night, actually.”

“All right. Enjoy.”

A minute later, Delaney called into the room, “Bye,” as she passed, and she was lugging a giant trash bag behind her.

“Hold on,” I said, and I took the bag from her in the dark
hall and swung it over my shoulder. She gripped the handrail of the staircase as she walked down the steps and pulled her jacket tighter around herself.

I tossed the trash into the bin in the garage, and she stood in the doorway, waiting for me. I thought she didn’t believe me about someone being after her, but it looked like she did. “Don’t be scared,” I said, walking toward her. I shouldn’t have told her what I thought. It was a mistake. She needed facts to cling to, not this feeling of dread that she could do nothing about. Something else to feel powerless over.

“Nothing to be scared of, right? Just somebody who wants me dead. No big deal.”

“Don’t,” I said, and I ran my hand through her hair, tucked it behind her ear. Felt her hands on the bottom of my shirt, her fingers sliding through the belt loops at my hips. “Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I said. I was getting so good at saying what I hoped was true, I thought for a second that I might have the power to make it true.

And before she had a chance to argue, I ran my thumb across her bottom lip and said, “I missed you like crazy.” She turned her face up, just slightly, and I said, “I’m such an idiot.”

She smiled, and that dimple formed in her cheek. Her eyes drifted closed as she drifted closer, and she said, “Good thing you’re my favorite idiot.”

I meant just to kiss her good-bye. Just a second or two. Or three. But it turned into the type of kiss that, no matter what you do, you feel like you can’t get close enough. When she pulled back from me, I leaned in again, kissed her one last
time, and said, “I’ll see you to night. Text me when everyone’s asleep up there, okay?”

She left through the garage, and I watched her run across the yard. As I shut the door behind her, I felt hope instead of dread. I felt every hour between now and then. I felt them slipping by.

And then I felt someone else in the room.

I glanced quickly behind me, saw my mom leaning against the wall at the base of the staircase, holding her own trash bag, one eyebrow raised. I cleared my throat and didn’t make eye contact as I passed her on the way to the stairs.

“A moment, Decker?”

I cringed, wondering how long she’d been standing there. I put my hands in my pockets and rocked back on my heels. “Oh, hey, I have an idea. Let’s skip this part.”

“Since your dad isn’t here, I feel the need to tell you something.”

“I promise, he already did this. Like, three years ago.”

“No, I think he missed a part.”

I held my breath. Please let this be quick. Please let this not be happening.

“You’re too close—”

I let out my breath, narrowed my eyes. “Yeah, he did this part. It didn’t go over well.”

But she didn’t stop. “You’re too close, and you don’t see what she’s doing. Or maybe you do, and you don’t care. I can’t tell.”

“Excuse me?” Delaney wasn’t doing anything.

“She’s changing her life, Decker. For you. Joanne said
she’s applying to colleges in Maine now, like she doesn’t care about looking anywhere else anymore.”

It didn’t make any sense. We had only gotten back together a day ago. It’s like she always knew that one day I would tell her I’d been an idiot, and she’d forgive me by saying that at least I was her favorite idiot. She knew it would happen. She never stopped believing it.

“And I was going to go to Boston for her. How is that any different?”

“It’s not,” she said. “And your father was going to talk to you about that. Or he tried to. I guess, as you said, it didn’t go over well.”

He didn’t try all that hard. Probably because he realized the futility of his argument.

“You’re so stubborn,” she said. But she didn’t say it like it was a bad thing. “But think of
her
. I mean
really
think of her. Not just about how you want to be with her. Think about how hard she’s worked all her life, and what she’s giving it up for. Do you really want that on your conscience? What happens if she starts to resent you for it? And Decker, look at what
just happened
. What happens next time you decide you’re done with her?”

I felt a red-hot fury in my chest. How dare she? “I was never
done
with her. I was—”

“Pissed, yes, I got that memo. You were pissed at her. You were pissed at me. You were pissed at the whole damn world.”

“No, Mom, I’m pissed at
him
.” Which is why I realized I was an idiot—being angry at everyone but him. Blaming everyone but him.

Like Janna, sticking her finger at Delaney at her brother’s funeral.

“Because he didn’t tell you,” my mom said.

Yes, that he didn’t tell me. Yes, that was a betrayal. But bigger than that. “Because he
died
.” He fucking died. And that felt like the biggest betrayal of all.

She winced. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m pissed about that, too.”

“And, yes, because he didn’t tell me, like he saw me as a little kid who wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

“That’s not …,” she started. “I think he wanted to remember you the way you were—not as someone scared of losing him, which was going to happen either way. If you could spare someone you cared about that fear, that added grief, wouldn’t you?”

But I had a right to know. Only then I thought of Delaney. I imagined her smile, and not seeing it again, and her not joking around with me, harassing me about putting the milk in the fridge. Not smiling and calling me an idiot. Instead, everything laced with sadness and desperation and the way I felt in the hospital when I thought she wouldn’t wake up, making bargains with anything that would listen.
Anyone but her. Everyone but her
. And yes, I’d spare her that.

My mouth hung open in response. “And also,” she said, “if I catch you sneaking upstairs over there to night, I’m taking your car keys.”

Point: Mom.