Lake seemed farther away, her back glued against the door. Even in the dark, I could see her ashen face. Fine. She needed to hear this, and maybe it was best if it scared her off me. She’d grown up as sheltered as anyone I’d ever seen. Whatever schoolgirl crush she had on me, maybe this would cure it.
“He went after your sister, and you wouldn’t let him.”
I must’ve misheard her. “What?”
“Is that what happened?”
My chest constricted. There was no way she could’ve known that, which meant she’d figured it out on her own. Maybe she saw more than I gave her credit for. “Yeah. Pretty much. Maddy was trying to get in the middle of one of their fights. I came in the door from baseball practice right as he smacked her into a wall.” The memory of the blank expression on my dad’s face still made me sick to my stomach. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen that, the way his eyes turned to glass while he went some place none of us could name. “I knocked him on his ass. I didn’t know what Dad would do, so I told Maddy to run, but she wouldn’t. She didn’t want to leave me. So I told her to get the fuck out or I’d kick her ass myself. I just wanted her gone. She looked terrified, which was how I felt, but it worked. She ran out the back.”
“You did the right thing,” she said.
Not really. I wasn’t sure what the right thing would’ve been, but it wasn’t that. “Mads had this friend next door, Beth. They had a secret, not-so-secret hole in the fence they’d use to get to each other’s houses. That’s where she was going.” She’d run so fast out the back. Because of me. If I’d known it was the last time I’d see her, I wouldn’t’ve threatened her that way. She’d surely been as afraid of me as she was of him in that moment. “My dad and I fought. Took down everything in the kitchen—the table, dishes, pots and pans.” There’d been so much shit all over the kitchen. Noodles on the linoleum floor from an overturned pot. I couldn’t remember getting scalded, but I’d had a burn from the water for a while after. Broken dining chairs. Blood on my knuckles. Everything falling away in a second . . .
“I swear, I would’ve taken my baseball bat to him if I hadn’t heard the screaming.”
“Maddy?” she whispered.
Hearing Maddy’s name out loud, reliving the moments leading up to it, I needed to take a breath. I looked out my open window. “My mom. She found my sister floating face down in the pool. After the autopsy and all that, we figured she’d slipped while running, fallen in, hit her head on the way down. She was unconscious long enough—while we were all in the house . . .”
I didn’t dream, but once in a while I had nightmares. Getting Maddy out of a pool red with her blood, the shock of pulling a cold body out of warm water. Trying to give life to a stiff mouth. Breathing so hard into her that I nearly passed out.
“When the cops showed, I was still trying to give Maddy CPR while Mom sobbed on the ground next to me. But my dad had cleaned himself up and calmed down. His anger was like that, quick to explode, quick to flame out. He knew they’d see the bruises on Maddy and my mom and the mess in the kitchen. He hadn’t landed a punch on me, but he was bleeding from a busted nose. I was the only one unscathed. When the officers asked what’d happened, he’d explained that I’d snapped. Beat Maddy up and them, too.”
“No.” Lake covered her mouth. “He blamed you?”
It was fucked up, but my dad had always been a dick. Aside from the death, it wasn’t the part I still wasn’t over. “My mom couldn’t speak to save her life, she was a wreck. But when the officers asked if it was true, she wouldn’t say I didn’t do it.”
“She let you take the rap?”
“She was afraid if she said no, they’d take my dad away.”
Lake readjusted her hold on her knees. “Did they arrest you?”
I sat forward and ran my hands over my face. Every time I thought about it, it renewed a sliver of my faith in humanity. “They took us both to the station. I told the cops what’d really happened, and they saw right through the bullshit. Figured out my mom and dad would rather send me to juvie than have Dad get in real trouble. Beth’s parents vouched for me, too, said they’d heard our parents arguing a lot and that I’d been good with the girls.” I shook my head. “I wasn’t, though. Good. I should’ve had him locked up the first time it happened.”