Page 96 of The Crush
“I know you did. But you shouldn’t have to do it alone. I can—”
“I’m not the one here doing things I shouldn’t,” he tells me pointedly. “I made my peace with doing this on my own a long time ago, Danny. When you were still a kid. I’ve always known that this wasn’t going to be enough for you, and that’s okay.”
Sometimes I wish he would just yell at me.
“Okay?” I shoot back. “You’re really going to pretend like I haven’t let you down? Like I’m not doing it again right now?”
He shakes his head, still adamant, even as his shoulders sag. “You haven’t let me down.Ishould have…I should’ve fought you on this years ago.”
“Fought me?” I think back to the argument we had right before I left last time. “Pop, you did. You told me not to go.”
“It was too late then,” he says, simply. “You’d already made up your mind. Had since the day you signed up, but I didn’t stop you then, because I understood.” He grips the chair harder, glancing toward the kitchen radio. “I understood wanting to dosomething. But after we lost her, I didn’t even know how to get myself out of bed most days.” He looks at me again. “I didn’t know how to breathe anymore.”
My chest aches again, my eyes drifting down the hall in the direction of the closed bedroom door.
“You know, when you first joined the police department, your mamá used to sit up and make lists of all the different ways you could get yourself hurt. But we never tried to tell you to do something different, even if it meant we didn’t get to sleep anymore at night.”
I huff, looking at him again with a poor attempt at a smile. “She always wanted me to be an explorer.”
“Mijo, she wanted you to behappy.” He steps around the table so he can place a hand on my shoulder. “Listen to me, I don’t know what Aarón said to you last night or what those assholes at the DEA promised you, but don’t do this, Danny. You’ll regret it if you do.”
“I know,” I admit. “I know I will but…not as much as I’d regret… It’s better. This way.”
“Itisn’t.” He squeezes my shoulder hard. “If you’re telling yourself that going back into the DEA is better for you or for me or for Isa, let me help you right now. Us being without you is notbetterinanyway. So I hope you have other reasons to do what you’re doing,because it’s actually a particular kind of hell you’ll be putting us in to spend every single day wondering if it’ll be the one where we get the phone call.”
An old memory surfaces. A late night when I had come home to my mamá asleep at the kitchen table, the phone and its long extension cord resting on the table beside her. When I’d woken her she’d reached for it before she’d seen me, a relieved smile breaking over her face. Relieved it was me. Relieved I was home.
“Pop, I only…I wanted to…”
“I know, mijo.” He pulls me into a hug, and I don’t have the strength to fight it, to try to remember the last time I let him get this close. Let myself.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble into his shirt. “I’m sorry for today and for before.”
“I know,” he tells me again, softly. “I’m sorry, too.”
Seventy-Six
Isabel
I can’t sleep. Whenever I try, I feel like I hear him leaving again, especially after his and Tadeo’s voices stopped in the kitchen several hours ago. Knowing they were talking had been some sort of comfort, even if I hadn’t been able to hear what they were saying. Now all I have is the silence and my thoughts as I stare up at the ceiling, watching the fan wick through the air and counting each pass of the blade.
One, two, three… He didn’t change his mind… Four, five, six… There’s still time… Seven, eight, nine… He didn’t come after you… Ten, eleven, twelve… Is he even still out there? Thirteen, fourteen… Is he even still out there?
“God damn it,” I mutter as I sit up, turning on the bedside lamp before I walk to the door. I’m careful not to open it too loudly even as I continue muttering into the hallway, “Self-sacrificing, stubborn—” All the air in my lungs suddenly evacuates in one go, a consequence of free-falling and colliding with the carpeted floor before I can even think to catch myself.
“Shit, are you okay?” Daniel’s deep voice emerges from the dark behind my sprawled form, and when I look back in the dim light from the bedroom, I can only barely make out his large outline scrunched on the floor.
He’s been out here? For how long?
“Are you okay?” he asks again, his hand coming to rest on my back, and of course, that’s what does it. That is what makes me promptly burst into tears.
“Isabel,” he murmurs, shifting up next to me. “What hurts?”
I let him carefully roll me onto my side, and I press my hands to my face to partially cover the sound of my crying. In response, Daniel jumps up to flip on the bathroom light to see better, then he’s right back, kneeling over me with that same gentle care I’ve come to expect. That he had yesterday when he took me to bed.
Had that only beenyesterday? How had everything gotten messed up in such a short time?How did I lose him so quickly?
I cry harder, great gasping sobs that I can’t seem to stop.
