Secrets She Left Behind (20 page)

“Your mom’s amazing to ask him in.”

“She’s had time to adjust to the whole thing. She and Sara were totally best friends, but that changed after the fire and the bit about Sara and my father came out.” I was spilling so much, it was embarrassing, but Jen was so attentive. And nothing I said seemed to freak her out.

“So whatever happened with Ben?” she asked. “Are you still hung up on him?”

“No way. I found out he was cheating on me the whole time.”

“Ouch.”

“Right.”

Jen took a final sip from her cup. “I’ve done some crazy things because of guys myself,” she said.

“As bad as setting a fire?” I asked.

“Well…” She laughed. “No. You’ve topped me there.”

“Do you want to come over to my house tonight?” she asked when we walked out to our cars. “I like to cook. I’ll make dinner.”

“Are you kidding?” I asked. “You want to get together after everything I just told you?”

“It’s okay, Maggie.” She opened her car door and sat down inside. “Trust me,” she said. “I haven’t had the most mistake-free life either.”

Keith

W
HEN I LEFT JEN’S HOUSE THE NIGHT BEFORE, I TOLD HER THAT
I’d call her, but now I wasn’t so sure. I’d felt really good last night. Almost like the old, before-the-fire me. I was totally convinced she was glad I was there, and that she was into me big-time. Today, though, I had some doubts. Maybe she regretted inviting me over once she really got a look at me. Maybe she’d just been too nice—or too horny—to kick me out. I wished I’d gotten her e-mail address. E-mail would be safer. A piece of paper with her number on it was tucked under the saltshaker on my kitchen table. I stared at the number all morning, but I couldn’t make myself pick up the phone. If I said let’s get together, and she said no, I wouldn’t be able to take it.

I was eating a bowl of ramen noodles for lunch when I heard footsteps on the deck, then a knock at the door. Ever since my mother disappeared, I’d been waiting for a cop to show up with bad news. So when the knock came, I got up slowly from the table, like I could put off getting that news for a few more seconds. I pulled open the door and found Laurel standing on the deck and instantly broke out in a sweat. Bad news, definitely. The cops would send her to deliver it, thinking I could handle it better from her than from them.

“Hi,” she said. “I brought you some food. Can I come in?”

I finally noticed the plastic grocery bags she was carrying. I didn’t want her inside, though. The trailer was a wreck. Probably stank, too, with the dishes in the sink and two-day-old leftover spaghetti on the counter.

“I’ll come out there.” I started to walk out on the deck, but she held out the bags to stop me.

“At least put these inside,” she said. “And there’re some things that should go in the fridge.”

I looked down at the bags like I’d never seen groceries before. “Okay.” I took them from her, put them on the floor inside the door and walked outside.

The trailer had a wooden deck a few feet off the ground and we sat at the round plastic table. I made sure the right side of my face was toward her. I didn’t even think about it anymore. It was automatic.

“Do you know anything?” I asked. If she did, I wished she’d just spit it out.

She shook her head. “I was hoping maybe you did.”

“How would I? It’s not like anyone’s looking for her.”

“I know it must seem that way.” She leaned her elbows on the table. There was, like, this layer of dirt on the table I’d never noticed before, but Laurel didn’t seem to see it. I guessed my mother usually kept it cleaned off. “If the police had a good lead, that would be one thing,” she said. “It’s got to be very frustrating for you, Keith.”

“Whatever.” I didn’t want to get in this big sympathy-for-Keith talk with her. Now that I knew she didn’t know any more than I did, I wanted her to leave.

“I wanted to talk to you about hiring a private investigator,” she said.

I started to open my mouth to tell her I hardly had money for food, much less a P.I., but she held up her hand to shut me up.

“My dime,” she said. “I’ll pay for it. I want to. I’ve done some research and found a man in Washington who has an eighty percent success rate finding people.”

“Yes,” I said. No question. She could afford it and I needed it. “Do it.”

“Good. And I’m also here because we—Maggie, Andy and I—want you to stay with us until…while your mother is gone. We’d like you to move in.”

She had to be kidding. I was supposed to actually live in the same house as Maggie? Give her a second chance to kill me?

“No, thanks,” I said.

She seemed to notice the dirty tabletop all of a sudden. She sat back, brushing off her elbows, then folded her arms across her chest. “Marcus told me that money’s a problem.”

“It’s not.”

“I understand you don’t want…charity,” she said. “You’re too proud for that and I would be, too, in your shoes.”

“You don’t know the first thing about my shoes.”

