The Deepest Secret (3 page)

He’s tried to explain to Zach why this is so cool.
It’s like running a touchdown
, he’d said, and Zach had nodded.
I get it
, he’d said, though Tyler’s not sure he does.

He takes another picture. At the soft
click
, the woman looks around. He holds his breath, heart pounding. But she doesn’t spot him standing there motionless in his dark clothes and she turns her attention back to the man, and after a few minutes, they walk away, still talking softly.

He goes over to the bridge and shines his flashlight down into the water. Minnows dart in every direction, shivery brown shapes. Rosemary had once told him that fish stayed awake all night, just like him. That had comforted him, knowing that someone else was awake besides him and the crickets.

Rosemary had liked crawling around in the mucky creek with him, never freaking if something crawly touched her or plopped into the water beside them. His mom worried because Rosemary was old, and might fall and hurt herself, but Rosemary had laughed and said
she’d lose it if she didn’t use it. So his mom had stopped telling him he couldn’t go and instead had gotten him his first cell phone.
If anything happens
, she told him,
push this button and I’ll come right away
. But Rosemary never did fall. She fell asleep one day and never woke up.

He reaches the stand of red cedars, their long gnarled branches poking up and their wrinkly mess of leaves hanging low. Squeezing between them, he shrugs down his hood and yanks off his gloves. The air is cool against his palms and he flexes his fingers, scooping up the freshness. He sets his tripod on the dirt and screws on his camera. He plugs in the remote switch and checks the f-stop and shutter speed. Pulling out his cell phone, he sits down to wait.

Facebook’s quiet. Everyone’s asleep, probably. They have to get up early for Orientation. It’s all Zach talked about at the party, him and the other guys. Everyone’s meeting at Timmy Ho’s beforehand for doughnuts. They’ve got one mom driving them to school, and another one picking them up. Then everyone’s going to the North Pool for one last swim before the season’s over. Tyler’s studied pictures online of the North Pool, the sparkling water and bright red tubes curving up to the sky. It seems like a pretty good place to have a party.

Leaves rustle. He sucks in his breath, leans forward to peer through the branches.

Something tall and ghostlike drifts into the clearing. It’s that doe. He’s glimpsed her before, nibbling on Charlotte’s tomato plants. Two smaller shapes meander after her. A one-year-old and the brand-new one, speckled and small. They float across the ground, pausing to eat the plants growing here and there. His blog followers will love this. They’re always complaining that his images are too far away. So he waits, finger hovering above the button, then presses down. The shutter clicks as loud as a firecracker. The three deer crash away through the trees, and a moment later, it’s as if they were never there. He feels bad that he interrupted their meal and hopes he got a picture
to show for it. He stands, stretches. He’s got twenty more minutes until his sunscreen starts to wear off. He’s already had three lesions carved out of him. The scars form a triangle on his right calf. No recurrence yet, but he’s seen the tightness on his mom’s face when her gaze rests on it. She hasn’t noticed the burn on his arm. He wishes it would hurry up and go away before she does.

Across the street, light flickers in the living room window at Amy’s house. Someone’s watching TV. Curious, he crosses the street and goes up to the window. An opened bag of chips sits on the coffee table, and a can of soda sits tilted on the arm of the couch. Charlotte would be really pissed if she saw that, but she’s not there. No one is.

The stove light’s on, a comforting circle of light in the darkness. His mom leaves theirs on when he’s feverish and sleeping on the living room couch. He’ll lift his head from the cushions, see the glow tunneling out from the kitchen beyond, and know his mom’s nearby. He goes closer to the glass and there’s Amy, hauling a kitchen chair across the floor. She rocks it into place in front of the pantry and climbs up. Reaching high to the top shelf, she brings down a package of cookies. When she jumps to the floor, her short nightgown flies up.

