Between the Girls (The Basin Lake Series Book 3)

by Stephanie Vercier

  “People think I’m dead?” I have to whisper it, but words actually do come out of my mouth.

  The nurse nods. “More than likely. And now we’re dealing with families who’ve heard some on the list are only injured and being given false hope. All so some so-called news site could be the first to publish what they thought was the full story, damn the facts.”

  “I need to tell Claire,” I say, my voice cracking when I put too much pressure on my vocal chords.

  “Claire? Will your mother have a number for her?”

  I look over to my mom. She’s just ended her call, sees me and hurries over to my bedside.

  “You’re awake!” She springs into motherly action, smoothing my sheets, wiping my damp, sweaty hair from my forehead, offering me water.

  “He’d like to talk to someone named Claire,” the nurse tells her.

  “Are you sure?” Mom asks, concern evident in her voice.

  “Yes… very,” I croak out.

  She smiles. “You’re right. She’ll want to know. I’ll get right on it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  TYLER

  “You gave us all a hell of a scare,” Dad says.

  He hadn’t been able to get the same flight as mom and then kept getting bumped back before he finally arrived this morning.

  “Sorry,” I say, sitting up in bed, having showered and been allowed to put on a sweatshirt and shorts but still ordered to remain in bed. And I’m pretty much okay with that, still reeling from the news that fifteen of the guys on my crew didn’t make it out alive.

  It’s just Dad and I in the room. Mom went out to grab some comfort food for us, and we’re expecting Claire and Sam to fly in this afternoon.

  “No need to be sorry.” He pulls up a chair and sits close to me. “We’ve been here before, in a hospital with you, scared out of our wits. When I got that first call, Tyler, I thought the worst—” He breaks off, clamming up and shaking his head.

  “It’s okay, Dad. You can cry if you want to. I did that most of last night.” My voice is stronger today, and it only faintly hurts to talk.

  “Were you close to any of them?” he asks.

  “All of them. Our crew was tight. It still doesn’t seem real.”

  This triggers something in my dad, and he takes me up on my invitation to cry. He takes my hand and tells me he loves me, tells me he’s proud of me, tells me he’s grateful that I’m his son.

  “I love you too, Dad,” I say after shedding some more of my own tears.

  I consider leaving it at that, but this is some kind of breakthrough we’re having, and I’m not going to let it go without getting some things off of my chest. There’s nothing like nearly dying to push you to say the things you’ve always wanted to.

  “You say you’re proud,” I tell him once he’s more in control of his emotions. “And yet you kept me from playing sports and tried to keep me from dating Claire.”

  “Son…”

  “You were ashamed of me. You wouldn’t even toss the football with me unless we were on vacation. You cringed at the idea of all those surgeries I had.”

  He shakes his head and sighs. “Oh, son… if you only knew. I was trying to protect you.”

  “By keeping me a prisoner and making me feel like a freak?”

  He looks crushed. “I failed you, and what’s sad is I knew I was doing it as I went along, but I didn’t know another way, couldn’t get there in my head.”

  “You could have listened to Mom,” I tell him. “She wasn’t trying to hide me.”

  Letting out a long, heavy breath, he rests his elbows on his thighs, clasps his fingers into a pyramid and lowers his head.

  And then he’s silent.

  I assume we’ve just hit a brick wall and that Dad doesn’t want to talk about this anymore, which isn’t really okay, but it’s not so different from the way things have been for the last ten plus years of my life.

  But before I can write him off, he lifts his head and says, “Your mother didn’t see what I saw.”

  I reposition myself higher on the bed. “What do you mean?”

  “When you were in the hospital after Pepper attacked you, my first concern was your health, whether you were going to live or die. And once it was clear you were going to live, then I worried about the other stuff, the chunks that dog had taken out of you, the future scarring… the mutilation.”

  “You can say it dad.”

  “Say what?”

  “That Pepper basically bit part of my dick off.”