She looked toward the beach. You could see the dunes and the beach grass from where we sat. “You know what I was thinking about while I picked up the food for you?” She faced me again.

I just stared at her. I didn’t give a shit what she’d been thinking about.

“I was remembering that your mother did a lot of grocery shopping for me long ago. For a couple of years, actually. Did you know that?”

“Why?”

“Because I was depressed and an alcoholic and doing a bad job of taking care of myself and my family.”

It wasn’t like I didn’t know Laurel’d been a basket case at one time. My mother’d told me that’s why she and Jamie Lockwood hooked up. But it still jolted me, the way she said it. Straight out like that. No embarrassment or anything.

“I know you’re not going to school,” she said.

“You the truant officer now or something?”

She leaned forward, her elbows on the nasty table again. “I just care about you, Keith,” she said. “I always have. You don’t need to push me away.”

“I’m your husband’s bastard kid.”

She flinched. She tried to cover it up, but I didn’t miss it. “All the more reason for you to live with us. You have siblings. Andy doesn’t know. I mean, I plan to tell him soon, but just…please let
me
be the one to tell him. Not you. But that doesn’t matter. You and I know you’re a…a Lockwood. And you should stay with us. Your mother would want it.”

“Oh, you think so? Do you have any idea how much my mother hated Maggie? How shafted she felt by her?”

Laurel leaned away from the table. Away from me. “I don’t believe your mother
hated
Maggie,” she said, “but I know she felt terribly betrayed by her.”

She was pissing me off. “I don’t think you get it at all,” I said. “My mother would rather see me
dead
than living in the same house with the person who left me like this.” I lifted my arms in the air. Showed off the scars. I knew that was a lie about my mother, but I loved how much I was upsetting Laurel.

“Keith,” she said. “Let’s not say things we’re going to regret, okay? I’m offering you a place to live. A roof over your head and food on the table. And friendship if you want it.” She stood up. Dusted off the seat of her pants. “Think about it.”

I watched her walk down the wooden steps to the sand and get in her car. As she drove away, I felt a weird kind of longing, like I didn’t want her to leave. Like I wanted to call her back.

Just when I felt like I was going to sink straight into a black hole of depression, my cell phone rang. I ran back into the trailer and grabbed the phone from the kitchen counter. I checked the number on the caller ID, then looked at the number on the piece of paper Jen had given me. I let it ring a couple more times, grinning to myself, before I pressed the talk button.

“Hey,” I said. “I was just about to call
you.
”

Maggie

“W
HAT’S HURTING YOU EVEN MORE THAN YOUR GUILT,” DR. JAKES
said, “is your shame.”

I hated when he was right. This was my third session with him and I didn’t see how it was helping or ever would help. But every once in a while, he hit the nail on the head. Feeling guilty sounded kind of noble. Like I had deep remorse or something, which I did. Feeling
ashamed,
though, felt dirty. And he was right. That’s how I truly felt. Dirty and sinful.

But so what? So I felt shame instead of guilt? What did it matter?

“You feel as though you deserve to be spit at.”

I nodded. It had been five hours since the woman had accosted me in the library, but I could still feel her saliva on my face. “I guess,” I said.

“And you feel as though you don’t deserve to have a friend.”

“Right.” I’d told him about Jen. About how nice she was and how I was going to her house for dinner tonight.

“She apparently doesn’t feel that way,” he said.

“Yeah, well.” I rested my head on the back of the big leather chair. “I don’t think it’s really sunk in to her what I did.”

He waited for me to go on. I hated when he was quiet like that and all the burden was on me to fill up the silence. I stared up at his ceiling. He had recessed lights laid out in a pattern I couldn’t
figure out. No symmetry to them at all. One of them was burned out. I stared at its round brownish-gray bulb and suddenly, for no reason at all, I felt like crying.

“What’s hurting you right now?” Dr. Jakes asked.

How did he know? I
wasn’t
crying. I only felt like it. Sometimes he totally freaked me out, the way he knew exactly when I was ready to crack.

“I don’t know how to get through this,” I said. “This whole…shitty experience.”

He shifted in his chair the way he did when he was about to say something he thought was important. I lowered my eyes from the ceiling to him.

“Let’s reframe what you’re going through, Maggie,” he said. “I’d like you to think of it as grief.”

“For the people who died?”

“No. For
yourself.
For the life you thought you had before the fire. Before Ben.”

My eyes burned, and I blinked fast. I’d hold the tears back if it was the last thing I did.

“And grief is never quick and easy,” he said. “It takes time to get through.”

“I’ll never get over it,” I said.

