Fracture

by Megan Miranda

  She dropped me off at home with explicit instructions not to leave the house (or my room, for that matter) while she went to fill another prescription I’d be flushing down the drain. I listened because of the way she slammed the lock on my car door. I listened because I was scared of what she might do.

  Except then I heard a loud engine out front and the doorbell rang, and I knew it was Troy. He would understand. So I tiptoed down the steps and pulled him inside and whispered, “You have to leave.” But even as I said that I gripped tight onto both of his hands.

  “Why? What happened?”

  I leaned into him and he moved his arms around my waist. Everything else fell away as I breathed him in. “I tried to save someone.”

  He tensed and pushed me backward. “You . . . what?” He clenched his teeth. “What did you do?”

  “I told my doctor someone was going to die.”

  Troy gripped my upper arm. “Why did you do that?” Then he shook me. “How stupid can you be?”

  I flinched, remembering how little I knew Troy and how little he knew me. “I’m not stupid,” I said, looking at the fingers digging into my arm.

  He slowly released his grip. “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. But there’s no point, Delaney. There’s nothing you can do. People will think you’re crazy, or maybe suspect you’re involved somehow.”

  I nodded, rubbing my arm, remembering how my parents suspected me in Mrs. Merkowitz’s death.

  “I tried to tell you before. I thought it would help to know. You can’t save them. This is hell.”

  His eyes were wide and his teeth were clenched, and the overcrowding didn’t look endearing anymore. It looked dangerous. I glanced toward the window. “What are you doing here, Troy?”

  “You said you’d come Monday for me to check out the hand. I thought maybe you were avoiding me, and I’m on lunch, so here I am.”

  Avoiding him. Right. Because of last night. Was it only last night? “I had a doctor’s appointment that nobody told me about. Sorry.”

  He ran his hands over his face, rubbing the tension away. “Okay. It’s okay. I’m sorry, too. So anyway, we should go out tonight. We can talk then.”

  “I have plans, actually.”

  “With who?” He was showing his teeth, but he wasn’t smiling.

  “With Decker. The guy from the pizza place.”

  “The neighbor? You’re going on a date with him?”

  Then I noticed his front right tooth had a chip, and I wondered whether he got that in a fight or in the accident. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it when I kissed him. “No, not a date. It’s a play, and it’s for school.”

  “You’re a crappy liar, Delaney.” He leaned toward me and took a step closer. “He doesn’t know you.”

  “I think you should go now.”

  “It didn’t seem like you wanted me to go last night, if I recall correctly.” He was right, and that bothered me. Because I hadn’t noticed the chipped tooth, which was practically glaring me in the face. And if I hadn’t noticed that, what else had I missed? I couldn’t think straight around him. Like vertigo. Like falling.

  I heard the garage door open and felt relief in my stomach. “That’s my mom. And I’m not supposed to have company when she’s not home.”

  He ran his tongue along his bottom lip and threw his hands up in an I’m innocent expression. He didn’t take his eyes off me as he backed out of the house. And as I swung the door shut in his face, he grinned and said, “Enjoy your evening.”

  Mom walked in just as Troy walked out. “I didn’t know he was coming. I swear,” I said, breathing too fast between words.

  Mom grinned. A real grin. “That’s okay, honey.” She hung her jacket over the chair and tore at the paper drugstore bag.

  “You’re not mad he was here?”

  “No, Delaney, though I would prefer if he called before he came next time.” I gripped the edge of the dining room chair, wondering if I had just hallucinated the entire doctor’s office scene. How could she swing between two emotions so rapidly? How could she go from treating me like I was crazy to this?

  And then I got it. This was normal. Boy over. Kicking him out before Mom got home. Nothing said normal teenager more than that. She was relieved.

  Mom shook a pill into her outstretched hand. “It says to take with food. Do you want a cookie or leftover pie?”

  “I can’t take it now. I’m going to Les Mis with Decker tonight. I don’t want to be all loopy.”

  “You won’t be loopy. You’ll be better. And anyway, I don’t think you should go out tonight.”

  “It was my Christmas present. You told him I could go. And it’s for school. And I’ll take the damn medicine when I get home.”

  Mom set her jaw and held her chin high. “You can go if you take the medicine.”

