Fracture

by Megan Miranda

  Troy glared at me, then smiled at Leroy. Leroy raised a hand toward him in greeting. Then I sucked in a deep breath and continued. “Hey, that rhymes. Easy to remember those names together, don’t you think?” Mom laughed. Troy scowled. He knew exactly what I was doing, but he couldn’t stop me.

  Troy wouldn’t hurt Leroy if he was connected to him. Not unless he wanted his name remembered along with Leroy’s. I remembered how he ran from the house fire. How he ran from me in my neighbor’s backyard and when sirens came for Carson. He was scared of any affiliation. It was why the woman at his work was still alive. He didn’t want to raise any suspicion.

  Mom bought the batteries while I stood in the back near Troy.

  “Do you two have plans tonight?” Mom asked.

  “I was planning on spending New Year’s Eve with you and Dad. Like we always do. Maybe you can make fudge.”

  “That’d be lovely, honey. Troy, you’re welcome to join us.”

  Then he smiled a smug smile at me, and I was left wondering whether I had successfully saved Leroy from Troy, or whether I had put my family in immediate danger.

  “I’ll be in the car, Delaney,” Mom said after she paid for the batteries.

  Troy looked at me with a slightly sideways expression. He leaned forward and whispered, “You’re . . .” He clenched and unclenched his fists, and I knew what he was thinking. I was the girl who ran when she got spooked. I was the girl who hid in the back of the funeral home. I was the girl who had to be saved from the lake. He hadn’t gotten to know me, really. He didn’t know I wasn’t stupid. I was smart. I knew what I was doing.

  “You’re not helping,” he said.

  “I’m not killing him, either,” I whispered back.

  I finally understood what I could not do. I could not save them from death. Life will end. For them, for me. But I also knew what I could do. Troy was wrong. Whatever I had—a damaged brain, a knowledge, a sense, or—like Troy thought—a purpose, I could help. Correction: I would help.

  I waltzed up to the front of the store. “Leroy,” I said. “Troy and I were just having a discussion here. A debate, really. And we’d like your input. If you had one day left to live, what would you do?”

  Troy turned green. Leroy grinned. “You mean like tell off my boss or buy that motorcycle I’ve had my eye on?”

  “Whatever,” I said. “What would you do, if it was the one last thing you could?”

  He slumped in the plastic seat behind the register and ran his hand through his thinning hair. “Well, I’d take the dog,” he said, pointing to the brown lump snoozing under his feet. “And me and him’d go down the coast. Watch the waves.”

  “That’s it?” Troy said, standing up and walking toward us.

  “Yeah, that’d do it,” he said, moving his tongue along the place where his jaw used to be.

  Troy shook his head and walked out of the store. I leaned across the counter and watched as Leroy ran his hand along his dog’s head.

  “Leroy,” I whispered. “Do it.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat as we pulled out of the parking lot. Through the dirty windows of the store, I could see Leroy staring off into the distance. I wondered if I had done enough. If I had done the right thing. I had to believe that death wasn’t the end. Maybe there was a heaven, or something like a heaven.

  I hoped he’d take his dog and drive down to the ocean. I hoped there was still time. I pictured him sitting on the gray rocks with the waves crashing and spraying white foam. Maybe he’d hear something in the roar of the ocean, feel some limitless power, believe that there’s something greater. Something more. Maybe his heaven was at the coast, with a dog’s head in his lap, with nothing but water and depth from there to the horizon.

  “Delaney,” Mom whispered. “Why are you crying?”

  I touched my hand to my wet cheek. Then I wiped the tears off both sides of my face. “I’m not sure.”

  Mom made fudge that night, as requested. The Maxwell house was playing a solid imitation of itself. Dad won at Scrabble, and Mom and I challenged him on words we knew were words anyway, just to make him feel smart. And like I said, Mom made fudge. And me, I ate it. Even though the chocolate reminded me of Troy and I really just wanted to go to my room and sleep. But the old Delaney Maxwell wouldn’t pass up fudge. Or Scrabble, for that matter. And Mom looked so content.

