Secrets She Left Behind (33 page)

Keith

M
ISTER JOHNSON SHOOK MY HAND WHEN I WALKED INTO THE
conference room at the police department that Friday night. Dawn and Laurel were already there, and Dawn slung an arm around my waist as we waited for Flip to set up the DVD player.

“How’s my guy?” she asked.

“Hangin’ in,” I said.

“You doin’ okay over at Marcus’s?”

“It’s good.” I liked that she was so cool with me around other people. She made me feel halfway normal.

“I think Marcus likes the company.” Laurel smiled at me.

I looked away from her. “Whatever,” I said. Man, I could be a son of a bitch.

“Okay,” Flip said as he stepped back from the DVD player. “Take a seat, everybody.”

We all sat around a long table, Dawn between Laurel and me on one side, Flip and Mister on the other. Mister was dressed in a suit that didn’t fit into the beach world in any way, shape or form. He looked like a rapper. Like if you took away that collar and tie, you’d find some bling.

“As I told the three of you on the phone,” Flip said, “Mister filmed his interview with Sara’s memoir teacher, and while he
doesn’t think there’s anything much here, he wanted you to be present as we watch it.”

Mister leaned forward on the table. “There’s always a chance y’all might pick up on something I’d miss,” he said.

“Right,” I said. My mother’d been gone three and a half weeks, and I was ready for
somebody
to pick up on
something.
How long could this go on?

The interview was kind of creepy, and the creepiest part of it was the teacher himself. His name was Sean, and he reminded me of Reverend Bill—very tall and skinny—but he had spiky, bright red hair and pale skin. He shook Mister’s hand, then sort of folded himself into a chair across from the P.I.

Mister asked the dude some basic questions, and we learned that the class met six times in a church meeting room. There were five women and two men. The only person my mother seemed to know was Dawn, he said, and as far as he could remember, she never talked much with the other class members.

“As in, not at all,” Dawn said.

“I can’t say if she ever got together with any of them after class or during the week, though,” Sean said.

“Nope,” Dawn said.

“How much of Ms. Weston’s memoir did you read?” Mister asked him.

“Just the first few pages.” The teacher waved his hand around when he spoke.
Gay,
I thought. “It was very well written, but she was the only student who wrote by hand. I asked her to type her entries in the future, but she said a) she didn’t have a computer or typewriter and b) the memoir was for her eyes only. She just wanted me to see the beginning to be sure she was…I think she said ‘doing it right.’”

“I told you,” Dawn said. I had the feeling Dawn had been a wiseass as a kid who got in a lot of trouble at school.

“Do you recall the content of the pages you read?” Mister asked the teacher.

“Yes, because it was unique,” Sean said. “She was in her early twenties, attending a church in North Topsail for the first time. The building was on the beach or…I don’t recall precisely where, but it was at least partially surrounded by water and was pentagonal. She was taken with the minister and unhappy with her husband.” He chuckled. “I have to admit, I wanted to know where her story was going. But not at the cost of my eyesight.”

Thank you, Jesus,
I thought to myself. If my mother was heading in the direction of telling all about her relationship with my father, I was glad she decided to keep it to herself. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Laurel playing with her fingernails. I sort of felt sorry for her. She knew where that story was going, too.

“She never spoke during class,” Sean said. “Everyone else wanted to read from their work, but Sara kept hers to herself. I once asked her if she needed any help, but she said she was doing fine with it. I honestly don’t know how much she took away from the class. I don’t think she missed any of them, though.”

“Just one,” Dawn said, and as if he could hear her, Sean sat up straight in his chair.

“Oh,” he said. “She did miss one because of her son. He was one of the teenagers injured in that church fire in Surf City and he wasn’t feeling well and she needed to stay home with him.”

I wondered if that had pissed her off, having to miss the class because of me.

The interview went on a few more useless minutes. Then Flip turned off the video and Mister looked across the table at me and
Laurel and Dawn. “The fact that Sara was working on this…journal or memoir may mean nothing,” he said. “But what interests me is that she was looking back into her past, and when someone does that, they sometimes try to get in touch with someone from that past. Laurel, Flip tells me you’ve known Sara the longest. Does any of this ring a bell for you?”

