Chapter Eighteen
Danny
“Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.”
-Lord Byron
They say things always look better in the morning and that everything happens for a reason.
They say that love makes all things possible and good things come to those who wait.
Well, I call bullshit on all of that.
I get off the plane at the airport in Croatia feeling like I’ve been run over by a truck and kicked in the gut a few times for good measure and head straight to the hospital in Porec, arriving just in time to watch my sister flat line as her heart stops beating. Nurses rush in, followed by doctors and a burly guy whose sole job seems to be to shove everyone who loves Caitlin out of her room.
Gabe, Ray, Sean, Emmie, and I are pushed out into the hall and granted a glimpse of Caitlin’s gown being wrenched open as they squeeze jelly onto her chest before the door slams in our faces. Gabe, who is out of his mind with grief and lack of sleep, lunges for the door and Ray and I have to hold him back. He does his best to kick our asses while crying so hard his entire body is heaving, but Ray and I manage to drag him back down the hall to the waiting room.
Emmie and Sean follow, both of them crying and Emmie chanting “please, please, please” over and over again until I’m worried my niece is on the verge of some kind of mental break.
I wouldn’t blame her. It’s too much. It’s all too fucking much.
We sit in a miserable huddle in the corner of the waiting room for ten long minutes while all the people passing through do their best to avoid eye contact and keep from catching the plague of grief hanging in a thick cloud around our heads. Finally, a nurse comes out to tell us that they got Caitlin’s heart started again and she’s stabilized.
Emmie starts chanting “thank you, thank you, thank you,” Sean runs to the bathroom like he’s going to be sick, and Gabe jumps to his feet, insisting that he needs to see Caitlin right away.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the nurse with the massive bun perched on top of her head like a burnt cinnamon roll says. “Mrs. Alexander won’t be allowed visitors for at least twenty-four hours.”
“She’s my wife,” Gabe insists, voice cracking. “I need to be there. She’ll know I’m there, even if she’s not awake.”
“I’m sorry.” The nurse holds up her hands. “Hospital policy—”
“I don’t give a shit about hospital policy,” Gabe says. “I need to see her.”
Gabe is still arguing with the nurse five minutes later, when another nurse comes in to tell us that Juliet, my new niece, went into respiratory distress and is being moved to the NICU. My poor brother-in-law stops talking mid-sentence and drops his face into his hands, obviously about one more piece of bad news away from taking a gun to his head.
“Ray, take everyone down to get lunch at the café across the street,” I say, pushing some money into my brother’s hands. “I’ll come get you in an hour or so and drive everyone home to get some rest.”
Ray nods before his tired eyes shift to Gabe. “Okay, but don’t let him be alone right now, okay? I’m worried.”
I nod. “I won’t. I’ve got this. Just see if you can get Emmie to calm down. Get her some hot cocoa or something.”
“I’m so glad you’re back,” Ray says, sounding way older than eighteen and so sad that I have to pull him in for a hug. Ray and I have never been super close—I’m all action and he’s all forethought—but the way his arms wrap tight around me make it clear he needed a hug as much as Emmie did when I first showed up at the hospital twenty minutes ago.
My niece had hung onto my neck so long my spine had started to ache, but I wasn’t about to let her go. I’m not going to let any of the people I love go. Everyone is going to get better and stay alive. I’m not going to bury my sister or her baby. I fucking refuse to let it happen.
They say where there’s a will, there’s a way, but the truth is all the will and prayer and hope in the world can’t make all the wrong things right or heal people who are too broken to get better.
For the next week, the Alexander-Cooney family hunkers down and hopes and prays while Caitlin continues to cling to life by her fingertips and the baby loses precious ounces as she labors for every breath. My brothers and I sleep in shifts and make sure one of us is always at the hospital with Gabe. We’re afraid what he might do if Caitlin dies and he’s alone. We don’t speak the fear aloud, but all of us are thinking the same thing.
I know deep down Gabe doesn’t want to make his daughter an orphan, but he’s not thinking clearly. He’s lost in his pain and grief and something in my gut tells me he’s not coming back from that dark place without Caitlin by his side.
On day six, I bring Gabe a sandwich from across the street and step out onto the balcony outside the waiting room to call Sam’s dad for the twelfth time since the plane landed. I don’t expect him to answer my call—I’ve gotten the hint that I’m being frozen out for some reason—so when he picks up on the second ring, I’m so surprised I stammer my hello.
“H-hi Mr. Collins. It’s Danny. I was hoping you’ve heard from Sam.”
“I’m in L.A. with her right now,” he says in a thick voice. “She’s in with the prosecuting attorney, preparing for the trial.”
“So she’s okay?” I ask. “I mean, she’s holding up? And she’s not in trouble with the police?”