  I tensed when the doorbell rang a few hours before midnight. I squeezed the tiled letter so hard between my fingers I thought it might shatter. Troy was out there somewhere. I could feel him lurking. I could sense him like I could sense when it was about to rain.

  I held my breath while Dad opened the door. He reached out into the darkness and pulled Decker inside, smiling and patting him on the back. “Where’ve you been, kid?” he said, leading him to the sofa. “Joanne, get the boy some food.”

  I handed the plate of fudge to Decker and smiled at him. “There’s not enough food in the house, Dad. Don’t bother.”

  Decker shoved me aside with his foot and plopped in the spot between me and Mom on the couch. I leaned over and asked, “What are you doing here?”

  He threw some fudge in the back of his mouth and said, “Same thing I do every year.” Except it was more, and we both knew it. But there was a chasm, too much said, too much unsaid, to go back. Or forward.

  So we faked it. We played Trivial Pursuit and he mocked my general illiteracy in the entertainment category. I harped on his lack of literature knowledge. We pretended he hadn’t told me that he loved me. We pretended I hadn’t ignored him and left. We pretended we could go back to who we used to be.

  And when the countdown to midnight hit zero, Decker squeezed my hand, and I pretended that I didn’t want to hold on tight and stay that way.

  I was a great pretender. I unlaced our fingers, said “Happy New Year,” and stood up to get ready for bed.

  Decker also stood. “Where do you think you’re going?” Mom asked.

  Decker looked confused, like he didn’t know which one of us she was talking to. “Me? Home.”

  “Oh, just because you think you’re all grown up now doesn’t mean you can break tradition, kiddo. Your parents expect me to take care of you New Year’s Eve every year. It’s a job I take seriously. Ron, get the spare sheets, will you?”

  Then Mom unfolded the pull-out couch and Dad made the bed and Decker grinned at me like he thought it was funny. In truth, I was relieved, because I knew Troy was out there somewhere. I wanted—I needed—all the people I loved in the same place. I needed to know they were all safe.

  We were all in bed soon after. The wind turned vengeful. The air howled through the gap between homes. The walls creaked and groaned in protest. And then, with one screeching hiss, the power went out. The heat clicked off. The hum of the refrigerator wound down to silence. The glow from the clock disappeared, leaving me in blackness.

  Even the moon was hidden behind clouds. The streetlights were out. All that remained was a roaring blackness. Shadows. Emptiness. A void of light.

  And Troy.

  Chapter 19

  I closed my eyes to a blackness I was comfortable with. I moved on instinct. Five steps to the door, hand on the door-jamb, follow the plastered wall to the light switch. I flipped it, just in case. Nothing. One more step until the stairs. I gripped the handrail and descended slowly. My foot creaked on the step, third from the bottom. Wind, creak, breathing.

  “Decker?”

  He didn’t respond, but I could hear his steady breathing in between the gusts of wind. I walked in the darkness with my hands out in front of me, trying to gauge the distance between the stairs and the couch. I whacked into the back of it with my hip, and then I didn’t hear Decker’s steady breathing anymore, but he didn’t say anything either.

  So I edged around it, my fingers trailing the sofa, and eased myself onto the corner of the pull-out couch. The old springs shifted downward. I crawled toward the center of the mattress and sat cross-legged next to his body. His
arm fell across my legs, and we just sat like that. I stared down at the space where I thought he’d be, even though I couldn’t really see him. I kept thinking of what to say, what to do. I was over-thinking it. So I said nothing.

  And then the house grew colder. The heat escaped through the crack under the door and the thin glass windows, and without the power, all that was left was the cold. Which wasn’t a thing at all. Just an absence of heat. But it felt as real as anything else. So I slid under the sheets and curled up next to Decker, seeking his warmth. And still we didn’t say anything.

  The great thing about the blackness was that I couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or closed, and he couldn’t tell what I was thinking and I could go along pretending he didn’t know I was there, and he could go along thinking I was scared of the dark or lonely for company. My head rested in the curved space between his chin and his shoulder and my arm covered his chest, and I could hear and feel the beating of his heart.

