Vengeance (33 page)

I felt the wood grains biting into my palm. Saw the dent in the door behind me. The hood of the minivan caved in. The recorder, just through the window, still off. And I didn’t care. I dug my fingers into the wood, and I knew it wasn’t justice I wanted. It was revenge.

“I wanted answers,” I said. But even if I got them now, I wasn’t going to have the proof. And now I wanted something more.

He laughed, still eyeing the piece of wood in my hands. “You already got them. Are you happy now? Our mom died. We lied. It’s over now. So do me a favor, and leave me the hell alone.”

“You’re the one who just attacked my car,” I said. Holden shifted positions, like he was deciding what to do. To run or to fight.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Holden said, pointing to the car, breathing heavily. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

I took a step closer. He took a step back. “You shouldn’t
have done
that
? There’s a lot of things you shouldn’t have done. This is kind of at the bottom of that list. That night,” I said, stepping toward him, “at the party …”

He shook his head at me. “It’s this place,” he said in a whisper. “It makes us do things. You understand?”

He was eyeing my grip on the wood because he wanted me to understand. He wanted me to believe it was
this place
that made him capable of the things he had done. He stopped moving backward.

“It made you destroy my house?” I asked. “Destroy Delaney’s windows? You’ve been
tormenting
us.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he said.

“Were you just trying to distract us? Make us believe in the curse?”

“I don’t even know where you live. I’ve got more important things to worry about than pretending there’s some curse,” he said. He sank back into the darkness, but I followed him.

He was admitting to Tara. But denying something far less. Saying we were all pretending.

The wood slipped from my fingers. “And now Maya’s gone,” he said. “And I’ll be gone the second you turn away. So what are you gonna do, kid? What are you gonna do with that piece of wood and your pretty little girlfriend and your bright fucking future? What,” he said as he took a step closer, like he could see me wavering, “will this place”—another step—“make you do?”

But it wasn’t this place that made him lunge in my direction.

And it wasn’t this place that made me swing the chunk of wood into the side of his ribs.

Listen
.

I heard the crack of his rib, like I’d felt Delaney’s break when I was trying to keep her alive. I heard the impact of his hands and his knees on the pavement. I heard him grunt and then laugh.

Holden was on the ground, and he was laughing as he grimaced. “See?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I see.”

And I let him believe it. I let him believe that it was this place that made him capable of murder and me of this. That it was this place that made me capable of hatred. That it was this place that made everyone capable of dying.

Falcon Lake didn’t take from us. It told us things. It showed us things about ourselves.

“
Have you ever pretended something so much that it became real?
” Janna had asked me in the hall after Tara ended up in the water. She was angry. She was so angry. Even Maya could see it. I started to get nauseous, tried to get my bearings. Remembered the fight Kevin had with Janna right before she went out to his car. Remembered the way I blew her off, didn’t want to talk about Carson, before my house was flooded. The gasoline in the shed after I’d painted over Carson’s name.

Like the curse. Coming for us all.

Holden turned over, looked up at me as I walked toward him, still holding that beam of wood.

“What else do you want from me?” he whispered, his
hands held out to show me he had nothing. I wanted to trade him. For my dad. For Carson. For everything that had been taken from us.

I wanted vengeance for every injustice, everything I couldn’t change and couldn’t stop.

But more than that, I wanted to believe in the future, like Delaney did, always planning for what came next. Like she could see it coming. Like she could see
us
. And even if I couldn’t see it yet, like she did, I wanted to believe in it. I wanted that future, more than I needed revenge.

“
I want to know what you believe
,” she had told me, “
so that I can believe it, too
.”

And so I left him. I walked up to him, past him, as he tried to catch his breath. I dropped the beam of wood beside his head, and I went straight for my car. I pulled out of the driveway. I didn’t look back.

But I didn’t go home.

“Where are you?” I asked into the phone.

“Home,” she said.

“I’m coming over,” I said.

And after a pause, “It’s about time someone did.”

Home. We hadn’t been to Carson’s house since he’d died. It had never been Janna’s house. It had been Carson’s. She had just lived there, too. I drove the streets as if in a dream. Taking the turns by memory, pulling up in front of the brick home with the stone path and the blue curtains, always hanging open.

