Secrets She Left Behind (16 page)

Maggie

I
N FRONT OF ME WAS A CARTFUL OF BOOKS WAITING TO BE
shelved. Mom had pulled some of her never-ending strings to get me community-service work at a library in Jacksonville. My job was mainly to organize and shelve books. It was perfect. Hiding in the stacks, I felt anonymous. Of course, the staff knew about me and they weren’t exactly friendly, but my supervisor, this middle-aged guy named Gary, didn’t mention a thing about who I was or that this was court-mandated community service or anything like that.

Dr. Jakes had wanted me to find my community-service job on my own, but I felt paralyzed after facing that wall of parents at the school. “Your mother’s rescuing you,” he said when I told him about the library. I explained to him that in my whole life, she never rescued me; she was always too busy rescuing Andy. I was going to enjoy it for now.

I’d made the news again Monday night with film of the parents blocking my way into Douglas Elementary. Mom was totally furious, more with herself for setting me up like that than at the parents. I told her it wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t the one who just got out of prison. I didn’t go anywhere for a few days after that except to sneak out to Dr. Jakes’s office. Otherwise, I just hung out in the house. I updated Sara’s information on the Internet and
printed more flyers for people to hand out, but the whole situation was more upsetting every day. Mom talked about hiring a private investigator with her own money. I thought she should. Keith couldn’t afford it, and the police seemed convinced Sara’d just taken off on her own, so how much more would they do?

Yesterday was my first day at the library, and I kept looking through the books as I shelved them. First, I was in the cookbook section, then crafts and knitting and that kind of thing. When I’d finished shelving, I looked up books on finding people who’d gone missing. I ended up checking out eight books, some about missing persons, some about building your self-esteem, since mine was at an all-time low, and a couple of novels.

Gary laughed when he saw me carrying the stack of books out the door. “You’re a library gal, all right,” he said. It was such a simple thing to say, but it made me feel normal for a change, like he saw me as a nineteen-year-old girl instead of a nineteen-year-old felon.

Today, the cart in front of me had a bunch of books with the call number 133. I couldn’t believe it. Of all the books in the library, was it just a coincidence that I had a cartful of books on psychics and life after death and talking to the dead? I got a chill up my spine looking at their covers.

I could still remember feeling Daddy’s spirit next to me on the deck of the Sea Tender. I didn’t like thinking about it because remembering how
real
his visits felt to me made me feel borderline insane. So most of the time, I blocked those thoughts from my mind. Twice in prison, though, I felt like he was in my cell with me. After the first time Lizard beat the crap out of me, I took the pain pills they gave me and fell asleep on my hard-as-a-rock bed. When I woke up, he was there, sitting next to me and wiping tears
from my eyes with his big hands. If someone else told me they experienced something like that, I would have said it was the meds or just a dream, but I knew it wasn’t. Which either meant Daddy was truly there or I was truly a fruitcake. The second time, though, I wasn’t drugged and I wasn’t just waking up. Instead, I was sitting at the little table in my cell, writing in my journal, and I heard him call my name, clear as day.
Maggie.
I turned around and there he was, standing against the bars of my cell. Smiling at me, like he always did. Then he was gone. I freaked out. Maybe I really
was
nuts. I thought I should write about it in my journal, but writing about it would make something concrete out of something mystical. Maybe ruin it for me. Crazy or not, I didn’t want to lose the connection I sometimes felt to him.

I sat down on the rolling stool and flipped through some of the books. Of course, they all said it was possible to be in contact with the dead, which made me suspicious right there. I’d done it, and I still didn’t believe it.

“Excuse me?”

I looked up from the stool to see a girl around my age peeking around the corner of the stacks.

“Do you work here?” she asked.

I stood up, putting the book I’d been reading back where it belonged in the cart. “I’m a volunteer,” I said.

“Do you know how I can look up college information?” she asked.

It wasn’t my job to help the patrons, but I sure knew how to look up college information. That had been the story of my life during my junior year—the year before things started up with Ben.

“Sure,” I said. “What kind of information do you need?”

“I don’t even know where to begin.” She smiled, glancing at the
stacks. She was incredibly pretty. Model kind of pretty. Really thin. She had almost jet-black hair, stick-straight to her shoulders, with long bangs above blue, blue eyes. And unlike me, she wore makeup. It looked natural, though. Just glossy nude lips and mascara and a tiny bit of eyeliner. A year in a women’s prison had
not
turned me into a lesbian or anything close to it, but she was one of those girls you couldn’t help staring at.

“Are you talking about how to apply to college or finding the right ones to apply to or financial aid or—”

“Finding the right ones,” she said.

“Your high school probably has tons of information,” I said. “Have you talked to your guidance counselor?”

She wrinkled her slightly freckled nose. “Damn,” she said. “Do I look like I’m still in high school?”

“Oh,” I said. “I just figured…”

“I’m nineteen. I just got my GED.”

Wow. From the looks of her, I never would have guessed it. I was really curious about her now. She looked so together, like the prom queen who’d hooked up with the star football player. Why’d she drop out? Pregnant? Burned down a church? I was the wounded seeking the wounded. That had been the one and probably only comforting thing about prison. We were all wounded there.

“Congratulations,” I said. I had my GED myself, earned behind bars. “So, okay.” I led her to the bank of computers, looking over my shoulder for Gary. I hoped I wasn’t crossing some invisible line in my volunteer job description. “You know how to use the Internet, right?”

“Sure.”

We sat down side by side in front of one of the computers.