“Not over, but
through.
That’s the key word. You can’t skip it. You have to go
through
it.”

“Like, endure it.”

“At the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna,
endure
is a very negative word. There are things to be gained from this grief.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Trust me on it. But you have to let yourself feel it. Embrace it even.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Learn from it.”

I looked at my watch. Twenty more minutes of this.

He smiled at me. “What are you thinking now?” he asked.

“You don’t want to know.”

He laughed. His belly bounced up and down.

“Will you continue at the library?”

“No way.”

“What will you do about your community service if you leave?”

“You say that like you think I should stay there.” I was never setting foot in that library again.

“I don’t think there’s a right or wrong decision with regard to the library,” he said. “That’s your choice.”

“My mother’s working on finding me something else.”

“Your mother didn’t commit the crime.”

I felt a flash of hatred for him. “What do you want from me?”

“You’re angry with me.”

I looked away.

“I don’t want anything
from
you,” he said. “But I want a great deal
for
you. And one of the things I want is for you to take responsibility for your sentence.”

“I just spent a year in prison! No one else did that for me.”

“As you said yourself, that was part one. Your mother’s not responsible for part two. No one is except you.”

The cottage Jen was staying at was not at all what I’d expected. It was at the southernmost end of the island, right smack on the ocean near Serenity Point. So maybe
Jen
didn’t have much money, but her friends were sitting on some pricey property. I was glad she had such a cool place to live while she was getting her act together about college.

“Come in!” she said when she opened the front door. She looked like one of those TV cooking-show hosts, a domestic goddess in a red-striped apron, her hair clipped back and a slotted spoon in her hand.

“It smells amazing in here,” I said. I was in the living room, but could see into the open kitchen. “What are you making?”

“Chicken cacciatore. Hope that’s okay. I didn’t ask if you were a vegetarian or anything.”

“It sounds perfect.” I was no longer fussy about food after all the crap I’d eaten in prison. I wasn’t sure what chicken cacciatore was, but by the smells coming from the stove, I was certain I’d like it.

“I’m so glad to have someone over,” she said as I followed her into the kitchen. “Topsail’s cool, but I’m, like, totally isolated here.”

I looked out at the sea, feeling wistful. Yes, my family lived on the sound, but I couldn’t help it—I still longed for the ocean view from the Sea Tender. I’d driven past that stretch of beach only once since getting home, and I doubted I’d ever drive past it again. All the condemned cottages were gone. Some of the pilings still jutted from the sand, but my stomach had turned just looking at them. My feelings about the Sea Tender were so jumbled up now. I had such great memories of Daddy there, mixed up with the nauseating memories of my illicit meetings with Ben, and the final, horrific hours with Andy, when I almost got us both killed.

An open bottle of white wine sat on the counter near the sink. Jen poured herself a glass, then started to pour one for me.

“None for me, thanks.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Because you’re not twenty-one?”

“Just don’t like the taste,” I lied. I didn’t want to get into my reasons for not drinking. I decided while I was in prison not to smoke weed or drink anymore, and not just because alcoholism ran
in both sides of my family. I didn’t want to do anything that might cloud my judgment, which I wasn’t sure I’d ever totally trust again. I’d already screwed up enough for a lifetime.

“You mind if I drink?” she asked, already raising the glass to her lips.

“No, that’s cool.” I didn’t want to sound like a Goody Two-shoes. She knew I was an arsonist, though. I guessed I didn’t have to worry about that.

With Jen’s hair clipped up, I could see the faint shape of a heart on her jawbone, just below her ear. A tattoo? That would give us one more thing in common. But as she tipped back her head to sip from her glass, I could see that the heart was not quite symmetrical. It was nothing more than a pale grayish birthmark, and although half the world had tattoos, I decided to keep my own a secret from her. At least until I got to know her better. My tattoo always required more explaining than I felt like doing right then, and besides, she didn’t seem like a tattoo kind of girl.

Jen turned off the flame beneath the skillet on the stove. “Well,” she said, “I may be a good cook, but I can’t time things worth a damn. This is already done. Are you hungry?”

“Sure.”

We made up our plates and carried them to the table, which looked out on the ocean. It was still light outside, though the sky had turned that early-evening gray.

“I’ve got the perfect night planned for us,” Jen said as she added another inch of wine to her glass.

Oh, God. I hoped she didn’t want to go out somewhere. I really didn’t know what this girl was like. What was her idea of a perfect night?

“What d’you have up your sleeve?” I asked. The chicken was tender and totally delicious. Someday I’d have to learn to cook.

