Secrets She Left Behind (39 page)

“Maggie,” he said, “that tattoo of yours is perfect. Over the weeks that I’ve gotten to know you, I’ve heard your feelings of empathy for so many people. You have empathy for everyone but yourself.”

“That’s because what I did is unforgivable,” I said.

“How much of your day do you spend thinking about that?”

“It’s always in the back of my mind. Even in my dreams. I dream about fires and I’m always the one who started them. Sometimes it’s other…tragedies. The other night I dreamed I caused a car accident. That kind of thing.”

“So even in your sleep, you’re beating yourself up.”

“There’s nothing you can say that makes what I did forgivable.”

“Perhaps that’s true,” he said. “But I’m going to say something completely different. I’d like you to consider this idea—you’re being selfish by not forgiving yourself.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It keeps you stuck. You just said it yourself. When you held that child, you were helping her by not thinking about what a terrible person you are. Instead, you were thinking of
her.
The more energy you spend beating yourself up, the less energy you have for other people.”

“I can’t automatically say, okay, I forgive myself,” I said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“What’s standing in the way of you being able to forgive yourself?”

I knew the answer instantly, even though I didn’t like it. “I haven’t apologized to anyone I’ve hurt,” I said. “Not even Keith. Especially not Keith. I avoid him. I hide from him. From everybody who knows. I can’t face them.”

“It would take courage to face them.”

Andy

M
E AND KIMMIE RODE MY BIKE AND MAGGIE’S BIKE TO THE
Topsail Island Trading Company in Surf City. We wanted fudge, and they had all kinds there. We both had exactly the same favorite kind: chocolate marshmallow.

“It looks like us,” Kimmie said while the lady put some of it in a little box.

“What do you mean?” I didn’t see how fudge looked like us at all.

“Black and white.” She pointed to the big thing of chocolate-marshmallow fudge behind the glass. The dark part was not black at all. It was brown. But Kimmie is brown, too. If she said it was brown and white, that would make more sense. I almost said it, but Mom said I should pick my fights better. So I just said, “Yeah.”

After we got the fudge, we put it in Kimmie’s basket and started riding home. There were no cars except parked ones on the street since it wasn’t summer or a weekend, so we could ride next to each other.

“There’s your cousin,” Kimmie said all of a sudden. She pointed to the new police station.

Keith was walking to the street from the police station. His car was parked ahead of us a little and I could tell he was walking to it.
I didn’t want to talk to him, but we were going to crash into him, so we had to stop right in front of him. Maybe we could’ve gone around him, but it seemed funny not to say anything, especially since he’s my cousin now.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hey.” Keith hardly looked at us. He just opened his car door.

“We bought some fudge,” Kimmie said. “Chocolate marshmallow. Would you like some?”

I didn’t want to give away some of our fudge, but me and Kimmie thought Keith didn’t tell Uncle Marcus about us being at the tower. Uncle Marcus would’ve said. I was surprised Keith would be nice like that. That was why Kimmie was being nice back.

“No, thanks,” he said.

“Do the police know any more about Sara? Miss Sara?” I asked.

He laughed, but it wasn’t like when you laugh at something funny. “I think it’s time they called in a psychic,” he said. “That’d be just as useful as anything that’s happening now.”

I wasn’t sure what a psychic was. After the fire, they had these psychic people come to my school to talk to us to be sure we were okay. They were like counselors. Maybe Keith needed somebody to be sure he was okay now.

“You mean, like somebody who can have a dream about where your mother is?” Kimmie asked.

Oh, I got it. Not like a counselor at all. Kimmie was the brains. I was the brawn.

“Right,” Keith said. He looked like he was waiting for us to say something else. Maybe he was waiting for me to try to give him money again, but probably not, because of the pride thing. Mom said pride made him not take my money, but she said it was nice to offer it to him. Pride is one of those things I don’t understand.