  He can’t seem to help but laugh. “A dick that they repaired and rebuilt,” he says, shaking his head like he can’t believe he’s saying this out loud. “They could call it the six-million-dollar penis.”

  Even though my throat still burns a little, I crack up until my stomach is hurting from the laughter. We’re making so much noise that the nurse checks on us and finds herself laughing too, like it’s contagious.

  She settles down first, checks a few things and then leaves the room.

  And when Dad and I get ourselves under control, I ask him, “Why couldn’t you be like this before? Maybe if knew how to laugh about it, it wouldn’t have been so hard.”

  “I should have, but then I would have thought laughing at it would make it worse. That’s what I meant earlier when I said I heard things your mother didn’t.”

  “Someone making fun of me? I was kind of used to that… did my best to ignore it.”

  “You were used to it coming from other kids who knew what had happened to you,” he says, “but I heard it from people who should have known better.”

  “Like who?”

  He takes a moment, as if gathering resolve. “It was before your first big surgery. You’d been in the hospital for two weeks by then and I was just coming back up from the cafeteria with some coffee, back up to your room to check on you—you’d been pretty sedated and had slept most of that day. I’d stopped outside when I noticed a couple of your nurses working around you—I didn’t want to interrupt them. They were laughing about something, and I figured it was completely unrelated to you, but I couldn’t help but hear, and when I did…” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t believe what they were saying.”

  I listen intently, feeling like what Dad is telling me is about to explain so much about our relationship.

  “These two women, young but professional—they were nurses, registered nurses, one of them with a master’s degree—I knew that because we’d talked about it, and your mother and I had been impressed you were in such capable hands. They seemed concerned… compassionate, and yet here they were, making fun of what the dog did to you, saying you were going to need a miracle if you ever were going to get married, if you were ever going to be able to please a woman. They were saying this about a child, Tyler, two women who were supposed to care for you were saying the most vile, disgusting things—”

  He stops and buries his head in his hands, and he sobs.

  I put my hand on his shoulder, shocked at the event that precipitated the way in which he interacted with me all of these years.

  “Do you see?” he says, lifting his head. “I figured that if I couldn’t trust these two women, then how could I let you keep going further into sports and trust adolescent boys in locker rooms not to completely tear you down?”

  “But they all knew anyway,” I tell him.

  “It’s one thing to know,” he says. “It’s another thing to see—people don’t like different—different is easy to attack. Maybe that’s why I was such a hard-ass with you, trying to build up your armor. But I couldn’t protect you from someone like Laney and how that practically destroyed you, destroyed our family, and I didn’t want to see that repeat itself with Claire.”

  “Claire isn’t anything like Laney,” I say, knowing that the mere mention of her name would be tearing me apart right now if I didn’t know she was on her way to see me. “And I’m sorry for putting our family at risk. I was just so… so fucking angry.”

&n
bsp; “I know,” he says. “I get how pushed you felt… I get it! I can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same thing. And… well, as for Claire, she’s proven herself in more ways than one, and I hope she and you will work and have a long life together. You sure as hell deserve some happiness.”

  For the first time in years, I really embrace my dad. It’s been a hell of a long time coming, and it’s one of the best feelings in the world.

  CLAIRE

  “You’re a really good friend,” I tell Sam who is sitting next to me on the flight to California.

  “Not just to Tyler,” he says. “I hope you realize I’m your friend too.”

  “I do. I most definitely do.”

  When Tyler’s mom called me to say he was okay, I’d been beside myself. When she put him on the phone, and he said, “I figure I should tell you I’m alive because I love you,” his voice hoarse and not much more than a whisper, I’d broken down and cried with tears of joy. After my dream, I’d somehow known he wasn’t really dead, but the confirmation still felt like a miracle. By that time, Court and Denny’s apartment was full, and Sam had come over with Meg. Even before the call, he’d been telling me he was reading new but still confusing information on other news sites and social media and not to give up hope. And once we’d gotten confirmation Tyler was alive—me pretty much exploding with joyful relief—Sam booked an immediate flight for us.

