Secrets She Left Behind (17 page)

“Great!” she said. “I’ll probably see you then.”

I watched her walk away, her hair catching stripes of light from the fluorescents overhead, wondering if I just might be able to have a friend.

Keith

I
WOKE UP AROUND ELEVEN IN THE MORNING, THE PAIN IN
my left arm so bad I felt like cutting it off. The bottle of Percocet was on my nightstand and I took two of them with a swallow of water while I was still in bed. It was dark in the trailer. There was a window right above my bed, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of stretching my arm high enough to pull the blind open.

Our trailer was always dark inside. I hated that rusty tin can. Lived in it practically my whole life. Of course, my tin can was less than a block from the ocean and not everyone who lived in a trailer park could say that. Maybe I’d surf today. Once the meds kicked in, that’s what I’d do. Out there, I could ditch my problems. First, though, I’d drive to Sneads Ferry and get my buddy there to fill my tank and then I’d get him to buy me some brew, because I wasn’t going to go through one more day without beer. For the first time ever, I could drink in my own house, whenever I wanted. Hell, if my mother had to be missing, I might as well get something good out of it.

When I got in my car, though, the needle in the gas gauge did a tiny little jump and then just sat there below the E. It was lower than I’d ever seen it before, and I’d run on fumes plenty of times. Sneads Ferry wasn’t all that far, and maybe I could still make it, but
what if I didn’t? It was midweek in late September, so there wouldn’t be that many cars on the road to begin with. I’d be stranded trying to hitch a ride with a face that’d scare off anybody who slowed down long enough to get a look at me.

There was a gas station less than a mile from the trailer park. I was going to have to bite the bullet. A zillion people filled up their tanks every day and never caught on fire, I thought as I pulled onto the main road. A zillion people.

There were no other cars at the pumps when I pulled into the station, but I could smell the gas already even though I hadn’t opened my car door. It wasn’t my imagination. Maybe the station had a leak going on or something. Maybe a car’d knocked one of the pumps a little off its base and no one knew about it yet.

Whatever,
I thought.
Whatthefuckever.
I just needed to get this over with.

I got out of my car, then realized the tank was on the other side. Got back in. Turned the car around. Remembered to pop the door on the gas tank.

I looked at the pump. There was this little cardboard sign taped to the display.
Pay inside if using cash.
Crap. I didn’t want to go inside and have to talk to somebody. Mom always took care of that. I dug into my pocket and pulled out my two last twenties, a five and three singles. I’d get ten bucks’ worth. It wouldn’t get me far, but it would have to do.

The blond guy behind the counter in the little market was talking on his cell. He didn’t even look up when I put a twenty on the counter.

“I want ten dollars’ worth,” I said.

He laughed into the phone as he opened the register. “She was, like, totally wasted,” he said, putting the twenty in the drawer and
pulling out a ten. “Yeah, no kidding. I wasn’t letting her in my car like that. She’d puke all over it.”

He handed me the ten. “Thanks, man,” he said. He finally looked right at me, and his eyes bugged out.
“Wow,”
he said. “What happened to your face, man?”

“Go to hell,” I said, and I headed for the door. I pulled it open and could hear him saying into his cell, “I don’t know. Guy looks like he walked into a propeller.”

Back at the pump, I leaned against the side of my car, trying to get a grip on myself. I finally reached down and twisted off the cap on the gas tank, my hand jerking around like I was spastic or something.
Walked into a propeller?
I pushed the button above the cheapest gas, took down the nozzle and stuck it in the tank. All I had to do now was pull up the trigger or whatever you called it. I held my fingers on it.
Just pull it up. Pull it up.
Ten seconds passed. Thirty. Forty. I couldn’t do it. The gas would come out, and it would be all over for me. That’s how Maggie started the fire. Gas and diesel. Gas and diesel. One little spark and
wham!

“You havin’ trouble out here?”

I looked toward the door of the minimart, where the blond guy stood, half in the store and half out.

“You need some help?” he called.

“No, I’ve got it,” I said. I squeezed my eyes shut, pulled up on the trigger and waited to die.

I was wiped out and shaky as I drove back to the trailer. I didn’t feel like surfing now. I felt like going back to bed, so that’s what I did. Crawled in. Pulled the covers up to my chin.

Guy looks like he walked into a propeller.

Effing son of a bitch.

I tossed off the covers and went into my mother’s room, into the closet where she kept this box of pictures. They were mostly of me. She was always annoying me with the cheapo digital camera somebody gave her.
My handsome son,
she’d say.
C’mon, good-lookin’. Smile for your mom.
I’d sneer or turn away. Why did I do that? Why did I treat her like shit all the time?