“It’s like when you lose a race swimming,” Mom said. “Sometimes you say, ‘Oh, I don’t really care, ’even though you do. That’s because your pride is hurt.”

I totally didn’t get what she was saying, but I pretended I did because she would go on forever about it if I didn’t. After Keith didn’t take my money, I couldn’t figure out how to get it back in the ATM. I only knew the getting-it-out part. Mom took care of it for me, though.

“Look,” Keith said as he sat down on his car seat. “About the tower. I know y’all don’t have anyplace to go since you can’t drive yet, so it’s cool, all right?”

I was totally mixed up. I thought he meant it was okay for us to have sex in Uncle Marcus’s house, but we didn’t do it. We were waiting till we’re more ready. I wanted to tell him that, but I didn’t on account of sex being private.

One thing I
did
know was Kimmie was blushing. Some people didn’t know when she was on account of her dark color, but I could always tell. I changed the subject so she wouldn’t have to blush.

“Your girlfriend is pretty,” I said. “Her hair’s dark now like Kimmie’s.”

Keith looked up from his car seat. “What do you mean, ‘dark
now’
?”

“You know,” I said. “It used to be white. Yellowy white. Like Emily Carmichael’s.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Lockwood?” he asked.

“Why do you get angry at everything?” I felt flustrated. We were having a good conversation and all of a sudden we weren’t. “I made a compliment!”

“Just tell me what you mean about Jen’s hair being white.”

“Yellowy white.”

“Whatever! What do you mean?”

“Nothing.” I was glad we were in front of the police station in case he started hitting me. “She just looks different than she used to. That’s all.”

He got out of the car and I moved my bike backward a little.

“How do you know what she used to look like?” he asked.

How
did
I? I tried to remember where I saw her. Maybe school? I just remembered being somewhere, looking at the heart-tattoo thing on her chin. “The bus, I think. Or maybe…the auditorium. I don’t remember exactly.”

“I think you have her mixed up with someone else,” Keith said.

“Definitely I don’t. I remember her, like, tattoo thing.” I touched the pointy part of my jaw under my ear. “The heart.”

“The birthmark?”

“What’s a birthmark?” I asked.

“It’s like a spot on your skin when you’re born,” Kimmie said. “It can be different shapes.”

“I think she has a tattoo,” I said.

“I’m hungry,” Kimmie said. “Let’s go eat the fudge.”

“Look, Andy,” Keith said. “Maybe you saw someone who looked like Jen or had a birthmark on her jaw like Jen or something.”

“Where?” I asked.

“You…” He made kind of a growl sound. “You drive me round the bend, you know it?”

“Okay.” I decided to not fight with him anymore since Kimmie wanted to go.

I started to get on my bike again.

“Do you really think you saw her before?” Keith asked all of a sudden.

“People…ladies, I mean…they dye their hair sometimes,” I explained to him. “So one day they have red hair and another day they have brown hair. It doesn’t matter,” I said. “They’re still the same lady.”

Sara
Little Miss Perfect

I
N THE BEGINNING, EVERYONE THOUGHT ANDY STARTED THE
fire. That was practically the first thing out of Keith’s mouth once they removed the breathing tube. He was in agonizing pain, half his face covered beneath layers of thick bandages. His arms were wrapped in gigantic tubes of gauze with surgical pins jutting from the bandage covering his left hand, and he kept saying, “Andy. Andy. Andy.”

“Andy’s all right, honey.” I thought he was worried that Andy might have been hurt in the fire, too, and I was surprised that he cared more about Andy than he’d ever let on. He always acted as though Andy, who’d once been Keith’s little buddy, was now a nuisance to him. An embarrassment. Now, with him calling out Andy’s name, I wondered if deep down he still loved him.

“No,”
Keith said. “Not what…I…mean.” He needed to take a breath between nearly every word, his lungs raw from the fire. “Saw…Andy…outside church,” he said.

