Chapter Eighteen
“Let me go get a nurse.”
I wrap my hand around Nanna June’s quivering one. She stops talking.
“It’s okay.” My voice is raspy, a scratch through gravel. I swallow around the rocks.
She sighs and her timid shoulders fall with the sound.
“Chase, darling, you could get an infection,” she says, her voice so soft and sincere, as light and as delicate as a petal. However, an infection was the least of my worries.
I needed to see Laiken…now.
“Soon.” I pause. “Promise. I need to spend some time with your granddaughter first. Is that okay?”
I try to keep my tone light, but the vise of urgency is too tight.
I haven’t taken my eyes from Laiken. A laser beam holds us to each other, and my mouth turns dry when I see the terror in her eyes.
She looks haunted.
A sixteen-year-old girl that has seen far too much.
I swallow again, and feel fear stab my chest.
The last time I had seen Laiken look the way she does now was when I held her after we found her father.
Neck broken.
Limp and lifeless.
What happened last night?
Nanna June’s eyes flick between me and Laiken, tears welling to the rim.
A breath flutters from her lips. “Yes, okay, sweet boy.” She presses her trembling fingers to her lips, an attempt to temper a whimper.
June steps back, reaching for the knitted earthy-toned cardigan draped over the back of the upholstered chair at the side of Laiken’s bed.
I take it first, hold it open at her back and help her into it, placing the wool over her hunched shoulders.
Nan turns and looks up at me. She doesn’t say anything, even though I think she might want to. Instead, reaching for my wrist, she pinches the skin gently before taking a few slow steps toward her granddaughter. She places a kiss on top of her head.
“I’ll be back soon, sweetheart,” she whispers at the same time I hear shuffling behind me. Turning over my shoulder, I watch Harlen step into the room. He stops beside me and passes over a bottle of water. Nanna June finishes with Laiken and makes her way toward us.
A sad smile hooks her wrinkled lips.
I can’t smile back.
“Beautiful boys,” she whispers, “Both of you.” Then she pinches Harlen’s wrist the same way she had mine before moving slowly for the door. She unhooks it at the side and lets it fall closed with a thunk behind her.
Silence echoes then spreads.
My eyes are still on Laiken’s when she drops hers toward her feet, one single tear burning a thin line down her cheek.
Everything inside of me turns numb, my muscles liquid, and yet, somehow, I work to place one foot in front of the other until I’m at the side of her bed taking a seat in the vacant space she had made for me.
I suck back a breath, try to catch my bearings, but my heart feels as if it is beating inside my eardrums.
I was light-headed and what I had to tell her was a tight band around my chest.
The pain almost rips me open, and I think she knows, because when I take a hand to my chest to try and stop my organs from spilling out, she reaches for me.
The tips of her torn fingers brush across my kneecap and I stop myself from shivering, wrapping her hand in mine.
I hear the click of my teeth in my head as they begin to chatter, the same way I can hear hers.
“Did they find her?” she asks, hand trembling in mine.
I try to force words off my tongue, but nothing comes.
Both Harlen and I clear our throats; his eyes to the floor.
I nod.
“W-where?” she stutters the same question I had asked Harlen in my truck.
My voice is so low I barely hear it, but she does. “Devil’s Tunnel.”
“No,” she cries, pulling her hand from my grip and pressing it to her mouth.
And I can’t reach for her in time before she’s untangling herself from the monitor in a panic, throwing the colorful blanket away from her body and sliding out of the creaky bed with urgency.
Laiken is at the ceramic sink in the corner of the room before I can find my feet.
I’m frozen on the hospital bed staring at the deep lacerations and dark contusions marred across her legs, taking in the purples and blacks of her injuries. It looked as if she’d been mauled by an animal.
Her hands wrap around the edge, knuckles white, face ashen and gray, she is curled over it, retching in agony.
I don’t realize I’m on my feet until I feel myself moving toward her.
I take the blood-stained locks of her white hair and wrap them around my crimson fist, gripping the strands and holding them back from her face.
Laiken’s frail body is spasming with every convulsion, a promise of relief, only one she would never meet.
My ribs twist and bend with hers when she cries, “It burns, Chase. Everything burns.”
I lift my gaze up and over my shoulder, see Harlen wiping his nose.
I clench my molars, press my free hand gently against the ladder of Laiken’s spine, not realizing that I’m working on autopilot rubbing over her in circles until I feel her shiver extend from the surface of her skin onto mine.
I swallow, press my eyes closed.
