but Charlie’s been gone for five years, and I’ve been out of prison for two. I was released just before Lucky’s sister died, but even while imprisoned I could have kept in better contact with him, asked more questions, told Thibault to intervene when I sensed something was off.
It’s been two years since Lucky lost her, but I get how something like that can stay with you and feel fresh even years later. I just accepted Lucky as this person who seemed okay on the outside, and never bothered to find out that he was tortured on the inside. He must have felt so let down by me. It literally hurts me to realize that about us. And it makes me see that I need to try harder to be a good friend to him, listen to him, talk to him, find out how he’s really feeling.
“She was too young,” Lucky says through his sobs. “Why did she do it?”
“You’re right. Maribelle was too young. But I think she did it because she couldn’t think of any other way.”
“Any other way to do what?” His sobbing stops for a moment.
“Any other way to escape. The pain. She just wanted to get away from it. She was a teenager. She was really sensitive. Everything hit her twice as hard as it hit everyone else. I didn’t know her that well, since she was so much younger than us, but I do remember that. She cried a lot. I remember how she bawled when she read about those animals being euthanized at the shelter. She went nuts over that, remember? She was only seven or eight at the time.”
“Yes, I remember.” He looks up, his face ravaged by tears.
I wipe one of his cheeks with the backs of my fingers. “She had a tender heart. She was born with it.”
“It didn’t help having the parents we did.” He looks at the ground, his jaw muscle twitching.
“None of us had a safe haven to go home to. That’s why we spent so much time shooting your gun in that empty lot.” My heart twists in my chest. Lucky helped save me. I wonder if he knows this. I don’t want to say it, though; he’ll think I’m crazy.
“But she was too little to hang with us,” he says, oblivious to my internal melodrama.
“Yeah. And guns weren’t her thing.”
He gives a sad laugh. “She was a pacifist from the word go. She hated my BB gun. She was always suspicious that I was using it to shoot birds.”
I frown at the idea. Lucky’s always been an animal lover, just like his sister. “You would never have done that.”
He shrugs. “You and I knew that, but she was suspicious of everyone. She had a hard time trusting people, even me.”
“Why do you think that is?” Maybe I’m asking more than I should, but I’m hoping this is the way to get him to a conclusion he can live with about his sister. He blames himself, but he shouldn’t. He didn’t have anything to do with her death.
“I don’t know. Our parents were assholes. I wasn’t there.”
I shake my head. “I don’t accept that. You were there with her a lot. You dragged Maribelle around in a stroller, for God’s sake.”
He smiles sadly. “It was easier when she was younger. When she got older, we grew really far apart. It’s like I didn’t even know her anymore.”
“When she got older, she started reading the news and seeing the outside world. I think it was too painful for her. She saw too many bad people, too many animals being hurt, too many kids being abused. She fixated on that stuff. It’s like she couldn’t see the happy things because the sad things took up all her head space.”
“Why, though? What made her do that instead of focusing on the good?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Some people are just drawn to that darkness, and they can’t let it go.” I don’t tell Lucky the whole truth: that I get where his sister was when she decided to take her own life, and that if it hadn’t been for the team and Ozzie, I might have considered a way out like she had. The difference between her and me is that I was open to getting help, and I had a very strong connection to the guys on the team. She never had much of a connection with anyone; she always lived in her own little world. Even her