I understood what he was implying, even though I hadn’t told him the fire was arson. I was afraid of setting him off with that news. But he seemed to know, to intuit somehow, that the fire had been intentionally set, and in his mind, Andy was the guilty party. I
knew in both my head and my heart that couldn’t have been the case. Andy didn’t have a malicious bone in his body, nor did he have the brainpower it would take to set and ignite such a spectacular blaze. But Keith’s suspicions, which he whispered to Reverend Bill during the minister’s visit to the hospital, set something in motion that couldn’t be stopped. The next thing I knew, they’d found traces of fuel on Andy’s clothing and his fingerprints on a gas can. I heard all of this through the grapevine, because although Laurel was calling me to check on Keith, asking if she could visit him, I wasn’t calling her back. In spite of all she was going through with Andy—the hearing, the possibility of him being tried in adult court, which was simply, horribly ludicrous—she was thinking of us.

I couldn’t bring myself to return her calls, though. I wanted Keith back the way he was, his body whole and spirited and even willful. I wanted his mind to be healthy, with every memory intact, except for one: finding the letter from Marcus. I wanted that small detail to have disappeared from Keith’s memory forever.

But a day or two after Keith came out of the coma, the memory was back, florid in his mind. He seemed to remember every word of the letter and our conversation that followed his reading it. My son and I held the secret I knew would destroy Laurel. I didn’t dare let her visit Keith, and I pled exhaustion when anyone asked why I didn’t return her calls. I was living a nightmare through my son, discovering prayers I never knew I had in me, crying tears from some bottomless well. I knew Laurel, along with Maggie and Marcus, was going through an entirely different sort of horror with Andy’s situation. I didn’t have the strength to support her when I could barely support myself, especially not with that huge guilty secret sitting there between us. Little did I know that she already knew the truth.
Keith had confronted Maggie with it when Maggie came to the hospital to visit him. Then Maggie, angry with Laurel over one thing or another, had laid the truth on her mother. But I didn’t know that then.

Marcus appeared unexpectedly in Keith’s hospital room one afternoon, a few weeks after the fire. It was the day of Andy’s hearing, when the judge would decide if he should be tried in adult court, and by the expression on Marcus’s face when he walked in the room, I thought I knew the outcome. He looked worn out, the muscles tight around his mouth. I’d been sitting next to Keith’s bed, coaxing him to eat some soup, and I put down the bowl, stood up and wrapped Marcus in my arms. He was the one person from home I felt safe having there. He knew all there was to know. Nothing Keith said could shock him.

“What are
you
doing here?” Keith asked. He was still convinced of Andy’s guilt, and that, in combination with his pain and his justifiable self-pity over being denied his share in the Lockwood fortune, had turned him against everyone with that surname.

“Is it bad news?” I asked, letting go of Marcus.

He motioned toward the chair I’d just vacated. “Sit,” he said. “I need to talk to the two of you.”

I felt suddenly frightened, all sorts of bizarre possibilities running through my mind. Things that didn’t even make sense. Andy hanging himself in a cell. Laurel shooting the judge. Crazy thoughts that were an indication of how far gone I was after spending weeks in a ninety-degree room watching my son fight for life.

I returned to my seat and nervously slipped a piece of wayward gauze beneath the bandage on Keith’s face.

Marcus stood at the end of the bed, holding on to the footboard. “First things first,” he said. “How are you doing, Keith?”

“Fuck you,” Keith said.

“Keith!” I didn’t care what kind of pain he was in, some things were unacceptable. “Watch your mouth!”

“It’s all right.” Marcus sounded so tired. He let out a sigh. “Well,” he said, “it’s like this. Maggie was involved with Ben Trippett.”

“You mean…romantically?” I asked, and he nodded.

I was stunned. Dawn was so in love with Ben.
The first actually trustworthy man I’ve ever been with,
she’d told me. “Poor Dawn,” I said.

“Maggie thought he’d broken up with Dawn,” Marcus said. “That’s what he told her.”