I went through the pictures, pulling out every one that had me in it. Old school pictures from when I was a kid. A bunch with Andy and Maggie on the beach in front of the old Sea Tender. Maggie and I looked like brother and sister for sure. Andy not so much, but Maggie and I had those giant brown eyes and dark curly hair. Then there were those school pictures from over the years. I remembered the eighth-grade picture real well. When we got that picture from the photographer, I stared at it for about an hour, thinking I was turning into a hot-looking dude. There was a picture of me with Lindsey Shallcross. We were all decked out before some dance our freshman year of high school. There was a shot of me posing next to my surfboard in my wet suit, my eyes squinty and the sour look I reserved for my mother on my face.

I got a pair of scissors from my mother’s desk, and started to cut the pictures up. I cut them into smaller and smaller pieces until my hand was sore. I would’ve liked to burn them, but I hadn’t lit a match since the night of the fire. Instead I tossed the pictures, which looked practically like confetti by then, into the toilet and flushed it. About half the pieces went down. I flushed again. Then again. The pieces just circled the inside of the bowl, and I knew I’d screwed up.

We had a plunger and we had a snake because my mother never wanted the expense of calling in a plumber if she could help it, so I spent the rest of the day working on the damn toilet. By late af
ternoon, I had the thing working again. I took a shower, thinking about maybe driving to Sneads Ferry to get my buddy to buy me some beer, but if he wasn’t working, it’d be a waste of gas. I couldn’t face the evening without a beer, though. My shoulder and arm and left hand were totally wrecked from using the plunger. I thought the Perc would work better and quicker if I took them on an empty stomach. No food for them to cut through. Just straight into the bloodstream. I popped a couple, and I was right. I fell asleep on the sofa and didn’t wake up until morning.

I put on my wet suit as soon as I got up. I was surfing, no matter what. I didn’t care if we had a thunderstorm, I was going out there where I didn’t have to deal with anyone or hear people talk about my face. My arm felt a lot better than the night before. Those drugs were brilliant. I opened my front door and nearly tripped over a pot of flowers. Crap. Some old lady sending me flowers like my mother was already dead. I carried them into the kitchen.

The flowers were in a dented old aluminum coffeepot, and they weren’t anything fancy. They looked like someone grabbed them from a field or something and stuck them in whatever thing they could use for a pot.

I saw a folded piece of white paper stuck in the stems and pulled it out.

She wrote her phone number again in case I’d lost that scrap of paper she gave me. I hadn’t lost it. It was still in my jeans pocket,
though I’d never planned to call it and sure didn’t expect to hear from her either.

I leaned against the counter, remembering that hot bod and those pretty blue eyes. She was hurt inside, she’d said. Did she actually get it? Did she understand? I looked at her number. Picked up my cell.

Maybe I could get laid, at the very least.

Maggie

O
N FRIDAY NIGHT, MOM, ANDY, UNCLE MARCUS AND I ATE
dinner at the picnic table on the deck. Pork chops and sweet potatoes we cooked on the grill, and collards Mom bought from the old woman on Route 17 who was the only person who really knew how to make them the way I liked them. Oh my God, it felt
so good
to be outside in my awesome yard on the awesome sound! The news vans were gone.
Finally.
The last one pulled out sometime that afternoon. Maybe it was just because it was the weekend and they weren’t bothering to cover the news, but whatever the reason, I could finally go outside without hiding in the shadows.

Sitting at the picnic table, I felt really, truly happy for the first time in forever. God, I’d missed my family! I munched on my pork chop, smiling inside as Andy talked about Kimmie, Kimmie, Kimmie.

“Somebody’s got Kimmie on the brain,” Mom said after he’d been going on and on for about ten minutes straight.

Andy looked surprised. “Who does?” he asked, and we all cracked up.

At one point during dinner, Uncle Marcus brushed Mom’s hair away from her forehead. She caught his hand. Squeezed it and smiled. I still couldn’t get over watching them. I’d get tense every
once in a while around them, the way I used to feel when they were in the same room together. I was waiting for my mother to say something cold to him, to freeze him out like she used to, but those days were gone. A couple of nights, I heard them making love. That was slightly creepy. My mother’d always been so not interested in sex—or at least, that’s how I thought of her. What did I know, though? Daddy died when I was eight, and she never dated anyone. Maybe she craved it all that time. Well, she was getting it now. It was strange. I’d left a family that was screwed up and miserable, and I came home to people who were suddenly giving off all these romantic vibes. I hoped the vibes weren’t catching, because I was done with romance for a while. Maybe forever.

It was nearly dark by the time we finished cleaning up, and I looked through the kitchen window toward our long pier. I hadn’t felt safe enough to walk out on the pier since I got home, but tonight the reporters were gone, and in the darkness no one would be able to see me from the water.