  “I hope your Mom isn’t mad we didn’t wait for her to fly out to Seattle and meet us,” he says, finishing off a pack of airline peanuts.

  “No, it would have been hard for her to leave Kate, and she’s grateful I’m not on this flight alone.”

  “Hey, I’m happy to be here. I need to give that kid a hug. I feel like I’ve known him most of my life, and damn if I wasn’t scared shitless when I thought he was dead.”

  “We’ll be giving him plenty of hugs,” I say, still elated and needing to pinch myself to be sure this isn’t some dream.

  “He’ll be wanting more than hugs from you,” Sam says with a grin.

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see what he’s up for,” I say, leaning back against the headrest.

  Mrs. Duncan told Sam that Tyler’s injuries were caused by smoke inhalation and that he’d most likely be up and around in a few days. She hadn’t know all the details about the accident, but having talked to Tyler and a few officials, she relayed he and many of the survivors had been a few hundred feet from those who perished. I could only imagine the grief and the pain others were feeling, how some had been given hope the news reports were wrong, only to learn their loved one was not one of the lucky ones.

  That seeps in for a while, and I wonder if Sam is thinking about that too because we both settle into the quiet. After the pilot announces we’re beginning our descent, I decide to use my time with Sam to ask him about some things Tyler had included in his letter to me.

  “So, Tyler wrote me a letter when he went back to California, and he mentioned this guy, Heath Larson… your, um, younger brother?”

  That had been quite the revelation when I’d read it. Sam, from everything Tyler said about him, was his best friend, a guy he’d likely trust with his life. And the complete opposite of Sam, his brother, Heath, was someone Tyler had beat up for sleeping with Laney. I’m not sure what I’d feel about a person who might hurt Paige or Kate, regardless of how many wrongs they’d done, and yet Sam had found a way to continue his friendship with Tyler, which probably said a lot about both of them.

  He lets out a chuckle. “It’s not exactly a state secret or anything, but I can’t say I’m all that proud of my DNA connection to the guy.”

  “Because of what he did with Laney?”

  He turns toward me, leaning in closer. “That… and other things. Heath could be a little shit, and he liked to pick at Ty, and Ty just sort of took it, brushed it off like it wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Even though it probably was.”

  “Damn right. Heath is the jealous type, and even after what Ty had been through, he was still jealous of him being bigger, stronger, and I dare say better looking. But Ty wasn’t trying to outshine Heath. He just wanted to do his own thing and be left alone.”

  “And your brother couldn’t even let him do that.”

  “Nope. Far as I could tell, he hated the fact that there were people who liked Ty more than they did him. I mean, of course there were people who messed with Ty, but there were just as many who respected him and were his actual friends. And girls wanted to date him, but they were all too afraid to because they didn’t want to risk being made fun of, didn’t want their friends asking them how was Ty’s Franken-dick.”

  “They really said that?”

  “We’re talking teenage girls here, Claire, immature ones, unlike you. But Laney was the first girl to really give him a chance, and Heath didn’t like that. He went after her, maybe played on her own fears and discomfort, and then he screwed her.”

  I’ve never seen a picture of Heath, but I imagine I could find it next to the definition of asshole in the dictionary. “I’m sorry, but your brother sounds kind of awful.”

  Sam laughs. “Just kind of? Well, he is, and Ty kicked his ass… hard. He tell you he put him in the hospital?”

  “He did.” Tyler had been forthcoming in his writing, detailing that he’d broken Heath’s nose and cracked a few of his ribs, enough to necessitate a trip to the hospital. My mind had raced back to Tyler’s fight with Austin and his friends and how angry he’d been. It wasn’t a leap to see that Tyler could really hurt someone one-on-one, but the letter also made it obvious to me that Tyler wasn’t proud of any of it.