Laurel laughed. Man, I had to give her credit for that. Before she laughed, I thought the tension in the room was going to suffocate me. “Well,” she said, “to begin with, the minister was my husband.”

Mister’s eyes widened. Dawn rubbed a spot on the table with her fingertip.

“He died in 1997,” Laurel said, “so I doubt she was trying to get in touch with him.”

“I see.” Mister made a steeple with his hands on the table. “I think…Maybe you and I could speak in private later, okay?”

“Sure.” Laurel nodded.

“As for the other gentleman mentioned in the memoir,” Mister said, “I
have
met with your father, Keith.”

It was my turn to look surprised. “That’s a neat trick,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Flip asked. I shook my head. Laurel was back to playing with her fingernails.

“So where is he?” I wondered what he was like, the man who had nothing at all to do with me coming into the world.

“In Minnesota,” Mister said. “He remarried and has three daughters. He was sorry to hear that your mother’s missing, but said he hasn’t heard from her since they split up when you were a baby. Does that fit what you all know?”

The three of us nodded.

“He’s paid no child support, but he said that your mother agreed
to that arrangement, and I did find that to be the case when I read their divorce records.”

“That’s why I live in a tin can,” I said.

Mister nodded. “It
was
an unusual arrangement,” he said, “but I’ve seen stranger.”

He put his hands on the table and got to his feet. “Well, I wanted you to see the interview.” He starting doling out his business cards, like we didn’t have them already. “Give me a call if you think of anything that might help later.”

When I got back to Marcus’s tower, the front door was locked. Marcus was really a pain in the butt when it came to locking the door. Three-quarters of the time, he didn’t bother, so I got in the habit of not taking a key with me when I went out. Then he’d lock it, for no reason I could figure out. When I complained, he told me to put the key on my key ring, but I kept forgetting. So now I was locked out.

I didn’t think he was at the fire station, which meant he was probably over at Laurel’s, and you couldn’t pay me enough to go over there with Maggie and the gang. I was about to call him to come home and let me in, when I remembered that there was a ladder attached to the side of the tower. It was a skinny little thing that ran straight up to the roof, maybe a foot across with rungs the diameter of my thumb. It stuck out a few inches from the wall, just enough to get a toehold. I asked Marcus about it and he said it was there when he bought the tower. Probably supposed to be a fire escape.

I walked around the side of the building and looked at the ladder. The moon was full, and the narrow ladder cast long sharp shadows against the side of the tower. No way, Jose. Even if I could get up that ladder, it would just put me on the flat roof that had no railing
around it. But there was a door up there. A short, slanted door that I didn’t think Marcus ever locked and that led to the circular metal stairway inside the tower.

I leaned against the building with a sigh. Looked at my watch: 9:07. I could call him, but it’d piss him off. He told me ten times about taking a key.

I grabbed the ladder and started to climb. Fast. If I did it fast, I wouldn’t have to think about it. The ladder shook like it was going to peel off the wall any second. The rails were as thin as cigars beneath my hands, and my toes hit the side of the building with each step.
Don’t look down,
I told myself.
Don’t think about how this is screwing up your shoulder. Don’t think, period. Just keep moving.

I did. I climbed higher. Higher. And I was okay until maybe two-thirds of the way up. Suddenly, I froze. My body went stiff as a corpse, my hands locked around the cigar rails. I couldn’t unclench my fingers to move my hands either up or down. I couldn’t make my feet go up to the next rung or down to the one below it. I was fucking trapped on the side of the building, and not only couldn’t I move a muscle, my head was starting to spin. I pressed my forehead against the ladder, keeping my eyes closed. I was gonna hurl any second.

Could I just jump? I thought of how I’d wrecked my ankle jumping the eight feet from the back door of the trailer. I had to be up at least twenty by now. I’d die.
That’s why heights are scary, you asshole.