“I’m going to go out on the pier,” I said as I turned on the dishwasher.

“Beautiful night for it,” Mom said.

“Can I come?” Andy asked.

“Sure.” I’d really wanted to be alone, but I needed to make up for lost time with my baby brother.

The sand was cool under my bare feet as we crossed the yard to the pier. Fall was coming already. I’d missed summer while I was locked up. I never wanted to miss another one.

The good thing about fall, though, was that the tourists were gone and the island was dark, which meant you could see zillions of stars. As I walked down the long pier next to Andy, I felt so incredibly free. I put my arms out like I was flying.

“What are you doing?” Andy asked.

“Just feeling happy,” I said.

He stretched his own arms out at his sides. “Me, too,” he said.

At the end of the pier, we sat down and dangled our legs over the side, like we’d done thousands of times before. It was totally still on the water, and I could hear little waves lapping against the pilings. I loved that sound.

“Uncle Marcus is getting me a kayak,” Andy said.

“Really? Mom’s letting him?” Mom had been paranoid about any sort of boat ever since Daddy was killed on Uncle Marcus’s.

“Yup. She said I’m old enough.”

I leaned against the piling and watched the moonlight flicker on the water. For a quick, sickening moment, I remembered the last time I’d sat with Andy looking out over the water—in the Sea Tender during the nor’easter, on that stupid, stupid night when I’d lost every particle of sanity I’d ever had. The memory made me feel queasy. I hoped Andy wasn’t thinking about the same thing.

I suddenly felt the rhythmic vibration of footsteps on the pier. I looked over my shoulder. If it was a reporter, I would jump into the sound before I’d talk to him.

But it was Mom and Uncle Marcus, walking toward us, holding hands.

“What a gorgeous night!” Mom said as they came close to the end of the pier.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Can we sit with y’all?” Uncle Marcus asked, even though he was already lowering himself to the pier next to Andy.

Mom sat down next to him. “We wanted to talk with you both about something,” she said.

“What?” Andy asked. I wondered if they were getting engaged.

“Well, first of all, I just wanted to let you know that I’m definitely going to hire a private investigator to help us find Sara,” Mom said.

“Good idea,” I said. Maybe a P. I. could do something the police hadn’t thought of.

“Yeah, good,” Andy said, like he had a clue what a private investigator did.

“But second,” Mom said, “and this is the part that affects you two—Marcus and I think we should ask Keith to move in here while Sara’s gone.”

I looked down at the water beneath my feet. I couldn’t imagine it. Not for a second.

“I don’t know where Miss Sara can be,” Andy said.

“No one does, And,” Uncle Marcus said. “It’s hard to know if she’ll be gone for just another day or maybe forever, so—”

“She might be dead,” Andy said.

“I hope not,” Mom said, “but it’s a possibility we have to face. We just don’t know. But in the meantime, Keith is alone. He has no money. He can’t legally get any of Sara’s savings, so Marcus and I think it would be a kind thing to ask him if he’d like to stay with us.”

I couldn’t even face Keith at the search. How could I live in the same house with him? It would be like a whole new kind of prison for me, but I so understood where Mom and Uncle Marcus were coming from: Keith was a Lockwood. The world might not know it, but—except for Andy—
we
did and
Keith
did. How could we let him stay alone when we could help him? I thought it was amazing of my mother to suggest it. She’d forgiven my father and Sara for what they did. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to in her shoes.

Still, I wasn’t quite ready to say yes. And Andy, who didn’t have a clue that Keith was related to us, didn’t get it at all.

“He’s always mean to me,” he whined. “Maybe he could live with somebody else?”

“If he lived here,” Mom said, “it would be with the understanding that he’s not mean to
any
of us. That he follows the house rules and returns to school. He’d have to treat all of us with the same respect we’d treat him.”

“What are you thinking, Maggie?” Uncle Marcus reached around Andy’s shoulders to touch my arm. I hadn’t said a word.

I tipped my head back and looked at the stars. I didn’t feel like speaking. I finally felt peaceful and safe for the first time in more than a year, and having Keith there—the flesh-and-blood reminder of what I’d done—would practically be the worst thing I could imagine. How Mom and Uncle Marcus could even ask me to go along with the idea seemed so unfair. But could I be any more selfish? I totally messed up Keith’s life. My
half brother’s
life. He had some of Daddy in him. Hard to imagine, but somewhere inside that hotheaded, mean-spirited boy was a piece of my father.

“I guess it’s the right thing to do,” I said.

Uncle Marcus laughed. “A ringing endorsement,” he said.

“What’s that mean?” Andy asked.

“It means we all have reservations about it,” Mom said in a voice that let me know she really
did
have reservations. “We all have concerns. But like Maggie said, it’s the right thing to do.”