The Deepest Secret (19 page)

That’s what it always comes down to: what’s best for Tyler, what’s best for Melissa. Nothing about how she wants this for herself, too. He understands now that that dark thick line that once encircled them has wavered, repositioned itself, and left him standing on one side and Eve on the other.

He looks straight ahead. “You have to stop blaming yourself.” This silences her. And into that silence he says, “We both made Tyler. It’s on both of us.”

They hadn’t known they were carriers. They hadn’t had any symptoms; they’d never even heard of XP. So they let sunlight filter into the nursery; they took Tyler for walks in his stroller; they played
with him on the playground. They did all the normal things parents did with their children, and in that innocent first year, they signed their son’s death warrant. Both of them—equally. Together, they’ve created a doomed child. Together, they’ve created this unhappy life.

THE BOATHOUSE

T
he sky’s bright pink behind the houses. There’s enough light left to see that the grass really is green, the flowers really are pink. It’s been a nice day. Tyler feels the truth of that against his face, the backs of his hands, the air there soft and warm. Everything looks relaxed, the leaves hanging from the branches. Sliding the spatula beneath the foil packets of fish, he lifts them up and sets them on the platter. They smell good, buttery and garlicky. He wishes salmon tasted as good as it smelled. His mom makes him eat salmon every week.
It’s packed with antioxidants
, she tells him, which is supposed to be a good thing.

The door opens behind him, and he hastily tilts the telescope up. His mom comes out, bringing a basket of bread. “Remember when you had an imaginary friend, and I had to set a place for him every night?”

She’s been doing that a lot lately, talking about stuff from when Tyler was a kid. He wishes she would stop. “No.” He’s not lying. He really doesn’t remember.

They sit around the glass table. Fat candles flicker between them, making them look like spooks. His dad’s gone, so it’s just the three of them. “Hey,” his mom says to Melissa. “I see you’ve gone through your clothes. You sure you want to get rid of so many?”

Melissa doesn’t even look up. “Yes.”

“But you just bought a lot of them.”

“Exactly. So it’s my money and I get to decide.”

“All right,” his mom says slowly. “I’ll drop them off the next time I go.”

“Good.”

His mom sighs and looks at him. “I wanted to tell you that I’m going with Charlotte to the police station tomorrow morning. I won’t be long.”

Which means he’ll be home alone. He knows the rules. No opening his door to anyone. Keep his phone charged and beside him if he needs her. Call 911 if he smells smoke. Make sure his mask is on his nightstand. She always gives him a heads-up before she leaves, and she always answers him the second he texts her, even when he’s saying things like,
We need chocolate milk
and
Can I rent a movie?

He likes the idea of being old enough to be trusted with such a big responsibility, but he worries. What if there is a fire? What if a stranger forces his way inside and surprises him alone in his room? The lock on his door isn’t that strong. It’s not meant to keep out burglars. But Zach’s been allowed to stay home by himself ever since he was eight. “Why do you have to go to the police station?” He wonders which one it is. He’s been on Google Earth, zeroed in on a few buildings, but there’s nothing to see. Just rooftops and parking lots.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Charlotte’s taking a polygraph.”

He knows what a polygraph is. People are always getting into trouble when they take one on TV. “How come?”

His mom hesitates, which tells him he should pay attention to what she’s
not
saying. “They always have to rule out the parents in cases like this.”

They think Charlotte did something to Amy?
“That’s stupid. Moms don’t hurt their kids.”

Melissa snorts. “Oh, that
never
happens.”

“Melissa,” his mom warns, but Tyler doesn’t want her to make Melissa stop. “On purpose or by accident?” he demands, and his mother looks sad.

“It depends,” she says, which is really no answer at all.

For as long as he can remember, his mom’s warned him about the path that leads down to the river. She always makes sure to walk between him and where the ground falls off steeply on one side. What if he falls and breaks a bone? Emergency rooms have lots of lights. He’d had to go to one once when he was little and had a high fever. He’d had to wear his facemask and long sleeves and jeans, and he kept trying to rip them off, he was so hot. It had taken two nurses and his mom to hold him down. The doctor had sent him home with a tube in his arm and a nurse had to come to remove it the next day.

On moonlit nights, the stars shine like coins on the surface of the water. During the winter, the water turns white as it freezes. Snow piles up along the banks, and the course of the river is revealed, a crisp, irregular path that cuts between the rocky hillsides. People in Minnesota wait for their lakes to freeze so they can drag little cabins out into the middle where they huddle inside and fish through holes they chop in the ice. Sometimes they miscalculate the depth of the ice and plunge through.

Farther east, the gradient grows shallower, and there’s a path that leads between people’s houses and down to the water. The river’s wider there, and calmer. His mom’s figured out a way of taking sidewalks
and trails that lead from their house through other neighborhoods—the house covered in ivy they nicknamed the Bush House, the house with stumpy slabs of limestone ranged across the yard like gravestones—and then through the woods to the water. They were both pretty excited the first time they did that and found the old boathouse standing there.

Pine needles slither beneath the soles of his shoes. Crickets chirp all around him; mosquitoes rise up and buzz in his ear. He walks down to the water that sometimes looks gray, sometimes sparkles, but tonight looks flat and dead.

The boathouse squats on the corner, weathered walls and a crumbling roof. But it had been a good hiding place when he was a kid. His mom made him and Melissa wear glow sticks snapped into circles around their necks so she could keep track of them, which defeated the purpose of hide-and-seek. He’d been nine when he’d figured out Melissa was humoring him when she claimed she couldn’t find him.