“No,” Mr. Collins says softly. “She’s not in trouble. I think everyone understood why she didn’t want to put herself through this.”
“Do you think I can talk to her?” I ask, aching for Sam, wishing I could be in two places at once. “Does she have a new cell I could call?”
“She does, but she asked me not to give you the number, Danny.”
I squeeze my eyes shut as my heart writhes miserably in my chest. “Please, Mr. Collins. I know I was an asshole to Sam the last night we were together, but I just want to apologize. My sister is really sick so I had to go back home to help out, but I want to be there for Sam. I plan to come as soon as things are okay with Caitlin and the baby.”
If things are ever okay, if I don’t end up staying here to raise a newborn after Caitlin dies and Gabe falls apart.
Mr. Collins sighs, a wounded sound that echoes the way I feel. “Son, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Sam doesn’t want you here and…I’m honestly not sure you could handle it. It’s almost killing me and I…” He pulls in another breath and when he speaks again, his voice is shaking. “I’m just the dad.”
I try to swallow, but my throat is too tight. All of a sudden that ghost of a suspicion that’s been drifting back and forth in my brain, haunting my subconscious, begins to crawl into my conscious mind. But I don’t want that suspicion to be founded. I want to be wrong so badly I can’t even bring myself to ask the question.
“I’ve got to go,” Mr. Collins says. “Sam’s on her way. Just respect her wishes, Danny. The last thing my daughter needs right now is more stress.”
He hangs up before I can say another word. I stand staring at the phone, sweating in the increasingly warm summer day, feeling like I’m about to have a heart attack. Every muscle in my body is clenched and my ribs are doing their best to crush my heart into juice inside my chest. My pulse is racing and my hands begin to shake so hard I have to try three times before I can type “Sterling University rape scandal” into the search window without half a dozen typos.
There hasn’t been time since I got back to jump online or watch the news. We’ve all been in survival mode, so focused on Caitlin and the baby that the rest of the world has faded into the background. But that world hasn’t stopped moving, and there are six new links to articles reporting developments in the case. I open the first one and start to read.
By the second paragraph, I’m slamming my fist into the stone wall of the balcony hard enough to shatter three bones in my hand, but it’s not the physical pain that makes me cry out loud enough to bring security rushing out onto the balcony.
They say that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle and that the best things in life are free.
But so are the worst things. They come in the door without paying a cover charge, take out a machine gun, and mow down every beautiful thing in sight.
I try to call Sam’s dad a hundred times that afternoon alone, but he doesn’t pick up. I send Sam an email begging her to forgive me, telling her how much I love her, and promising I’ll be there as soon as I can, but the email bounces back. She’s closed her account. I can’t get to her. I have no way to tell her I’m so sorry, no way to tell her all I want is to be with her and help her through this.
I spend the rest of the week in hell, torturing myself by reading every article I can find about the case, imagining what Sam must have gone through until I make myself physically ill, then soothing away the pain by imagining what I’m going to do to the monsters who hurt her. I sit next to Gabe by Caitlin’s bedside and plot four perfect murders and one dose of poetic justice for Alec, who apparently wasn’t an active participant, just one of the many frat boys who turned a blind eye while a girl was gang-raped on their pool table.
While my girl, my Sam was treated like a fuck toy for their amusement, while they savaged her so brutally she left a blood trail as she ran from the house.
The police had been confused as to why the blood type didn’t match Deidre Jones’s, but once Sam came forward, that confusion was cleared away. She’s making their job easy for them now. It’s going to be a short trial and the maximum sentence for every one of those arrogant fucks. There is hard evidence, and witnesses who saw Sam run across the quad to her car wearing nothing but a tee shirt. And there is the video that the monsters hacked into the campus website to post while they were still drunk. You allegedly can’t see Sam’s face clearly—just the back of her hair, which for once she’d straightened—but surely it will be clear to anyone who’s watching that the girl in those videos wasn’t a willing participant.
It doesn’t matter that Sam was the one who started the rumor that Deidre was the girl in the video. I know Sam well enough to know she blames herself for the other girl’s suicide, but no jury in their right mind would see that as a reason not to believe Sam’s story. She was traumatized. She was the victim of a violent crime. She wasn’t in her right mind. Deidre’s blood doesn’t belong on Sam’s hands, it belongs on the hands of the men who raped her, and I have no doubt a jury will see that.
The only thing I doubt is if I’ll ever see Sam again, or if she’s going to keep running from me forever.
But I forget that things can always get worse and it isn’t always darkest right before dawn.