  I tried to mimic her expression, jaw clenched and tilted up, but from the look on her face, I knew I wasn’t succeeding. I hung my head. “Cookie,” I said. When she turned for the kitchen, I saw the resilience in her profile for the first time. This person who left her own home and made a life for herself. My mother had dragged herself out of her personal hell. She escaped. So could Troy.

  I ate a chocolate chip cookie, threw a pill into the side of my mouth, and excused myself to get ready.

  I flushed my new medication down the toilet, and tried to think of how to explain this to Troy. That hell can be temporary. That there’s a way out. So I thought about what Mom did—she left. Okay, Troy had already done that. What else had Mom done? How long had it taken? I couldn’t change his past, I couldn’t change his present, but I could give him something—some hope maybe.

  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.

  “He was in a coma, too. He knows what it’s like.”

  “I would too if you told me. So it’s a yes then. You’re starting something with him.”

  Is this how it starts? Meeting some guy I have something in common with and kissing him on Christmas? Or did it start thirteen years ago, with a boy who promised to make me smile and has been doing it every day since? It didn’t matter. We couldn’t go backward. We couldn’t go forward. We were stuck.

  I swung my bag onto my shoulder and hopped down from the car. “I really don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  “I guess not,” he said, and I slammed the door. But then he lowered the window. “I was just wondering where you knew him from, is all. Because I remember where I saw him.” I stood, one hand on my hip, leaning into it, eyebrow raised like I didn’t care but obviously I did because I was still standing there. “The hospital,” he said. “He was at the hospital.”

  He raised the window and rolled down the driveway. He was already in his house before I willed myself up the front porch steps. Something twisted in my stomach, and it wasn’t until I made it to my room that I thought of what it might be.

  I went into my room and changed, noticing the handprint on my upper arm. I pulled at the skin to see if Troy’s fingerprints had made an impression. To see who he was. Because Decker had me working out a logic problem: how did Troy know I was like him even before I met him? How did he know me at all? First, I thought he’d seen me in the paper. Lie. Then, I thought he knew me from Mrs. Merkowitz’s yard. Lie. Now, it appeared he knew me from the hospital. Maybe Troy was seeing a doctor for his headaches after all. If he could lie so effortlessly to my parents, he could lie to me, too.

  As I was working through that puzzle, another logic issue demanded attention. This had been my logic: people were dying, and we were drawn to them. People were dying, so we showed up. But what if it was the other way around? We showed up, and people died. Never had the order of sentence clauses seemed so important. Either I was drawn to death, which was eerie and kind of sucked, or I was causing death, which, let’s face it, was far, far worse.

  I crumpled onto the floor and held my head in my hands, pressing my fingers into my temple. Something in there was wrong. Not a fluke or an anomaly and definitely not a miracle.

  An abomination. And I h
ad no one to talk to but Troy.

  I wanted to borrow the car, but Mom wasn’t making breakfast when I got downstairs the next morning. She wasn’t scrubbing dishes either. Mom was nowhere to be found. I poked my head into the back office, the garage, and the laundry room. No Mom. I snuck back upstairs and stuck my nose into the open space of her doorway

  The shades were pulled tight, and Mom was curled over old albums on the floor. I thought maybe she was looking back at her childhood, remembering, but I recognized the covers. They were the scrapbooks Mom had made of my childhood—a book per year, until grammar school, when everything started to blur together.

  She was bent over, tracing the edge of a picture with her finger. Like she was trying to remember that girl. Like that girl in the picture was the real one and I was the ghost left behind. Like that girl in the picture was dead. No, not dead. Like my grandparents—dead to her. A chill ran through me, and I backed away.

  I took the car.

  Troy probably wouldn’t expect me this early. After I kicked him out yesterday afternoon, he might not expect me at all. He had scared me a little when I realized how intimidating he could be. How possessive. How angry.

  The same woman was working at the front desk. She waved when I walked in and jutted her thumb out down the hall. And just like the last time I had been there, death was pulling at me from both sides of the hall. Some faint, some stronger. The strongest was at the end of the hall. Which was where I found Troy again. I leaned against the doorjamb and watched him care for the old woman. He used a wet washcloth to clean her face and placed it on her forehead while he cleared the food from her tray.