“Well, after dinner, we’ll fill a couple of plastic basins—I found some on the deck—with hot water and give ourselves pedicures while we watch a movie. They have shelves of movies upstairs in the family room and a big-screen TV.”

I stared at her, speechless for a second, before I started laughing. I was so relieved she didn’t want to go out. But
pedicures?

“I’ve never had a pedicure,” I said.

“Not even, you know, at home?”

“Not even.”

“Oh, you are in for a treat, Maggie.”

We ate in silence for a few minutes. Outside, the stars were beginning to pop out of the sky.

“So who owns this cottage?” I asked. “Not that the word
cottage
really fits this place.”

“You’re right. It’s pretty incredible, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“It belongs to some family friends. The Roscoes. They live in Chicago and don’t use it at all off season, but they spend the whole summer here.”

“Chicago.”
I didn’t know anyone who came to Topsail Island from Chicago. “How does your family know them if you live in Asheville?”

“Oh—” she moved a slice of zucchini around on her plate “—Mrs. Roscoe and my mother went to college together.” She set her fork down and raised her arms to take in the whole house. “Did I luck out, or what?”

“You really did.”

“Where do
you
live, exactly?”

“On the sound in North Topsail,” I said.

“Right on the sound? I bet you get great sunsets.”

“Yeah, we do,” I said, thinking how glad I was to be home, and—although I was ashamed of myself for feeling that way—how totally thrilled I was that Keith didn’t want to live with us. Mom had left a message on my cell while I was driving to my appointment with Dr. Jakes, saying he turned down the offer. “I really lucked out, too,” I said.

After dinner, we went upstairs to the huge family room. Jen turned on the TV while we looked through the shelves of movies. These Roscoe people had to be rolling in dough, especially if this was just their summer movie collection. Jen liked slasher flicks. Bad news. I used to like them, too, before I ended up living with a bunch of real-life slashers.

“You know—” I was going to have to be straight with her “—I’m just not in the horror mood these days. Any chance of a comedy?”

Her head was turned sideways as she looked at the movie titles. “You get nightmares?” she asked.

“Not really. I’m just into lighter stuff right now.”

“Yeah, I guess you’ve had enough horror to last a while.” She glanced at the TV screen where a commercial for Viagra was airing. She rolled her eyes at me. “Men,” she said. “I swear.”

I laughed.

“A comedy’d be cool,” she said. “You pick, and I’ll go get the stuff ready for our pedicures.”

I’d pulled out a few movies and was waiting for Jen to return when another commercial came on the screen.
“Brier Glen Hospital needs you!”
a man’s voice said. There were pictures of an old woman in a hospital bed. A man pushing another man in a wheelchair. A little girl smiling up from a coloring book. I sank onto the sectional,
watching. I remembered seeing volunteers at New Hanover Hospital when I delivered cards to the fire victims. They’d all been elderly. Were the volunteers at Brier Glen old, too? Would they let someone my age volunteer? More specifically, would they let
me?
It was far enough from the island that patients probably wouldn’t know who I was. Could that be my community service? I thought of Dr. Jakes pretty much telling me that I should find community service on my own. Ugh. I hated to please that man, but I felt excited. Maybe I could work with kids there. I smiled at the TV screen just as a man dressed in a white coat and stethoscope pointed his finger at me and repeated, “Brier Glen Hospital needs
you!
”

Jen came back into the room, carrying a basin of fragrant, bubbly water, along with two rolled-up towels under her arm. “I filled yours, too,” she said. “It’s in the master bath. Last door on the left.”

I found the master bedroom. It was enormous, cut into two separate spaces that were connected by a big arched opening. The largest space had a bed and dresser and an armoire in it. The smaller space had a love seat and one of those long, luxurious lounge chairs. A huge painting of the ocean was on an easel in front of the window. I turned on the light for a better look. It was just the water and sky, but the colors were awesome.

In the main part of the bedroom, there were two huge windows and I envied Jen waking up with an ocean view in the morning. It was obvious that was the room she was staying in. For starters, why not? No one else was there and it was probably the best bedroom in the house. But also, her suitcase was in the corner, and her clothes were scattered across the bed. And it
smelled
like her. A citrusy smell that was strong and really nice. In the bathroom, with its sunken tub and glassed-in shower, her makeup covered the marble countertop. There was an eyelash curler, moisturizer, a
tube of fake bronzer and a small tan rectangular case I recognized instantly as birth control pills. I touched the case lightly with my fingertip, remembering how careful I’d been about taking mine. How wise and responsible I thought I was being! I’d stopped taking them after everything ended with Ben. Who knew when I’d ever need them again?