I tiptoed down the steps and found Mom at the kitchen table. She was reading the paperwork that came with my medicine. She shouldn’t have been so concerned—it was currently swimming with the sewage.
“Mom,” I said, but she kept staring at the paper, like I hadn’t said anything.
“Mother,” I said again.
She held up her hand. “Not right now, Delaney.”
“I wanted to ask you about . . . your parents. And—”
She swung her face to me and yelled, “I said not now!” And I could tell she’d been crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She laughed, a sad, mean laugh. “Apparently, you.” I staggered backward, bumping into the door behind me. And for the first time I understood the idea in physics that sound is a transferable energy. Because her words transferred right into my gut.
I ran out of the kitchen, up the steps, into my room, and slammed the door. I leaned against my door, struggling to catch my breath, and thought that maybe hell wasn’t a place at all, but a thing. A contagious thing. A thing that could creep up the steps, seep through the crack under my door, grow horns and sprout fire—smelling faintly like sulfur. A thing that could sink its tendrils inside and take root, coloring everything gray and distorting a smile into a sneer. And while I got dressed for the play, I swatted at my back and kept running my hands over my stomach because I could feel it, I swear, I could feel it reaching for me, trying to grab hold.
Chapter 12
Decker showed up looking all prepped out. I would’ve teased him about his V-neck sweater and khaki pants, asked if he was late for a round of golf or maybe on the debate team, but we were barely speaking. Every sentence between us was pained and forced. Silence was easier.
We traveled the long expanse of barren road between our town and the city, bare trees creeping toward the edges, evergreens filling in the background. “What’s this show even about?” Decker asked after we’d been driving for twenty minutes in silence.
I had read the back blurb of the book. “Something about a fugitive ex-con who changes his life and becomes a mayor and takes in a dead prostitute’s kid during some French uprising. Oh, and the cop who chases him and commits suicide.”
Decker almost smiled. “For real? Sounds like a blast. Can’t wait.”
I ignored his sarcasm, because I really couldn’t wait. An ex-con who becomes something more than who he was destined to be. He was greater than his fate. He saved people.
Decker had bought us seats in the balcony. He stretched his legs in the aisle and slumped in his seat, resting his head on his hand on the far armrest. I kept my hands in my lap. At the movies, we’d usually share popcorn and a soda with one straw and bump hands and fight over the center armrest. Now, we were making sure we never touched each other.
We sat there, pressed against the opposite sides of our seats, unmoving for nearly three hours. I was riveted. So riveted I didn’t check to see what Decker thought. Until the end, the final act, when the ghost of the prostitute comes back for the soul of the ex-con, with the daughter hovering over the death bed, and they sing:
Take my hand and lead me to salvation
Take my love for love is everlasting
And remember the truth that once was spoken
To love another person is to see the face of God.
And I got that lump in my throat when something is so surprising and so perfect and I’m caught off guard by it. And everything kind of makes sense in a whole new light. I turned my head away from Decker and dabbed at my eyes with my sleeve. And while I was facing away, I felt Decker’s hand on my shoulder, his fingers falling through my hair. But by the time the crowd started applauding, his hand—and the moment—was gone.
Somehow the play had started to fix us. In the car, Decker started talking like he used to. Like there wasn’t some unspoken heaviness surrounding us. “No wonder the book was so long,” he said. “It’s his whole freaking life.”
“It’s, like, twenty people’s whole freaking lives.”
“It was good, D. I’m glad I came. I’m glad you made me start reading it anyway.”
“Wow, Decker, are you gonna start doing assigned reading now?”
“God no, what could top that?”
I opened my mouth to answer but I never got the chance because the minivan hit a patch of black ice and we started spinning. I braced myself with one arm on the dashboard and one arm on the window and looked out at the headlights dancing off the spinning blackness ahead. I heard Decker curse and the squeal of brakes finally catching traction again, and I felt the roughness of unpaved ground beneath us.
And then we stopped. All I could hear was my pounding heartbeat and Decker’s heavy breathing and the uneven hum of the recovering engine. My heart sounded like the drum in my head when I woke up that first night in the hospital. When I went from feeling nothing to everything and couldn’t stop screaming because it turned out the everything was blinding pain. I had to get out. I threw the car door open and stumbled out into the night.
“Get back in the car.” Decker’s voice wavered.
“I need some air.”
“Don’t move,” he said, and he revved the engine and backed the minivan off the dirt and onto the side of the road.
The dark came into focus. Cracked mounds of earth poking through the snow. Bare trees. Clusters of evergreens. Fog lingering at the white tree line.
Decker hung a U-turn in the middle of the road to get the car facing in the right direction. I walked toward the woods and put my hands on the rough bark of the nearest tree. I rested my forehead on the trunk and sucked in the cold air.
A car door slammed and Decker came running. “What the hell, Delaney? I told you not to move!”
I pushed myself away from the tree and looked at him. “I’m right here.”
“Yeah, I can see that, but I told you to stay over there.” He placed both palms on my shoulders and pushed me, actually pushed me, into the tree trunk.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” I said. Then I felt his hands shaking on top of my shoulders. His eyes were wide. His mouth was open. He was terrified. So I lowered my voice and said, “Hey, we’re okay. We’re fine.”
And without warning, Decker’s lips were moving on mine, forceful and desperate, and I thought about pushing him away, but somehow instead my arms wrapped around his neck and I was pulling him closer, closer. His hands clung to the back of my jacket, like I was a thing that might slip away if he paused to take a single breath. And he kissed me like he was looking for something, like there was some question he couldn’t quite find the answer to. And the only answer I had was that no one else mattered—not Troy or Tara or Carson or anyone else—as long as he would just keep kissing me.
But he didn’t keep kissing me. Headlights crested the hill ahead, and we pulled apart, exposed. And now that he wasn’t kissing me, everything mattered again. We walked back to the car. “You can’t do that if you’re with Tara,” I said.
He jammed his seat belt in the buckle and gunned the engine as much as a minivan’s engine can be gunned. We were back on the road when he said, “It was a mistake.”
But I’d seen the way he kissed her. Like he had done it a million times before. And I’d seen her stupid red car at his place. “Don’t pretend it was just once. I know she was over last night.”
Decker clenched his jaw and his knuckles on the wheel turned white. He didn’t deny it. He didn’t say she showed up unexpectedly, he didn’t say he asked her to leave, or that he was sorry. He didn’t say any of that. I opened my mouth to ask him to explain, but I couldn’t. Because I realized the mistake wasn’t Tara. He’d meant the mistake was me.
Decker cleared his throat when he pulled into my driveway. “You seeing that guy from the other day?”
I shrugged and thought about it. “He knows me,” I said. But when I heard the words, I realized they weren’t mine. They were Troy’s.
“I know you,” he said.