“Do you have any idea where you want to go?” I asked.

“Well, no, actually.” She laughed. “I only just decided to get my GED a few months ago, so this is all new to me.” We were using those quiet, not-quite-whispering library voices. Hers sounded embarrassed by her ignorance. I wanted to pump up her ego a little.

“That’s great that you got your GED,” I said.

“My mother thinks so. Most definitely.”

“Do you live near here?”

“Right now I’m in a family friend’s cottage in Topsail Beach,” she said. “They’re letting me use the cottage for the fall and winter, and then I want to go to college in the spring. I actually live in Asheville, but me and my mother needed some time apart.” She laughed again. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” I said, although I was happier than ever to live with my protective mother for a while. I hadn’t always felt that way, though, so I got it. “Do you want to go someplace near Asheville?”

She shrugged. “Not really.”

I chewed my lip, trying to remember the Web site I’d found most helpful when I was doing my own search. I typed in a few wrong URLs before hitting the right one.

“This site has everything,” I said, moving the cursor across the screen. “You can figure out which colleges have your major, for starters. Do you know what you want to major in?”

“Not really,” she said again.

“Have you been working since you left high school?” I just
had
to know her story.

“Well—” she chewed her own lip like she wasn’t sure she wanted to answer “—I had this part-time job while I was in high school doing filing and answering phones for this lawyer firm. It was easy work and paid pretty good, so I thought I’d drop out of school and
do it full-time. I hated school with a passion.” She rolled her eyes. “But a couple of months after I dropped out, I got laid off.”

“Oh, no.”

“Right. I just didn’t want to go back to school. I would’ve been in with kids a year younger and everything. So I got a job at Old Navy, which was very cool, except I didn’t get along with my boss. So I left there, and—” She laughed. “This is way TMI, isn’t it?”

“No, no,” I said. “I’m just trying to see what your interests are. You know, what you might like to—”

“To be when I grow up?” She smiled. Her teeth were a little crooked, but very white.

I laughed. “Exactly. And you don’t have to declare a major right away, so it’s not a big deal if you don’t know now.” I was jealous. When would I get to go to college? I would have been a sophomore by now if my life hadn’t gone off track. If I hadn’t
made
my life go off track. Dr. Jakes was into me taking responsibility for what happened. He was irritating, but he was right. It was nobody’s fault but my own.

“What were you good at in school?” I asked. “I mean, not just good at, but what did you get excited about?”

“Besides guys, you mean?”

I smiled. “Right. Besides guys.”

She looked lost. “I don’t know. Did you actually get excited about anything in high school?”

“I liked my psychology class,” I said.

“So how come you’re working in a library?”

I was going to have to learn how to answer that kind of question. No way she was getting the truth, though. I needed my cover story. Other women at the prison told me about making up a story to explain their time away from the real world. A favorite was the “I’ve
been in Iraq” story, which was sure to get them sympathy. Others were more creative, like the woman who said she was going to tell people she’d been training to be an astronaut until she developed an inner-ear problem, or the one who’d say she was a trapeze artist in a circus until she took a terrible fall. But I hadn’t given my own cover story a whole lot of thought until that moment.

“I’m taking some time off before college, too,” I said. “I’ll probably go in a year.”

“Why are you taking time off? You seem so into this whole—” she waved her hand toward the monitor “—this whole college scene.”

“Just…you know.” I squirmed. “I had my fill of school for a while.”

“Yeah, I get it.”

“So back to you.” I focused on the screen to avoid her eyes. “Seriously, about your interests. A law firm, maybe? You liked working there.”

“Just because it was easy. I wasn’t all that into it.”

“You liked Old Navy. How about retail. Marketing, maybe?”

She wrinkled her nose again. “It was the
clothes
I liked. I wanted to design them. I liked helping people put together outfits. I could tell right away what they should be wearing.”

I suddenly felt subconscious about my wrinkled tan capris and the navy blue shirt I’d owned since high school. I’d never been into clothes the way a lot of girls my age were. But I was not totally out of the loop. “Did you ever see that
Project Runway
show on TV?” I asked.

Her eyes lit up. “Exactly! Oh my God, I love that show. That would be, like, my dream, to be on a show like that.”

“Well, girl,” I said, realizing I sounded like Letitia. “There’s your
passion. We need to find some schools where you can study fashion design.”

“They have schools for that?”

Maybe she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but I liked her.

“Of course. Schools specifically
for
it, and schools where you can just major in it.” I clicked on the computer screen, ran a search. “You can start here,” I said. “The thing is, some of these places are probably hard to get into. You might have to start at a community college and take some art courses. Some of them probably even have fashion courses.”

I glanced up and saw Gary standing at the end of the computer bank, watching me. “D’you think you’re set for now?” I asked her, getting to my feet.

“Yeah, thanks. This is great.”

I walked over to Gary. “I’m helping her with college research,” I said. “Is that all right?”

“Sure.” He looked pleased. “I just wanted to be sure you’re okay.”

My mother had probably told him to baby me a little. “Just don’t let any reporters in here,” I said, “and I’ll be fine.”

I was back to shelving books an hour later when the girl found me again.

“I’ve gotta go,” she said. “I got a ton of info, but I’ll probably be back again Friday.”

“You don’t have a computer where you’re staying?”

“I have a laptop, but the cottage only has dial-up and it’s torture getting online that way.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“My name’s Jen Parker,” she said.

“I’m Maggie.”

“Will you be here Friday?”

I nodded. I’d be living in the library for the next three hundred hours.