  “My folks wanted to sue Ty’s parents for everything they had. Kind of an overreaction, and yeah, my brother was hurt, but he made sure to play the victim pretty hard, even though he’d been doing his best to torment Ty for years.”

  “I’m sure he’d like to find another way to deal with that anger,” I say.

  He sighs. “Sure… I mean, it’s not like he’s ever bragged out it, but you push someone hard enough, and they’re going to push back. I had to convince my parents that Heath sort of deserved it, got them to accept Ty’s parents paying whatever the insurance wouldn’t plus a little more for ‘pain and suffering,’” he says with air quotes and a roll of his eyes. “It was still like five thousand, but that’s better than trying to sue the Duncans for more, right?”

  “For sure. They’re lucky to have you, but I can’t imagine that went over well with your parents.”

  “Not at first. And you can bet Heath was telling me he’d see me in hell, but my parents had been rescuing him from trouble for years, and they weren’t going to go out on a limb for him again. And Tyler paid a pretty heavy price in basically getting hauled out of Denver. I mean, it all worked out in the end, meeting you and all.”

  I blush at that. I can’t help it.

  “He’s so much happier with you than he ever was with Laney. Trust me.”

  I feel my face erupting into a smile at that. “I do trust you, and you know, Laney isn’t exactly my favorite person to talk about, but… well… sometimes I want to know more than what I think Tyler is willing to tell me about her, about why he held on, even if it was just in friendship.”

  Sam takes my hand and grips it. “You’re the only girl Ty loves. He was confused and still had feelings for Laney, but, as his best friend, I can say a lot of that was about trying to regain her respect.”

  “Even if she’s the one that cheated on him?”

  He loosens his grip on my hand. “Yeah, I know, but she also witnessed him kicking Heath’s ass. From what Ty has said, she was beyond horrified and never wanted to talk to him again. And Ty couldn’t handle that. He loved her, and it pained him to know she thought he was some kind of monster, so when she showed up on his doorstep before they moved out of Denver, I think he saw that as an opening for them but also a chance to get back into her good graces and prove to her that he wasn’t some crazed, violent asshole.”

  I
take everything that he’s telling me in, a lot of it aligning with what Tyler had tried to explain about her in his letter, and it makes sense. Austin was basically a moron, and yet I’d fallen for him in my own way. I’d gotten over him easier than Tyler was apparently able to get over Laney, but I couldn’t say that I wouldn’t have held onto more feelings for my ex if things had been different between he and I. He was my first, and that held some weight. So, I’m not sure I can blame Tyler for holding onto Laney and this idea of mutual forgiveness when his life had been so much more complicated than my own.

  “What are you thinking over there?” Sam asks me.

  “Oh…” I look over at him, somewhat embarrassed about my silence. “I’m just piecing things together I suppose.”

  “He’s had a rough time of it,” he tells me. “We all have shit happen to us, but Ty took more of a brunt than most of us. And he felt responsible for the move out of Denver. His parents just felt like they needed to get away after the stuff with my brother, probably felt they were doing Ty a favor. And that’s how they ended up in Basin Lake.”

  I’m not sure what to say. If I’d been older when my father died, I might be able to better understand what it would be like to be uprooted in your last year of school, be moved to a new state, a new town and a new school and think that all of it was your fault. Add to that an ex-girlfriend who tells you she never wants to see you again and then pops back up into your life when you’re ready to leave the old one behind. I can’t imagine the weight that put on his shoulders or the way in which it confused and complicated things for him, but I can say that I’m grateful that if all of those things were going to happen anyway, that he and his family were at least led to Basin Lake.

  “You’re a very good friend,” I tell Sam again.

  “Ty’s like my brother,” he says, some emotion in his voice. “I love that kid, and I’d pick him over my own family if I had to. And because of this, I know he loves you, and I hope this isn’t just a pity visit. I hope you give him a real chance.”