Something in the Way (Something in the Way #1)(72)

How could I stay pissed? All she wanted was more time. I wanted the same. “I’m not mad,” I said. “I worry. I worry so goddamn much, Lake.”

“Why? I don’t understand.” Her voice was tiny, frightened. “I’ve been swimming in the ocean since I could walk.”

I gripped the steering wheel, even though we weren’t going anywhere. The difference between Lake and every other person I’d come across the past eight years was that it felt as if her goodness could actually be enough to heal my ugliness. To fill the hole in me. I wanted to tell her. Knowing what I’d been through meant knowing me better than anyone since Maddy.

I turned the key to see if at least the heater would come on; it did, along with the radio. I lowered the volume and sat back in my seat. “My sister drowned while I was thirty feet away.” The words were foreign. Saying it out loud was as hard as I thought it’d be. It changed the air around us. The molecules rearranged. The truth sat between us like a third person. In a way, it was. Madison was never far from my mind. I still carried her around, one long piggyback ride until the day I’d die. “I couldn’t save her.”

Lake didn’t move an inch. She sat still so long, I looked over to make sure she was still conscious. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t realize.”

By the look on her face, I’d scared the shit outta her. I couldn’t just leave it at that. “We had a pool, but that wasn’t what killed her. It just sped up the process.”

She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “What do you mean?”

“I told you my parents used to fight. It was a war every time. They’d married young—for love.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Nah. Not when you’re fundamentally different. My mom’s family was middleclass, my dad came from the wrong side of the tracks. They didn’t grow up the same or want the same things. That might be okay if you’re not as passionate as you are different. Long story short, they fought as hard as they made up.” I wasn’t sure Lake’d understand what I was getting at, so I glossed over that. “Once in a while, something in my dad would flip, and he’d go too far. He’d hit her, apologize in tears at her feet, and that’d be it. He beat me up a few times, stupid shit like finding my dishes out after a particularly bad day at work. He hurt Madison only once as a kid. When I hit puberty and got bigger than him, never happened to either of us again, just my mom when I wasn’t around.”

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.