They were closed now.

Janna’s car—Carson’s car—was in the driveway, beside her mother’s car. There was no sound coming from inside. The whole thing was like a tomb. A constant reminder that
Carson was here
, but now he’s not. A person wiped from existence.

I rang the bell and heard footsteps coming down the stairs. Janna opened the door and frowned when she saw the expression on my face. “Hi,” she said.

“You.” I stuck my finger at her chest, same as she’d done to Delaney at her brother’s funeral. But now, staring into her eyes, same as Carson’s, I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t accuse. Couldn’t even blame.

But it hung there—half-spoken—between us. She stepped outside and closed the door behind her. “My mom’s upstairs,” she said, though I didn’t hear a sound from inside. How easily she could’ve been Maya—for all purposes, alone. Without us, alone. She walked off the front porch, around the side of her house, to the patio where we all used to hang out with Carson and what ever he could snag from his parents’ liquor cabinet without them noticing.

She sat in a chair—not his—and crossed her legs at the ankles, leaning back, breathing out toward the sky. “Everything’s gone to shit,” she said.

I reached into my pocket, hit the Record button on the recorder that I never sent back. Like my dad, needing facts. Needing proof.
Getting
proof.

I couldn’t prove anything else. Not that Holden dragged Tara into the lake, thinking it was Delaney; not how Maya’s
mom got into the lake; not what the lady in 2B was trying to tell me as she died.

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” I said.

“He’ll be gone
forever
,” she said, like I didn’t understand the concept. Like I didn’t dream about that very thing all the time. Delaney, disappearing. My dad, ceasing to exist. She took a breath in, but it shook. There were tears, but it was like they had always been there, just waiting for her to take a breath.

“My dad wanted to sue the doctors, like that would bring him back,” she said. “But here’s the thing: every time he went in for an appointment, they asked him a series of questions. About what he was feeling.
How
he was feeling. He passed the test.” Then she laughed. “Probably the only test he ever got a perfect score on.” She frowned. “It’s not the doctors’ fault.”

“It came out of nowhere,” I said. A sudden seizure, a sudden, unexpected death, and nothing that could be done to stop it. Some deaths are unstoppable. Delaney understood that, worst of all. “It’s nobody’s fault.” Not a doctor’s. Not Delaney’s. Not mine.

She stared at his empty seat. Gritted her teeth. “I don’t know, Decker. Sometimes I wonder if he just didn’t say anything. If he felt the signs starting up again, if he just pretended he was fine.” She stared at me. “Think about it. It’s something he would do, acting like everything was great, like life was perfect. You
know
he would. You
know
him.”

She buried her face in her hands, and then I was sitting. My legs weren’t working. My mind wasn’t working.

We could carve his name into a wall, into a tree, into our skin, but it wouldn’t matter. It was true. Carson had always lived his life like he might not last as long as the rest of us, I could see that now. With a girl on the couch or cannonballing into the lake or saying what he wanted when he wanted. Not worrying about the future, in case it never came. Feet stomping over the earth, over all of us, shouting,
Carson was here, Carson was here, Carson was here
.

But he’d fight to live. He’d fight for us, and he’d fight for Janna. I knew him.

“How could he do that to me?” she cried. It’s what I thought about my dad. That he died. That he left. Her fingernails scratched at the plastic armrests, and I could imagine her carving his name there, too.

“He wouldn’t,” I said. I was sure of it. He may have lived his life like he wanted to make the most of every day, but he would’ve tried to stop it if he could. He got in that car with Delaney because he wanted to live. “Janna,” I said, “there’s no way. It’s not his fault. There’s no one to blame.”

But her eyes were dead. She wanted someone to blame. No, she needed it. “I hate it here,” she said. And then lower, “I hate it everywhere.”

Dead here. Dead everywhere.

I wanted to pull one side of her toward me and wrap my arms around her and tell her,
it’s okay, it’s okay
. But I was furious at the other side.

“My
dad
died, Janna. What the hell were you thinking? I mean, my
house
. My mom’s house.”

“It was a mistake,” she said. I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about Carson or what she had done. Probably both.

