Vengeance (3 page)

Black pupils, growing wider
.

Listen
.

The sound of a knife on the cutting board. The clicking of the burner as my dad waited for it to catch. “Want to help?” he asked.

I started to shake my head, but he held up the knife, like an idea. “Girls love a guy who can cook,” he said.

“Gross,” I said, because he was talking about my mother. But I thought of Delaney, sticking her hip out, leaning into it, telling me she’d love me forever. I owed her a meal. I walked back across the room, took the knife from his outstretched hand, and left the apple on the counter. By the time I reached for another bite, it had already turned brown.

Delaney didn’t pick up the phone later that afternoon. It still went straight to voice mail. “Pick up,” I said, after her voice told me to leave a message. “I made dinner. I half made dinner. What ever, I helped. There’s lasagna. Come.” I even thought about calling the home phone again, but I didn’t want Joanne to yell at me, too.

She didn’t call back.

I zoned out through dinner, wondering how long she’d be grounded and whether I’d get to see her tomorrow, and then wondering if maybe I should sneak over to night, and how that would even work if she didn’t know I was coming and couldn’t leave the back door unlocked for me.

“Decker,” my dad said, like he had already said it and was getting annoyed.

“Yeah?”

“Did you hear a word I said?”

I smiled at my mom, then at my dad. “This lasagna,” I said, scooping another bite into my mouth. “It’s like heaven. It’s the
greatest thing ever created in the Phillips kitchen.” My mom threw her napkin at me.

“Tomorrow we’re going hiking. Six a.m.,” my dad said.

“Pass,” I said.

“It’s not really optional.”

“It’s Saturday,” I said. “At six a.m.”

“Seven,” he said.

“
Pass
,” I said again. My parents’ idea of hiking recently was more like a leisurely stroll, which would probably eat up at least half the day—maybe more, depending on how far we were driving.

“Joe,” my mom said, “you’re going about this the wrong way.” She turned to me and cleared her throat. “Oh, good, we can stay home and do one of those SAT prep tests.”

“I’ll go find my boots,” I said, pushing back from the table. I heard them laughing from my room.

Open the door
, I thought. Not that I believed in telepathy or anything, but I didn’t use to believe in a girl who knew when someone was about to die, either. I didn’t use to believe in a girl surviving eleven minutes trapped under the ice. I didn’t believe she’d ever wake up. Not really.

So I figured this couldn’t hurt. We had to be thinking the same thing. It was after midnight when I snuck out my back door, the same way we’d snuck in earlier that day. I was barefoot because it made it seem less premeditated if I got caught. This was definitely premeditated. I’d been meditating about it for hours.

I’d only done this once before—but it was after this
particularly crappy day where this guy yelled at her at work. He’d grabbed her arm. Made her jump. Called her an
omen
, which I guess she was, standing beside his bed because she had been drawn there. And if she was drawn to him, he was going to die.

Like Marlene said, they were
all
going to die.

But when he grabbed her and she jumped, I hit him in the arm, dying or not. It’s a miracle Marlene didn’t fire me then, but I think she saw the look on Delaney’s face. I think she saw the way he grabbed her wrist. Marlene said his mind was going, that he lost himself. But it wasn’t true. He could see more than most. He could see Delaney, like a sign. Like a warning.

I told Delaney to leave the back door unlocked that night because I didn’t want her thinking she was an omen. I didn’t want her thinking of that man dying a few hours later.

The grass was shorter in her backyard, and cooler. Damp. Her house had these motion-detector lights in the backyard and off the front porch, and the only way to avoid them going off was to press myself against the siding of the house and creep along it until I reached the back door. Like I was a stalker. I held my breath and tested the handle. Locked. They didn’t keep a spare key under a mat or a rock in the side yard, like we did. I crept back to the front of the house and stared up at her dark window. Guess we weren’t thinking the same thing after all.

The air felt thick with humidity, even though the grass was cool, like maybe it would rain. Good. Then maybe the
hike would be canceled and I’d get out of waking up in less than six hours.

I wasn’t as quiet as I should’ve been coming back inside my own house, and the kitchen light flicked on down the hall. Crap. I froze but figured I was already caught. I looked down at my bare feet.
I was just out back
. True.
I didn’t go anywhere
. True.

Then I heard a clatter, like furniture being pushed around. I walked into the kitchen. My dad stood hunched over the counter, like he had earlier today. But there was a chair toppled over beside him. “Dad?” I asked.

He spun around too quickly, knocking a glass of water off the counter. It shattered into pieces beside him, and I was trying to focus on the pieces, trying to figure out what was happening after midnight in this room with a chair on the floor and a glass in pieces and water pooling on the hardwood next to my dad’s bare feet.

“Something’s not right,” he said. He clutched at his chest for a heartbeat, maybe two, and I watched as his knees hit the pieces of glass on the floor.

I felt something closing off my windpipe. Felt terror growing in my chest. “Mom!” I yelled.

I slid to the ground beside him, holding him up by the shoulders, looking anywhere but at his eyes, at the black centers. I looked at his mouth, instead. At the way it formed a word, but no sound came out. My mom was in the room, gripping the phone already. “Decker?” she asked, and I realized she couldn’t tell which of us was hurt. We were both
struggling to breathe. My arms were shaking as I tried to keep him up. They were shaking, still, as we both sunk farther onto the floor.

The ambulance took my dad away, took my mom away, too. She said, “I’ll call you” as they closed the double doors. I’d ridden in the back of the ambulance with Delaney. There was barely any room, and it felt like a coffin. It felt like hell.

I didn’t fight to ride in one now. I’d meet them there with my own car. It was smart.

