Outside the truck, someone was yelling. Her father was yelling. She’d recognize that sound anywhere. Ginny peered out the window.
Her father was standing in front of a beat-up pickup truck. A man was leaning against the side, and one was seated in the driver’s seat, his arm dangling from the window. Ginny swallowed back fear and lowered the window just enough to hear what they were saying. She caught her father midsentence.
“S’matter with you?” he was shouting. “Those girls are less’n half your age.”
The guy leaning against the side of the truck laughed, clearly unthreatened by her father. “Whatever, old man.”
Ginny’s blood ran cold as her father stood up straight. “The fuck did you just call me?”
The driver of the truck stopped smirking. He opened his door, sending a flood of panic over Ginny. She lowered the window and called out to her father.
“Daddy, please. Don’t.”
The man standing outside the truck swung his head toward her. He gaped, then turned back to her father. “You’re standing there blitzed out of your mind, and you got a fucking kid in the truck?”
Ginny flitted back and forth between hoping the men would call the police and praying that her father wouldn’t put his beer down and go after the driver. He may have been stronger than her mother, but this was a fight he couldn’t win.
“Daddy,” she pleaded. “Let’s go. Come on.”
To her surprise, he didn’t take another step toward the men in the truck. He hoisted his twelve-pack of beer up and headed around to the driver’s side of his own truck, while the other man got into his truck. They peeled off, leaving Ginny trembling in her seat.
“I told you to stay out of shit like that.”
Her father’s voice jolted her. He tossed the beer into the backseat and slammed the door shut. Ginny’s heart thumped as he climbed into the driver’s seat.
“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” she whispered.
Her father grunted. Ginny picked up the stench of beer on him that wasn’t there when he entered the store, and she strongly suspected that one can was missing from the twelve-pack in the backseat.
“Those men were harassing some girls,” he said. “I don’t like when animals like them look at girls like that. One of them could be you someday.”
Ginny breathed through her mouth as he fumbled to put the truck in reverse. She didn’t say it, but she didn’t think there was a man out there who was more dangerous to her than her own father was.
The rain was falling sideways in sheets now; one of those fall storms that shifts gears with little warning.
“It’s really rainy,” Ginny said. “It’s too dangerous to drive.” It’s too dangerous for you to drive.
Daddy grabbed her by the chin. “Hey. Look at me. Have I ever put you in danger before?”
His words slurred together. Ginny shook her head. Her father released her, and Ginny felt a red spot bloom on her face where his fingers had dug in. “I don’t put my family in danger. You’re safer with me than ’nyone else, you got that?”
Ginny nodded. She thought of the cell phone in the pocket of her father’s jacket. If she could sneak it without him seeing—
He leaned over and began to cycle through the radio stations. The moment his eyes left the road, the truck swerved onto the shoulder. “What d’you think? The Stones or the Moody Blues?”
Ginny squeezed her eyes shut.
“What, now you’re not talking to me?” Daddy whipped around in his seat to face her, jerking the car into the oncoming lane. Ginny grabbed the dashboard, seeing the headlights of the other car through the rain—
She felt like she was leaving her body, like it was someone else screaming Daddy Daddy Daddy—
He yanked the wheel back. The sickening sound of the other car’s horn, then the screech of metal on metal; Daddy slammed on the brakes and the truck spun a complete three-sixty. Ginny felt the tires leave the pavement—they were falling, both of them screaming. Her skull cracked against the ceiling and then everything went still.
Upside down. They were upside down. With trembling hands, Ginny unbuckled her seat belt. Next to her, her father was motionless, blood trickling down his face.
Ginny lowered the window and climbed out, the scene swirling around her. The truck had flown over the guardrail; the ground sloped below her, her feet sucking into the mud. The water from the lake below was rising with the rain.
She stumbled up the hill back toward the road, her sneakers sounding like suction cups in the mud. She walked through the pain in her shoulder, or maybe her collarbone. She had never broken a bone before, but she imagined this was what it felt like.
Help, I have to help them—
Ginny came to a halt when the other car came into focus. It was split in half, the front end wrapped around a tree.
When she saw a limb, completely detached from its body, lying on the grass, she stumbled forward and vomited.
Both of the girls—Ginny thought they were girls, at least—in the car were dead. That much was clear. They were dead because of her father—or maybe it was her fault; she hadn’t answered him when he asked what music she wanted to listen to, and he’d gotten angry and taken his eyes off the road.
In both directions, there was only blackness and rain. Why wasn’t anyone coming? Where were other drivers? Ginny ran back across the road, sliding down the embankment, grabbing on to branches as she went so she wouldn’t fall. If she could get to her father’s cell phone, she could call the police.
That’s when she heard him moaning her name. The film of vomit still sour on her tongue, Ginny climbed over the embankment. Her father had managed to lower his window. His face was purple from the blood rushing to his head.
“Ginny baby,” he said. “I need you to unbuckle me so I can climb out.”
Ginny looked from his arm, twisted at an unnatural angle, to the blood dripping from his forehead. She thought of Mom’s eye, purple and swollen.
Daddy’s voice cracked through the pain in Ginny’s skull. “Now, Ginny. I’m fuckin’ bleeding over here.”
Ginny touched her eyebrow and examined her fingers, stained with blood.
Her father’s eyes were pleading. “Come on, baby. You gotta help me out of here. I can’t unbuckle myself.”
All she had to do was reach through the window, undo his seat belt so he could wiggle out the driver’s window. The embankment was flooding, the truck teetering, threatening to topple into the lake—
Daddy was screaming her name now. Thunder sounded over the lake, and she knew no one in the houses, if they were even listening, could hear his screams. She watched, one arm around the tree, as the truck rolled into the lake.
Then she turned and headed back up toward the road, away from the sounds of the sirens approaching, disappearing into the rain.
Hours later, when her mother got home and wanted to know why Ginny was lying in bed with a bag of frozen carrots pressed to her fractured collarbone, Ginny said her father had done it before he left.
It was the truth, after all.
She knew the image of that wrecked car would haunt her for the rest of her life, but what was there to gain from admitting what had really happened? Hadn’t her father gotten what he deserved for killing those two girls, for hurting her mother, for destroying almost everything he touched?
No, Ginny decided. She wouldn’t tell anyone.
There are some things not everyone has to know.
This book was a team effort with my editor, Krista Marino. Thank you for responding to my brainstorming emails in the middle of the night. Thank you for your patience, guidance, and enthusiasm (as well as our shared love of dark and creepy things).
Thank you to my agent, Suzie Townsend, who has been by my side for seven years and counting. I’m also so lucky to have the team at New Leaf Literary in my corner: Sara Stricker, Joanna Volpe, Mia Roman, Kathleen Ortiz, Pouya Shahbazian, Chris McEwen, and Hilary Pecheone.