“You destroyed my house, Janna.” Couldn’t she see? My dad and then my house. And then everything. Becoming the curse. “You hurt Delaney.”

“For what it’s worth, I didn’t know Delaney was home. Or you. And I didn’t mean to destroy your house. It was just water. …” But water destroyed everything. It rotted the wood, shorted the electricity. Got in Justin’s lungs. Ruined Kevin’s engine. Froze over and trapped Delaney, suffocating and suffocating.

Breathe
.

She was crying still, but I thought it was for Carson. Not me. “I thought you guys didn’t remember,” she said. “That you were letting Carson go. And he never would’ve let you guys forget me.
Never
.”

Carving his name into the wood. Showing us the curse. The trade. A reminder.

“But the curse … it made you all remember. You remembered everything that happened. What we lost. And why.” She leaned toward me, across the gap between our chairs. “By then it was too late. It’s like it was coming to life. Justin got sick. And then Tara … I can’t stop it.”

She almost smiled. “It’s alive now,” she said. “Everyone will remember.”

“I never forgot, Janna.” I closed my eyes, picturing Delaney in the hospital bed. Carson’s funeral. I never forgot.

“Yes, you all did. You never talked about him before this.
You never wanted to. You never wanted to do anything for him. The only person you thought about, even after you broke up, was Delaney.”

Maya was right, we were all too close to one another, too wrapped up, so we couldn’t see. All the layers. The things we grieved for. The things we feared. No,
that
we buried in Falcon Lake. We gave our fears over to it. We gave it power.

“You’re wrong,” I said.

She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter now. Everything has a price, right? They won’t forgive me for this. I know that.” She shifted in her chair, looking somewhere else. “I
knew
that.”

“What makes you think
I’ll
forgive you?”

“Oh, I know you won’t,” she said. “
You
won’t, most of all.”

I pushed back from the chair, the metal legs scraping the bricks on the patio as I stood. I walked away, turned the recorder off as I did. “You’re right,” I said before I disappeared around the corner. “Carson never would’ve let us forget you. But he
also
never would’ve let you become
this
.”

Chapter 22

I didn’t do anything with the recording.

That night, I sat and listened to it—listened to
her
—but mostly, I thought of Carson. What he would do. What he would want
me
to do.

I thought of all the mistakes I’d made in the past year. Of all the “almosts” that we escaped, escaping punishment or punishing ourselves instead.

That maybe justice and vengeance are not opposite sides of a coin, but more like the same side of a paper, folded in half.

And sometimes they didn’t exist. There was really nobody to blame for Carson’s death. And maybe Janna wanted justice or vengeance for that fact alone.

She found me on the way to lunch. I saw Delaney at our table, and I was ignoring everything but getting to her. Janna grabbed me by the elbow as I walked through the double
doors of the cafeteria, pulling me back outside, pulling me close so I could hear her whisper. “Justin called this morning, wondering why I hadn’t picked him up,” she said. “You didn’t tell them yet?”

“No,” I said, and I shook her loose. “And I’m not going to.”

Her eyes searched mine, and for a second I wondered if she wanted to be punished. If she needed it. But if she wanted them to know, she’d have to tell them herself.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Do you mean that?”

“Yeah,” I said, my fingers finding the recorder in my pocket. I’d brought it with me, unsure what to do with it. Proof. I had it. But Carson never would have told. He would’ve covered it up for her. No matter what. “But it’s not for you,” I said. I let her think I was doing it for Carson, but that was only partially true. Like Holden, I could become bound to the dead. Or I could be bound to the living.

If Delaney picked apart the logic—and one day she would—she’d revisit this months from now, a year from now, and she’d see the holes. If I let her think Holden had done it all—destroying my house, targeting her house—she’d find the holes. Why my house? Why try to scare her before trying to kill her? And did the timing add up? Right now, she was too close. We were all too close. But later, she’d come back to this, like she went back to Carson and the boy she saved and who knows how many other decisions she had to make. She’d sift through the facts and try to make sense of them, like she did in that journal of hers. And when she confronted me with the facts, the facts that made it count, would she understand it
when I told her that I’d made an unspoken promise to the dead? And another to those of us left behind?