By the time Caitlin finally starts to get better and she and the baby come home from the hospital three weeks later, the trial has already started. I’ve been able to read all about the defense’s claims that Sam was not only a willing participant, but the one who’d orchestrated the “New Year’s Eve Orgy.” I’ve heard news anchors say that photos from Sam’s room showing a variety of sex toys spread out on her bed confirm her “deviant sexual tastes.” I’ve watched the smug monsters who did this to my best friend walk past the news cameras looking innocent and victimized, like they’re the ones who were attacked and then forced to stand in front of a courtroom and beg people to believe “sluts” can still be victims of rape.
They’ve called the woman I love a slut and a whore and before that night, the only man she’d ever been with was me.
It’s so wrong, I can’t fathom how any rational person could go along with the defense’s accusations, but as the days tick by it becomes more and more obvious that the assholes might get away with it. They might walk free, return to their frat house, and live to do it again to another girl next New Year’s Eve.
But Caitlin is still so weak she can only hold the baby when she has pillows propped under her arms and Gabe hasn’t fully returned to the land of the living, either, spending all of his time hovering near Caitlin’s bed or taking the baby out for long walks while she sleeps. Meanwhile, Emmie’s seeing a shrink for anxiety, Sean stumbled home drunk two nights ago, and Ray isn’t equipped to handle it all. He’d snap under the pressure if I left. I can’t go to Sam yet, I still haven’t found a way to reach her, and I’ve never felt so helpless or filled with impotent rage in my life.
Still, I think I’m hiding it well enough until Caitlin reaches out and takes my hand one evening when we’re sitting out on the porch, watching the fishing boats chug back to the harbor.
“I know you have to leave soon, Danny,” she says in that huskier voice she’s had since she spent so many days with a tube down her throat. “I would have told you to head out a week ago, but I’m scared to let you go.”
I fold my fingers around hers. “Don’t be scared. You’re getting better every day and Juliet is going to be a porker before you know it. You guys are out of the woods, I know it.”
“I’m not scared for me or Juliet.” Her intense look is even more piercing with her eyes so large in her painfully thin face. “I’m scared for you.”
“I’m fine,” I say, slipping my hand from hers as I turn to look out at the boats. “It’s Sam you should be worried about.”
“I am. I’m worried she’s going to end up trying to recover from all this alone because the man she loves is serving a life sentence in prison.”
I press my lips together for a long moment, but don’t look at Caitlin and don’t answer.
“You will be the very first person they go looking for if one of those monsters has an unfortunate accident, let alone all five of them,” Caitlin continues in a calm voice, proving she can still read my damned mind. “You and Sam’s dad. And you’re way too upset to plan a perfect crime right now.”
“I’m fine,” I snap.
“You broke your hand hitting a wall, Danny,” Caitlin says. “You would end up making a mistake and you and Sam would end up losing everything that matters.”
I glance at her out of the corner of my eye. “But I don’t hear you telling me it’s wrong.”
“You know me better than that,” she says softly, sounding tired after only a few minutes of conversation. “But you can’t take the law into your hands right now. You would get caught. All the cards are stacked against you. And I love you and Sam too much to let you leave here without speaking my mind. Whether you listen or not is up to you.”
I swallow hard, fighting the tears that simmer as close to the surface these days as my rage. “Then what do I do? I can’t let them get away with it. They can’t do that to her and walk free. It will kill me, just…eat me alive. Just thinking about it is enough to make me fucking crazy, Caitlin.”
“So you wait until you’re not crazy anymore,” Caitlin says, leaning in close and dropping her voice to a whisper. “You go to Sam, and while you’re healing and loving your way out of the hell you’ve both been through, you plan every single detail in advance. Take at least a year, longer if you can. Give them time to stop looking over their shoulders and make sure you have an airtight alibi. Then, if you still need this…”
I hold her eyes. “You’re serious?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
“As long as you can do it without exchanging one thing that will eat you alive for another.” She takes my hand again, making me aware of how cold her skin is. “And don’t let it change you. You’re a good man, Danny. I wouldn’t want you to lose that, or stop believing that you deserve happiness.”
“It doesn’t matter what I deserve,” I whisper. “We don’t get what we deserve.”
“And thank goodness sometimes for that.” Caitlin smiles sadly. “I’m so sorry for all of this Danny, but I believe in you and Sam. You will get through this together, I really believe you will.”
They say time heals all wounds and it’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.
But when I finally fly into L.A.—getting to the courthouse hours after the not guilty verdict has been announced, thanks to a delay in Chicago—I know I will never be healed. I will never stop wanting vengeance for the girl I love.
I search for Sam at her apartment and at the extended stay hotel where her roommate says Sam and her parents were staying during the trial. But the Collinses checked out this morning and Sam is nowhere to be found.
I call Mr. Collins, but all he’ll tell me is that Sam drove off while he and his ex-wife were checking out of the hotel and hasn’t been answering her phone. The terse tone in his voice infers that somehow that’s my fault. He hangs up before I can tell him how sorry I am that things ended up the way they did and refuses to answer my calls for the next few days.