  His hand traced the edge of my face in the darkness. Like he knew me by heart and he was making sure it was me.

  I drifted to sleep when his fingers slid down my face to the curve of my neck. Heaven. But I dreamed of hell. Of looking up from a useless body, tied to a bed, with Troy grinning down at me. He checked my pulse with one hand and caressed my cheek with the other, and I fought to pull away. To bite his hand. To do something. Anything. But I was powerless. And then he moved his hands to my mouth, traced the outline of my lips, and brought his palm down hard. He pinched my nose shut with his other hand. And I couldn’t even fight or claw or rage. I just lay there, watching him, until the blackness settled in.

  I woke up gasping for breath. I sucked in deep breath after deep breath and heard the beeping of the microwave ready to be programmed and the heat click on and the refrigerator power itself back up. Light seeped through the curtains. One of Decker’s arms was still on me, though he was sleeping soundly.

  I crept out from under the sheets before my parents woke up and found us in a compromising position and made our relationship limbo so much worse by making us talk about it. We couldn’t even talk to each other about it.

  I peeked out the front curtains and saw Troy’s car down at the corner of the street. He wasn’t in it. Except it was too far for me to really know that.

  But I did. I knew exactly where he was because I felt him. I felt him.

  I stepped back from the window and let the curtains fall back into place. I knew where Troy was. I could always sense when he was around. I knew it then, and I knew it now. I just didn’t want to see it.

  A lump rose in the back of my throat. With shaking hands, I pulled my boots and bright red parka over my flannel pajamas, grabbed my cell phone off the kitchen table, and stepped outside. The wind lulled for a brief second as I pulled the door closed behind me, and it slammed shut, rattling the door frame and the windows.

  I looked toward his car, angled in front of Mrs. Merkowitz’s yard, wondering if he’d been camping out in her abandoned home. I closed my eyes and focused. I turned in the opposite direction and walked down the center of the road, where the melting slush rippled with the wind. I followed the current down the street, to the edge of the block, toward the lake.

  I paused at the intersection, knowing exactly which way to go, but wondering how to do it. I took out my phone and dialed.

  “911, what is your emergency?” It was a different voice from when Carson died. A male, bored and muffled. Like his head was down on the desk.

  “Please send help to Falcon Lake.”

  “What is the emer—” I snapped the phone shut and walked to the crest of the hill. I stood on the top, looking down at the edge of the lake. Someone had painted a handmade sign, red lettering on brown wood. DANGER—THIN ICE, it read. And a man stood beside it, gloved hand resting on the top of the sign, staring at the rising sun across the vast expanse of ice.

  “What are you doing, Troy?”

  He turned to face me and his mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear him over the roaring wind. So I sidestepped down the embankment and stood on the other side of the warning sign and stuffed my hands deep inside the pockets of my coat.

  “Why are you out here?”

  “I was just thinking about you. About why you didn’t die. I’m trying to understand.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it, just come back with me. We need to get back.”

  “We? You’re back to we, now? And here I thought you spent the night on the couch with your neighbor.” He sneered, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. He had been out there. I was right to fear. But I didn’t have the time.

  “Come with me,” I said.

  “Do you want to help me, Delaney?”

  “Yes.”

  “Help me understand.”

  I squinted against the glare on the lake and pointed toward the center. “I fell out there. I couldn’t find the surface. And then Carson got a rope and—”

  “Show me,” he said.

  “Show you?”

  “Yes, out there.” He pointed to the sign. “It’s not thin anymore. You know that, right?” I did. We’d be skating across the lake now if I hadn’t fallen through. The sign was a lie. The ice wasn’t thin this time of year, but nobody would risk it now. After all, how many miracles could one lake grant?

  I looked up the hill, wondering if anyone could see us. If the help I called would find us. I couldn’t see the road or the homes beyond. We were in a pit. Fitting. This was, after all, my hell. This pit around the lake. The lake that had taken so much. My friendship with Decker. My humanity. Quite nearly my life. And I was so angry with it. I wasn’t scared anymore. I was furious.