The boathouse has no doors, just doorways and squares cut out as windows. The last time he was here was on the Fourth of July, when he persuaded his mom to let them watch the fireworks across the river from here. They stared up at the dark sky exploding into streamers of light and smoke. Firecrackers are safe. He can watch a million of them, just like everybody else.

His shoes squeak across the damp wooden floor. Cobwebs glimmer in the glow of his flashlight. He takes a photograph of them strung across the rafters, adjusts the shutter and f-stop and takes another. Some of these pictures will be better than others. He leans out through the windows to take shots of the river below. That might be cool, to do a sequence of the water, varied only by the fish swimming past.

The wind shifts and he inhales a rich, acrid odor that scrapes against the roof of his mouth and hollows out his throat. Skunk. He gags.

Where? He looks all around the small space, but it’s not in the building with him. It must be somewhere outside. The click of his shutter must have startled it.

He tiptoes to the doorway and searches the shore for the bright white tail, listens for the scratching of its claws on the ground. Leaves rustle in the breeze. It’s gone, disappearing into the brush as silently as it had appeared. He takes a few pictures of the shore before heading back home.

A car’s turning out of his cul-de-sac and onto the road, the light from its headlights racing across the trees in front of him. He jumps back just in time. Some headlights are safe and others aren’t. There’s no way to tell which are which. Yoshi’s told him that being blind is no big deal.
You get used to it
, she’s said, but what good is a photographer who can’t see? He waits for the growl of the engine to fade into the distance before stepping out of hiding.

The reporters’ vans are still there, so he takes the back way, walking behind Amy’s house, stepping over the crumbling logs that line her yard from where the old neighbors kept their firewood.

“Well, hello,” someone says, and he freezes, his face red. It’s Holly and she’s sitting right there on her deck in a folding lawn chair.

“Hi,” he says. “Sorry,” he adds.

Light shines down from an upstairs window, shining on her head and shoulders, the tops of her legs. He averts his gaze.

“Don’t your parents mind you wandering around late at night?” she says.

Is she threatening to tell them? But no, her voice holds no challenge, just mild curiosity. “I can take care of myself,” he says.

“I suppose it’s different when you’re a guy.”

Guy
, she said. Not
boy
. Is this how she sees him? The thought warms him. What’s she doing, sitting out here in the dark by herself? He goes closer, walking across the grass. He thinks she’s smiling, but he’s not sure.

“So what do you do?” she says. “When you walk around?”

He can’t tell her he looks in people’s windows. He knows how creepy that sounds. “Take pictures,” he says, which is something even Zach doesn’t know.
Cool
, Zach would say, but then he’d talk about football practice or the car show or the trip to New Orleans his parents dragged him on.

“Of what?” she says, and she sounds interested.

“Animals, mostly.”

“And little boys who don’t brush their teeth?”

She’s making a joke, wrapping it around the two of them. “Yeah.”

“You can pull over a chair, you know. I don’t bite.”

There are more chairs leaning against the wall. The old neighbors used to have a big glass table with rocking chairs all around it, but it went with them when they moved. He unfolds a chair and sets it up beside Holly, but not too close.

“Want some lemonade?” she says.

“I’m okay.” That’s the thing about Holly, maybe the thing he likes best. She’s never asked him what it felt like to have to hide from the sun, whether he thought about dying, or if he was afraid. She never goes to that place that matters so much to everyone else.

There’s a tiny spurt of fire, and he sees she’s lit a cigarette. He doesn’t mind. He kind of likes the smell of it. “So what do you think?” she says in a voice that tells him she’s letting him in on something.
“Do you think it’s better to have dreams and lose them, or not to have dreams at all?”

He’s not sure what kind of dreams she’s talking about. He’s never heard of anyone losing a dream. Forgetting one, maybe. “I don’t know,” he says, hearing how lame that sounds, feeling very much like a
boy
and not like a
guy
.

“What about you?” She blows out some smoke that curls around in the air and disappears. “What do you want to do with your life?”

Oh. Those kinds of dreams. His mom’s told him that he can grow up to be whatever he wants, but they both know that’s impossible.
He can never be a lifeguard, never work in an office building. There are so many things he can never be. “A photographer. Or an astronaut.” Why not?

“That’s a good dream. Maybe I could be an astronaut, too.”

Sure. They could both grow up and fly in spaceships.

“I don’t know anything about the stars, though,” she says. “I don’t even know where the Big Dipper is.”

“Really?” As soon as he says that, he wishes he could take the word back. It makes it sound like he thinks she’s stupid. But she doesn’t seem to notice. “I have a telescope. I can show you sometime.”

He knows all about stars. He’s spent hours studying them through his telescope. At one point he even thought he’d be an astronomer. Space is constantly expanding, stretching galaxies farther and farther apart. And maybe somewhere there’s a space for someone like him. “Why would somebody have a cage in their house?”

“Like what kind of cage?”

“A big one.”

“A dog, maybe?”

Not a dog.

She sighs. “How did I end up married with two kids?”

His mom gave up her career when he was diagnosed. When Zach’s mom went back to work, because she was
going nuts staying at home
and her
brain was rotting
, Tyler asked his mom if she wanted to go back, too, and she gave him a funny look and said,
No way, Jose
. “You must have been a great actress.”

She looks at him. Has he said the wrong thing? But her mouth curves into a smile. She taps the ash from the end of her cigarette. “What a sweetie you are.”

But Tyler hears her real words.
I see you
.

EVE

S
omeone’s shaking her awake. She opens her eyes and sees a blurry figure bending over her. It’s Tyler. She sits up, suddenly alert, heart pounding. “What is it? Are you okay?”