We’d all have a ride home later.

Then I saw Delaney standing between her parents on the front porch, her arms folded across her chest, her hands tucked up under her shoulders, like she was hiding something. Her mouth was open but she didn’t have to say anything. She closed her eyes, and in that stupid motion-detector light, I could see the tear trailing down her cheek, and I knew.

I knew with every cell in my body—now paralyzed, nauseous—the same way she knew with hers.

Sometime between here and there, he wasn’t going to make it.

When death is close, she hides her hands. They shake. They give her away.

The engine of the ambulance turned over, the red and blue lights lighting up the night. Delaney was racing across my yard, and that jerked me into motion. I was back-peddling toward my house, like if I could just get away from her, if I could pretend I didn’t see, it wouldn’t be true. I held up my hands. She stopped dead in her tracks. And then I looked at her
hands, which were hanging still beside her, and for the briefest second I thought that he was going to be okay.

Then she looked at them too, and she clenched them into fists.

“No,” I said, talking to her, talking to myself.

But she didn’t listen. She walked up the steps and followed me into the house.

“Decker,” she said, nearly whispering, “I am so, so—”

“
What?
” I spun around as I said it, and she cringed.

“Sorry,” she said, and I could see her mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear anything else.

“I have to go,” I said, fumbling for the car keys. My mom would be there, alone. Alone because Delaney’s hands were still as the ambulance drove away. Death wasn’t coming anymore. It was done.

His work shoes were beside the door. And the house still smelled like lasagna, still felt like him—I could hear him, walking down the stairs, all some big trick, like how I’d keep imagining Delaney gone, see her still body, and then she’d appear, full of life, right in front of me.

I ran into the office. The kitchen. Watched the stairs, my breath coming too fast, my vision going hazy from it.

“Decker,” she said. And she was crying. Shaking her head at me.

Like I was that lady in 2B. Looking for someone who didn’t exist anymore.

I shook my head at her. Like she had the power to change this.
Change this
, I thought, turning away from her, watching the stairs again.

“Delaney? Decker?” Joanne stood in the open doorway, her curly hair a mess, a bathrobe pulled around her pajamas, sneakers over bare feet. “Hon? Do you want to go or wait for your mom to call?”

“I’m going,” I said, holding up my keys. They trembled. My hand trembled.

“Ron will drive you,” she said.

“I need my car,” I whispered. But I didn’t know how to say no to Joanne.

“I got it,” Delaney said, reaching for the keys over my shoulder.

I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking. Couldn’t take a breath. I pressed the keys into her hands and heard her exhale.

“Mom,” she whispered as we brushed by her.

“Be right there,” she said, and she squeezed my shoulder as I passed. Delaney ran for the car. I couldn’t figure out why we were running. Why were we running?

And she drove fast, like that might change anything. I remembered that it could. I ran for her on the ice. I found her. She lived.

Delaney had died under that lake—her heart had stopped, her brain had gone without oxygen for eleven minutes—she was blue and cold and painfully still when I pulled her out of the ice, and I didn’t let her go. She came back. She was sitting beside me this very second.

Not him
, I thought—I thought it all the way to the same place I’d begged for Delaney’s life.

We were halfway to the hospital when I realized she
didn’t have any shoes on. I realized that I didn’t either. Her toenails were painted a pale purple that I hadn’t seen on her before. I was still staring at them when she jerked her foot to the brake and put the car in park.

She handed me the keys in the parking lot, but she didn’t follow me. Just stood in the parking lot, staring at the moon. I wondered if she was just waiting for her ride. I wondered if maybe she was praying. I wondered if she was making a bargain with someone. “Thank you,” I said, and then she turned and clung to me, her face buried in my neck, like she knew that everything was about to change. I left her there, pretending I didn’t know what she meant.

I found my mom in the waiting room a half hour later, after racing from floor to floor, room to room, with no idea where I was going. But it seemed like there was a clock, something I was racing against. As long as I kept moving, as long as we all kept moving …

But there she was, with her back to me, perfectly still. Also missing shoes. It was almost comical. She had these blue gauze things on her feet that surgeons wore over their shoes in the operating room or something. She was staring at her phone. Just staring at it. It was trembling slightly as I walked up behind her. “Mom,” I said.

She stared at the phone, then stared at me. “I was going to call,” she said.

But she couldn’t. She didn’t have to say why.

It was almost light when we made it back home. Not morning yet, not to me. “You should sleep,” my mom said, tossing my car keys on the dining room table, which seemed like the most ridiculous idea in the world. There were a million things more important than sleep. A million things to do. Except there weren’t. Not really. “Your grandmother will be here after lunch, so …” And then she disappeared into my dad’s office.

I wandered past the kitchen and noticed the glass was off the floor. The water was gone. The chair was upright, back beside the table, like last night had never happened. I wondered if Delaney had cleaned up—she knew about the spare key, knew where to find it, had the guts to use it.

I wandered up the stairs and stood in my doorway. Yep, definitely Delaney, seeing as she was sprawled facedown on my bed. I took a step into the room, wanting to fall down beside her. Lie there while she rubbed my back and told me I’d be okay. I stepped toward her, the floorboard creaking, and she jerked upright to standing, sucking in a breath, a hand against the wall to steady herself.

She was looking at me like she wasn’t sure where she was or what I was doing here.

It felt like I was supposed to tell her something, but she already knew. She’d known it before we left this house, racing toward the hospital for no reason. I stared at the hiking boots in the corner, the bottoms covered in mud. “The doctors said he had a heart condition,” I said to her, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I had nothing else to say. There
was
nothing else to say.