  And Troy, who never gave me enough time to make a decision on my own, gripped my arm and pulled me with him onto the ice.

  Troy moved like Decker across the ice, with sure-footed confidence. The surface was slick from the melting snow. It was uncharacteristically warm for January. Still cold, just not as cold as usual. For a moment I was panicked that the ice would melt, but then I remembered how it took a while for the water temperature to catch up to the air. It’s why the lake was still painfully cold in June, and why the water took longer to freeze than the air in the autumn.

  I heard a splash with each step, experienced a small moment of panic before I felt the ice beneath my feet. I couldn’t even look down to check. The sun hit the ice at a slanted angle and refracted through the thin layer of water pooling on top, distorting the image.

  I bumped into Troy’s back. “Here?” he asked. We were in the middle of the lake, the point of no return, the farthest spot from land. I looked to the far shore and remembered that day, seeing Decker reach Carson on shore, knowing I was slightly closer to them.

  “A little more,” I said, feeling more secure once we were nearer land. I shaded my eyes with one hand and squinted toward the far shore and the McGovern home beyond. “Right around here,” I said. Then I looked down, trying to see into the depths. Into hell. I thought I could see movement under the ice, a current, water lapping against the surface.

  I stepped back. “It’s too thin.”

  Troy gripped my shoulder. “It’s fine. It’ll hold as long as you don’t fall again.” This was a terrible idea. This ice was too new. It had shattered when I fell in, and it hadn’t had time to re-form solidly. I looked back toward our starting point, toward home, and tried to gently dislodge myself from Troy.

  “Tell me what happened here,” he said.

  “I was going too fast,” I said. “And I fell. Nothing happened for a minute, but I didn’t move. I didn’t try to get up. And then everything just fell apart underneath me.”

  “I hear drowning is very peaceful.”

  I looked away, back toward the shore, wondering when help would arrive. Wondering if they already came and left. Wondering if they thought it was a prank call and wouldn’t ever come. Drowning was not peaceful. I was terrified. I was frozen. I was useless. But I kept that to myself. I didn’t want to
talk to Troy about dying anymore.

  “But you didn’t die,” he said. “So what happened?”

  “Like I was saying, Carson got a rope. Decker came in after me.”

  “So, you would’ve died without Decker. This”—he released my shoulder and gestured toward my body—“was an accident. A mistake.”

  “I guess.” Miracle, anomaly, fluke. Nobody had called my life a mistake before.

  “So,” he said slowly, thinking while he spoke, “if it hadn’t been for Decker, you’d be dead.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Maybe someone else would’ve saved me. Unlikely, but possible.

  He peered at the sunrise again, squinting against the light.

  “Troy, come back with me. Please.”

  “Funny how it looks like the sun is rising right now, isn’t it? When really, we’re the ones who are moving.”

  “Troy—”

  “It doesn’t feel like we’re moving at all, though.”

  “I need to ask you something.”

  He kept looking at the sunrise, then took a deep breath and shook his head. He turned to face me. “Ask and ye shall receive,” he said, and he grinned.

  I cleared my throat and said, “If you had one day left to live, what would you do?”

  “I’m not playing your stupid game, Delaney.” He brushed the air away between us.

  “It’s not a game.” Then I pulled my hands out of my pockets, held them out in front of me, and showed him. My twitching fingers, the only physical release for the itching that had spread from my brain down my arms.

  Troy’s mouth fell open, and then the corners of his lips quirked upward, just for a second. “Yeah, I kind of figured.”

  “I think . . . I think it’s always been you who was dying,” I said. Because I remembered the feeling, like vertigo, like falling, like nothing else mattered but him, like tunnel vision of the other senses.

  He pointed to his head. “The headaches. Probably something left over from the accident. A hemorrhage or a slow bleed or something.” He said it all so matter-of-factly. “But I didn’t know if it was real. If I’d finally be allowed to die, you know?”