“I’m here, Laik. I got you.”
But I didn’t know if what I was promising was true. Could you really have someone else when you didn’t even have yourself?
Her right hand curls to the back of her head, finding mine, and she wraps her fingers around my wrist, nails digging into the flesh of my skin. Her body convulses again.
“I can’t breathe,” she whispers, throat full of fear and gurgling tears.
“Do it with me. One…” I rasp, and on cue our chests rise and deflate.
“Two,” I breathe, tapping each out against her spine.
I press my palm to her back, feeling the way her lungs inflate with mine. I seek out Harlen again, who’s still watching us, his nose red, eyes bluer than I’d ever seen them.
He is crying silently.
And I, too, fight to keep my own down.
“Three.” Three taps, and on our joint exhale Laiken spins and falls into my chest.
Her arms are in front of her, a barrier across her heart and I wrap my arms around her shoulders so tightly that I feel the vibrations of each cry rip from her throat, extending into my own.
It shakes my veins, turns my knees to rubber.
I stumble, arms coiled around Laiken when the wall at my back catches us, keeping us on our feet.
“It should have been me, Chase. It should have been me,” she cries, each louder than the last.
I exhale through my nose, my words a breath over her scalp. “You and I both know she wouldn’t have wanted that.”
My elbows press to the top of my thighs, my thumbs beneath my chin, head tilted toward Laiken.
She is sitting beside me on the upholstered window bench. Her knees drawn to her chest, shoulders wrapped in the colored crocheted blanket she’d thrown off earlier.
Her bandaged toes peek beneath the bottom, and even though it’s warm in here, she’s trembling.
She curls her matted hair behind both ears. She doesn’t meet my eye, nor Harlen’s, when she croaks, “I don’t know where to start.”
I reach for a breath. Harlen cracks his neck. He is in the chair across from us, his knees jolting up and down.
“What about at the party,” Harlen says, his voice soft and wary.
Laiken shuffles in her seat, drawing her feet closer toward her. She licks her lips, stares out the window.
“We were really drunk, thought we’d walk back to town.
” She pauses to pull on air, wraps her arms around herself tighter.
“Took a bottle of Jack on our way out, drank it all, had a f-fall.” She swallows her words, her gaze never shifting from the window.
And I don’t know if she couldn’t, or wouldn’t let herself look at us.
But the thought…terrifies me.
She trembles, palming tears from her cheeks.
“Jade’s hand was all cut up. We thought it was fucking hilarious.” She makes an unusual noise, something that sits between a laugh and a cry, and I want to smile at that, not that my sister had been hurt, but because she’d laughed it off.
Cuts were something she had never cried about, not even when she sliced the top of her hand open, chopping an apple when she was ten.
Laiken continues speaking, “We were kind of all over the place. Jade worse than me.” She presses her eyes closed, more tears spilling out. “I fucked up. I could have…should have…stopped us from getting in that car.”
A shiver chases through me.
What car? Who’s car? Did you know them? I had so many questions, but I didn’t want to rush her. I had to let her do this at her own pace.
Laiken bites into her bottom lip when it trembles, curls her fingers tighter around the edge of the blanket. “We heard the engine in the distance. We flagged it.”
Harlen butts in. “Do you remember what type of car it was?”
Laiken’s brow furrows at the question, and she clenches her toes, eyes still out the window, trying to remember.
“A sedan, gray, or white, maybe black. I can’t remember.” This time, she looks up at Harlen and whispers, “I’m sorry. Ugh. I’m so stupid.” She slams her palm to her forehead.
“Don’t do that, Laik—” Harlen begins, only for me to push in.
“The driver, you recognize him? How many?”
I try to keep my voice as light as possible, but Laiken feels the weight of it because her head snaps in my direction and she answers my questions as if she is squeezing the trigger on a revolver. Answer after answer. Pop, pop, pop.
“No. And one,” she breathes.
This time, she doesn’t take her eyes from me.
“What did he look—”
She is talking before I am finished.
“Black ski mask; I figured he came from the same party. Didn’t recognize his voice, though. It sounded weird, like he was putting it on.” She rubs her hand over her stomach, holds it.
I swallow, then ask the question that had been burning around in my skull since his father conveniently threw me in lockup the same night my sister was brutally murdered.
“Colton?”
It all fit, I just had to make sure I wasn’t missing the center piece.
Laiken squeezes her eyes, a solo rivulet descends her tear-stained cheek.
“I have no idea.” She exhales, shaking her head. “So fucking stupid.”