Her eyes focus on mine and an impish smile plays across her lips. “Are you sticking up for me?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“So diplomatic,” she muses. Then her expression darkens as she stares into her coffee. “Lacey thinks everything has been handed to me because she got the shit end of the stick when it came to my parents.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s only three years older, but it feels more like ten years when you look at how my parents raised her versus how they raised me. They’re religious, right? Not in a bad, cult-ish way. They’ve always been very supportive of us. But…with Lacey, they were very strict. I guess my mother struggled a bit before she finally got pregnant, and they were so fearful of losing her that they never let Lacey out of their sight. They didn’t let her have many friends, never bought her new clothes, never let her eat junk food, never let her go to sleepovers. In high school they monitored what music she listened to, she wasn’t allowed to date. They knew she had no interest in the family farm, so they pushed her into studies.”
“I have a hard time believing Lacey would be pushed into that.”
“You’re right. But they put a lot of pressure on her to be the best and maybe that made Lacey worse, I don’t know. Because she puts a lot of pressure on herself in order to please my parents and she’s still acting that way, to this day.”
“And what about you?”
“Me? I was given nothing but freedom. I got away with murder. I had boyfriends galore, I stayed out late, I drank and smoked weed, I did whatever I wanted. I’m lucky that I loved school because I don’t think they would have even pushed me to do well.”
“So Lacey resents you because you got all the freedom and she didn’t.”
“Yeah, resent is the right word. But…the thing is, I’m no better off than she is. Because she’s the one who got all the attention. My parents cared enough about her to be that strict. They didn’t care about me. They let me do whatever because I was barely a thought in their minds.”
“That’s not true,” I tell her. “I spent a lot of time with your parents, they’re very proud of you.”
“Maybe…maybe now we’re closer. But it wasn’t like that before. So while Lacey resents me for my freedom, I resent Lacey for the love and attention she got.”
The words seem to hang in the air between us until they’re blown away by the wind and I get the feeling that Daisy has never said those words out loud, has never articulated that to someone else.
Why that makes me feel special, I don’t know.
“So…” she goes on, her voice lower. “It’s complicated.” She glances at me. “You’re lucky you don’t have any siblings.”
I freeze and I can feel my skin pale.
Because she doesn’t know.
And it’s not a secret at all, it’s something I should be able to talk about.
But I can’t. Not here, on the water. Not when there is so much at stake.
It’s not healthy, that voice speaks up, the voice that roars the loudest on the sea. You named the boat after her and thought that was enough, you thought that was how you dealt with her death. But you haven’t dealt with it at all. None of you have.
I close my eyes, fighting the feeling.
Not here. Not now.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my life now,” Daisy says.
I blink, pushing the grief deeper into my heart.
Focus on her. Focus on Daisy.
I clear my throat. “In what way?”
“In every way, man. In every single way.”
“I have no doubt you can get another marketing job. Perhaps one even better.”
“I know,” she says. “I don’t doubt that. But…I’m not sure I want that. I took that job because I lucked into it right out of high school. My boyfriend at the time, his father worked there and got me an internship and that was it. I never went to college. I wanted to, but I never went because I didn’t have to. I stayed with that job because it made my life easy and I went with it. But…I’m starting to think that it didn’t fulfill anything except a paycheck.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with that,” I point out, remembering many times in my life where I did whatever jobs I could in order to make money. Then again, I had a goal in mind and it was always to buy boats and to do what I’m doing right now.
“There isn’t,” she admits. Her brows knit together delicately. “Do you think there’s something wrong with wanting more, though?”
I shake my head. “There’s nothing wrong with that either. We should always want more. More for ourselves. To be greater versions of ourselves. It’s better to be in a state of becoming than to be in a state of being. I believe that.”