I must have stood like that for five minutes. Finally, I unkinked my right hand. I forced it open, and slid it jerkily down the rail. Moved my right foot down a rung. Did the same with my left side. I felt uncoordinated, but I was moving and when I got about six feet off the ground, I let go and jumped to the sand.

By then, my body was made of Jell-O and I was ready to swallow my pride. No, I wouldn’t go over to the house on the sound, but I
would
call Marcus to come save me again. He was probably getting used to it.

Andy

I
NEEDED TO TALK TO A GIRL ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED WITH
me and Kimmie. Mom was a girl, but she’d say, “Where did this happen?” Then I’d say about the tower and she’d tell Uncle Marcus and I’d be in trouble. So I asked Maggie to come into my room. I closed the door and went, “Shh.”

“What’s up, Panda? Andy?” she whispered.

I didn’t yell at her about calling me Panda because she fixed it.

“You can’t tell anybody,” I said.

She shook her head. “Okay.” She sat down on my bed, cross-legged, like she always did.

I sat in my swivelly desk chair. “Me and Kimmie tried to have sex but it didn’t work,” I said.

Maggie didn’t look mad or upset or anything. “What happened?” she asked.

“Don’t tell anyone. Promise?”

“I promise. As long as nobody got…you know…Is Kimmie all right? Did she get hurt?”

“No!” I said. I forgot we were whispering. Mom was home, but she was downstairs so it was probably okay. “No. I wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

“I know that. Where were you?”

“At Uncle Marcus’s. He wasn’t home.”

I waited for her to yell at me, but she didn’t.

“Okay,” she said. “And what happened?”

“We planned it all out. I had my condom and we went to that room I sleep in with the blue bedspread.”

She nodded. She knew which room I meant.

“And…” I started feeling embarrassed. Maggie’s someone easy to talk to. She’s so nice. But I remembered how Uncle Marcus said you never talked to anybody about it. It was private. “This is private,” I said. “But I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s okay, Andy,” she said. “You know you can trust me.”

“I was ready to do it,” I said, “but Kimmie started crying and wouldn’t open up her legs.”

“Oh.” Maggie bit her lip. “What did you do?”

“I said okay. We didn’t have to do it. And she was worried I wouldn’t still be her boyfriend, but I will be.”

Maggie smiled. “I love you, Panda Bear,” she said.

That was a dumb thing to say that had nothing to do with what I was talking about! “Did you understand what I said?” I asked.

“Yes, I did. You really wanted to have sex, but Kimmie got scared at the last minute and changed her mind. You cared enough about her to not try to force her. And you’re mature enough to know that sex isn’t the most important part of a relationship.”

“It’s pretty important,” I said.

“But not important enough to ruin what you and Kimmie have right now.”

“What do we have?” I was getting confused.

“Your relationship. Your love for each other.”

“Right. But I don’t know what to do next time.”

“You need to wait,” Maggie said.

“I don’t want to wait.”

“You need to. You need to tell Kimmie that you’ll wait until
she
feels ready.”

Maggie wasn’t giving me good answers. “That might be never.”

“It might be a long time, that’s true,” Maggie said.

“Can’t you tell me how to talk her into it?”

“No way,” she said. “That’d be totally unfair to her.”

“I don’t want to be unfair to her,” I said, “but I want to have sex.”

“You are such a typical guy,” she said.

“Why did you say that?”

“Look, Andy,” she said. “Girls sometimes aren’t as hot for it as guys are. They have more to lose.”

“What can they lose?”

“They can get pregnant, for one thing, while guys can’t.”

“Not with a condom.”

“Even with a condom, but definitely not as easy.”

I didn’t know that. I tried to picture Kimmie with a big baby growing inside her. No way.

“It can hurt the first time, too,” Maggie said.

“Was that why she was scared?”

“Ask her, Andy. She’s the only one who can answer that question. And just…you have to be patient.”

“My condoms could expire by when she’s ready.”

Maggie laughed. “You can always get new condoms,” she said. “A new girlfriend as pretty and cool as Kimmie is harder to find.”

“Oh,”
I said, getting it. I really
would
have to wait, because Maggie had finally said a very smart thing.