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“Ah. Well, here’s to awkward conversations with best friends.” I clink my beer bottle against her cooler.
“You don’t have plans tomorrow, do you? I mean besides the ice time with Dad in the morning.” Lavender changes the subject.
“Nope, not that I’m aware of, why?”
“I’m supposed to hang out with the twins. Just girls. It’d be great if you spent some time with Kodiak and the rest of the guys.”
“I was planning to text him. Where is he anyway?”
“He had some thing with his mom. He wanted me to come with, but he needs time with his family, and I needed to hang out with Mom so she could ask me a million questions about how things are going. She was asking about you, FYI, and how I thought you were doing. I think she’s worried, so don’t be surprised if she corners you at some point and digs for information.”
I rub the back of my neck. “No one needs to worry about me.”
Lavender rolls her bottle between her palms. “That’s their job, Mav. And until this year, I’ve taken the front seat for all the worrying, but now that I’m handling college away from home, and I have a steady boyfriend, they get to shift their focus elsewhere, and you seem to be the target. I thought you’d like a heads-up.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” I sigh. “It must have been a pain in the ass, always having them watching over you like that.”
Lavender shrugs. “Sometimes it felt like I lived inside a bubble. I get it, though. I’m the only girl, and things were kind of messy when I was a kid. The overprotectiveness was their way of dealing with what happened at the carnival. The reality is, bad things happen to good people every day, and at the risk of sounding cliché, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. I’m me because of what I’ve been through, and I know every single person in this family holds their own bag of guilt over that night, including me.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Didn’t I?” Lavender tips the bottle back and swallows the last mouthful of her cooler. “The only reason I wanted to go in the funhouse was because everyone else was going.” Her teeth run over her bottom lip. “And Kodiak. Everything was always about him.” She rolls her eyes at herself. “It still is. And it always will be. I knew I should have stayed put and waited for someone to come get me, but I panicked. If I’d stayed where I was, that lunatic wouldn’t have taken me. Or if I’d stayed with Mom and Dad, Robbie wouldn’t have felt bad for rushing through the funhouse so he could keep reading. You and Kodiak wouldn’t feel bad for going on ahead. River wouldn’t feel bad for losing his grip on me.
“So many things might have been different. Our lives might have been different. But I can’t go back and change things. I can’t undo what’s already been done.” She sighs and extends her arm, hand palm-up on the couch cushion between us, most of the pale, crescent-shaped scars are barely visible. “I don’t know what your bag of guilt feels like, Mav. But I think sometimes it’s heavier than it should be.”
I set three fingers in her open palm, and she curls hers around mine. “I just wish we would have waited. The hardest is not knowing what happened while you were missing.”
Lavender rests her cheek against the cushion, and her expression shifts, sadness passing through her eyes and then understanding. “The memories are really spotty, and mostly I was just scared. He kept calling me Cali. And I think he was drunk or high, or both. He wasn’t in his right mind. I don’t know that I could comprehend that at the time. It seemed like he thought I was his daughter. He didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I remember trying to dig my heels in and trying to scream, but all the sound got stuck.” She taps her throat.
“You don’t have to talk about this,” I tell her, suddenly not sure this is making anything better at all. “I don’t want you to relive all this shit.” And part of me is scared to hear it, because what if my worst nightmare is true? What if all the bad things I worried about did happen?
She squeezes my hand. “It doesn’t help any of us to pretend like it didn’t happen. And maybe part of the problem is that we’ve tiptoed around it so much and it’s left a lot of holes for you to climb into.”
“I know what that hour looked like for me, but I don’t know what it looked like for you.” And maybe the not-knowing was a punishment I inflicted on myself for letting her down the way I did.
She nods. “He kept telling me not to scream and that if I did, I’d never see my mom again, which is why I did that stupid thing with my nails. I was just . . . so fucking scared. Kodiak had those candies in the pocket of the sweatshirt he gave me—Jolly Ranchers—so I kept tossing them on the ground, hoping it would make me easier to find. Then he brought me to that shed or whatever it was. He told me to stay put and stay quiet, and then he locked the door and left me in the dark. I stayed there until Dad and Kodiak found me. But he didn’t hurt me, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Her voice is soft but strong. “I mean, I had bruises, and he wasn’t exactly gentle, but he didn’tdoanything to me. Mostly the whole thing just scared the shit out of me.”
It’s so hard to swallow. “He didn’t . . .” I can’t even finish the question, can’t get the words out, and I wonder if this is what Lavender felt like as a kid, choked by her own voice.
“No. He thought I was his daughter. He didn’t hurt me like that. He was out of his mind, but he wasn’t a monster. He was broken.”
I drag a hand down my face, relief warring with the guilt that still slices through me. Knife wounds that never seem to heal. “Fuck. I’m sorry. I just . . . I didn’t know.”
“I wish I’d known how much you were struggling with this. I would have told you all of this sooner.” She slides over and wraps her arms around me, and I hug her hard, probably harder than I should, but she squeezes me back fiercely.
Eventually I release her, and she sits back. “It’s not just my trauma, Mav. It happened to all of us. Our whole family suffered because of it. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about it in therapy, working through it all, but I think maybe it’s been different for you because you hold your cards close to the vest.”
I grit my teeth against the emotions climbing my throat. “Sometimes I fucking hate myself for not waiting.”
“Oh, Mav, no.” Her eyes soften and shine with tears. “You’ve always been my biggest ally, and I know that couldn’t have been easy for you. You’ve lived in an impossible situation your entire life. You’ve had to play so many roles. I see it. I know the lengths you went to in order to keep me from being more overprotected than I already was.” She squeezes my hand again. “You’re an awesome older brother.”
I shake my head. “I’m not awesome. I’ve done a lot of selfish things.”
“You’ve done more selfless things. Shift the focus forward. We can’t live in our pasts, or they’ll drag us down and keep us locked up.” She smiles softly. “It was never your fault. It was a fluke. A terrible one, and the only person truly at fault is the man who took me. Stop punishing yourself for being an eight-year-old boy who wanted to run through a funhouse with his best friend.”
“How the fuck did you get this wise?”
“Fifteen years of therapy and a lot of reading. I’m worried about you,” she says softly.