I stay in Los Angeles for almost two weeks, haunting the campus, her apartment, the test prep place where she used to tutor kids after school, looking for any sign of her, but she’s vanished into thin air. I put an ad on Los Angeles Craig’s List asking Sam to call me, then cross-post it to every major city on the west coast. The next night I expand the search to the heartland and the east coast. I keep the ads rotating every forty-eight hours until my inbox is full of weird messages from creepy guys and a few desperate-sounding women and I finally realize it’s pointless.
I’m not going to be able to find Sam unless she wants to be found.
Finally, after two weeks of crashing at a hostel in Hollywood, sleeping in a weird pod bed that makes me feel like I’m waking up in a coffin every morning, Pete calls saying Tevia is quitting at the end of the week and he can’t get another guide trained on such short notice. If I don’t come back to step in, he’s going to have to cancel fifteen tours and the chances of staying in the black this month will be slim to none.
I don’t want to go back or give up on Sam, but deep down I know I’m not accomplishing anything here except driving myself crazy.
I fly home. I go back to work.
I crash at Caitlin and Gabe’s and spend the summer teaching Emmie how to surf and doing my research on Todd, Jeremy, J.D. and Scott. In the fall, Ray and Sean go back to the American school in the city, Emmie starts home school with Caitlin, and Gabe returns to work doing whatever rich guy thing he does with properties and investments. I spend the mornings with Juliet strapped onto my chest in her sling, walking the picturesque ancient roman streets of Porec while Caitlin and Emmie study, plotting how I’ll make the monsters who hurt Sam pay. In the afternoons, I lead rock climbing expeditions up the face of the cliffs outside town, and at night, I continue my research alone in my room.
Caitlin doesn’t talk to me about hurting people again, but she doesn’t try to draw me into family dinners or evening sails on Gabe’s boat more than once or twice a week. She gives me my space and lets me obsess, almost as if she knows planning how I’m going to get my revenge is the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.
Without Sam, without being able to love her, without even knowing if she’s okay, it’s like the best part of me has gone missing. Hate helps numb the pain of losing her, keeping me moving around and functioning instead of walking into the ocean across the street and letting the water carry me away.
The holidays come and go and Juliet starts to crawl all over the house, but Sam’s dad still refuses to answer my calls. Spring rains flood the streets of Porec, and Caitlin and Gabe start talking about getting on a list to adopt another baby when Juliet is two.
And then, it’s almost summer again and Ray is graduating from high school and planning a European tour with his crazy girlfriend, Sean is convincing me to hire him as a guide even though he won’t be seventeen for a few more weeks, and the summer trip I’ve been preparing for all year long is suddenly only a few days away.
They say revenge is a dish best served cold, and of all the platitudes I’ve heard in the year since I lost the girl I love, it’s the only one that makes sense.
I board the plane for Costa Rica in board shorts and a weathered blue tee shirt, looking like I don’t have a care in the world. I’m a laid back surfer on my way to catch some waves, not a cold son of a bitch with a block of ice and hate where my heart used to be.
I haven’t decided whether to kill Todd, Jeremy, J.D., and Scott while they’re living it up in Costa Rica for their senior trip, or just make them wish they were dead, but I know one thing—whatever I decide, no one is going to suspect I’m the one responsible.
Even though I have every detail memorized, I go through the plan again during the flight. It’s become a ritual more comforting than any rosary I was forced to say back when my mom still got around to dragging my ass to church.
Soon, this will be over, and I’m not sure what I’ll cling to for comfort then, but I suppose it won’t really matter. I will have done what was right by Sam. Maybe I’ll be able to move on with my life after, maybe not, but I hope I’ll at least have put some of the regrets that haunt me to rest.
I get off the plane at six o’clock in the morning Costa Rica time, after a red-eye flight during which I slept less than twenty minutes total. All I’m thinking about is getting to a cab and getting a full day’s sleep before I start building my alibi. I’m not thinking about love or loss or beautiful girls with big blue eyes, but the moment I see the efficient sway of the woman’s hips, I know it’s Sam walking through the airport in front of me.
Her hair is bleached a dark shade of gold and hangs in a single braid down her back. She’s heavier than she was last summer, with powerful muscles evident beneath her black tank top and more strong, toned flesh emerging from her khaki shorts, but I know it’s her.
I know it like I know my own name and the constellations of freckles on her tanned arms.
They say great minds think alike, and as I tail Sam through customs, paying my cab driver extra to stay at the curb until her cab pulls out, and then to follow the other car through the busy streets, I wonder if it might be true.
Maybe Sam has come here for the same reason I have.
And maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance we’ll be heading into hell—and back out again—together.
To be continued…
FIGHT FOR YOU
the conclusion to Danny and Sam’s story
is available now.
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