“Why are we talking about Maggie’s pathetic love life?” Keith asked.

“Here’s why,” Marcus said. “Ben was having a hard time in the department because he got claustrophobic when he had to use the SCBA gear. The other guys were razzing him about it. Maggie wanted to help him. He was talking about maybe leaving the island if the situation didn’t get better.”

“What does this have to do with Andy’s hearing?” I asked. Why
were
we talking about Maggie’s love life?

“Andy’s not going to have a hearing,” Marcus said. He shifted from one foot to the other. “See, Ben thought he finally had the claustrophobia thing under control, but he needed a fire to prove himself. So—”

I gasped, suddenly understanding, although it was completely unbelievable. “You’re not saying
Maggie
set the fire?”

Marcus nodded. His eyes suddenly glistened. “She confessed, but she never meant for the kids to be there. Remember the lock-in was supposed to be in the youth building.”

This was ludicrous! “I just don’t believe it!” I said. “I’ve known Maggie forever, and she’s the most kindhearted girl ever. She must be trying to protect Andy.” But even
that
didn’t make sense, because as kindhearted as Maggie was, Andy was even more so. “She’s protecting
Ben,
” I said. “Maybe he set it and she’s taking the fall!”

Marcus shook his head. “She was so hooked on him,” he said. “She wasn’t thinking straight.”

I gripped the side bar of Keith’s bed. I thought I was going to pass out or scream or throw the bowl of soup across the room. Instead, I just stared dumbly at Marcus.

“She poured fuel around the church,” he said. “Andy’s prints were on the gas container because he helped her. He didn’t know what he was doing. He thought he was pouring bug spray.” He raked a hand through his hair and blew out his breath. “It’s a long story.”

“Little…Miss…
Perfect,
” I said. Reality was sinking in. I’d known that little girl as well as I knew my own name, but how well did I know the
seventeen
-year-old Maggie, really? I knew the side she showed me. The side she showed the world. Sweet-natured. Generous. Smart and studious. But something devious had been going on behind the scenes. Something cruel and crazy. How I’d loved that girl!

“I don’t think she meant to hurt anyone,” Marcus said.

“How can you
say
that?” I nearly shouted as I filled up with fury. I felt it explode in my chest and spill into my arms. “Look at Keith! Look at my son! She didn’t just
hurt
people, Marcus. She
killed
people!”

“She swears she didn’t actually start the fire,” Marcus said. “She said once she saw the lock-in was moved to the church, she gave up the whole plan.”

“Oh, right,” I snapped. “Spontaneous combustion.”

“I know.” Marcus ran a shaky hand over his chin. “I know it doesn’t make sense.”

Keith suddenly sniffled, and I looked down to see his unbandaged cheek awash with tears.

“Oh, honey!” I grabbed a tissue and smoothed it over his face. He looked so helpless, his arms like useless blocks of wood at his sides. What must it be like for him to listen to all of this?

“I thought it was
my
fault,” he said suddenly. “I thought
I
did it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “How on earth could it have been your fault?”

He gulped air, and I could tell by the pain in his face how much each breath hurt his lungs. I wished I could take some of that pain away. I’d take it all away if I could.

Keith told us about going onto the back porch of the church to have a smoke. He lit the cigarette, and when he tossed the match on the ground, it ignited the fuel Maggie’d poured over every inch of the pine straw surrounding the building.

“Massive flames,” he rasped. “
Massive.
They trapped everybody. I thought it was all my fault.”

My heart broke for him, and I hugged him as he cried. “My poor baby,” I said, barely aware that Marcus was still in the room with us. “It wasn’t your fault, honey. Not at all.”

As I held him, so awkwardly because of the bandages and the metal pole and the wires and tubes and all the apparatus surrounding him, I no longer cared…I no longer
gave a shit…
about protecting Laurel or her family. I wanted to hurt them. In that moment, I would have given my right arm to see Maggie burn in hell. I would have loved to be the person striking the match.