Amy had insisted he open her present first and she’d pushed in to stand beside him when he blew out the candles. When Charlotte told her it was time to go, Amy had climbed onto the trampoline instead. Everyone’s jumping had bounced her against him.
I hate Robbie
, she’d said, and when Tyler said Robbie wasn’t so bad, she’d narrowed her eyes and leaned closer with chocolate cake breath.
He just pretends to be nice
, she’d hissed.
He calls me a little bitch and he calls you vampire boy
.

It’s time to go home. Dante may be online and wanting to game. Too bad Tyler caught Alex cheating. It used to be fun to play with him, too.

The houses all around him are dark. There’s only the quiet tapping of his shoes on the sidewalk. The wind shivers through the cul-de-sac,
loosing a blizzard of small leaves that rain down on him. He stops, delighted, and holds out his hands, lifts up his face to let the leaves gently pelt him. They swirl around him like he imagines butterflies might. They tickle his skin. They dance along the ground.

This is me
, he thinks.
I am here, a part of all of this
.

EVE

W
here was he? Pressing her cell phone to her ear, Eve looks through the window as though she could conjure the sight of David, arriving home in a taxi or maybe in a rental car. Up the street, Charlotte’s porch light shines through the gloom. She wonders how Charlotte’s date with Robbie went. There’s an urgency to her friend’s relationship with her boyfriend that makes Eve uneasy. Robbie’s asked Charlotte to move in with him.
You caught him reading your email
, Eve had protested.
Going through your texts. You can’t live with someone like that!
And what about Amy, who’s already suffered through her parents’ divorce and clearly dislikes Robbie? But Charlotte won’t listen.
I’ll make sure Amy’s okay with it. Children are more resilient than we give them credit for
, she’d said, and Eve had thought sadly,
Not all of them
.

Three rings, four. She hangs up before his voicemail picks up.
The blinds rap against the glass; a cool breeze gusts in. A storm’s on its way.

Tyler’s on the floor behind her, game controller in hand. This is their time together. This has always been the best time, her favorite part of the day, when it’s just the two of them. They can talk about anything and everything, and for these few minutes, life feels limitless with possibility. Her beautiful boy, with his creamy skin and piercing blue eyes. His eyelashes are long and dark, his hair black like hers but curly like David’s. It falls over his forehead and hides his eyes; it protects the nape of his neck. He’s been begging for a haircut, arguing that he’d put on extra sunscreen, wear a ball cap even indoors. How terrible to deny him such a small request.

Down the hall, Melissa’s alarm clocks blare like deranged donkeys. She has three of them set around her room. In order to silence them, she has to get up and turn each one off.

“Breakfast is ready,” she says, and Tyler pushes himself up from the floor to follow her into the kitchen. He’s tall and gangly, awkward with his new growth and height. He’s lost his sweet baby profile—his jaw is firm now instead of curved; there’s a small bump on the bridge of his nose, the cartilage growing in. Just the other day, she spotted golden fuzz beneath his lower lip. It’s impossible to think he’d be shaving soon. The doctor predicts Tyler will be six feet tall when he’s done growing, maybe six feet two inches. The doctor gives this information to Eve as though this is a gift, and all Eve can think is how utterly normal her son is in every way, how utterly healthy in every way but one.

She glances at the chart taped by the door, then at the clock. They’ve got forty-three minutes. Tyler’s classmates are probably just waking up, getting ready for Orientation. Tyler hasn’t said a word about starting high school. Eve had tried to arrange it so that he’d be in at least one class with his friends, but there’d been too many obstacles. David had told her that this wasn’t too surprising, given how many kids were in the freshman class, but Eve couldn’t help but
wonder. Zach may have wanted separation, and his mother had put in a request.

She forks a steaming waffle onto his plate. “Guess what? I got another client. You’ll never guess what she writes. Werewolf mysteries.”

“Cool.” He sits with his arm curved around his plate as though afraid someone will snatch it from him. He eats in big bites, barely chewing, the way he always does. He’s impatient to get through life. She’s the one who wants to slow it down.

“I was thinking you could animate the werewolf’s eyes and make them look as if they’re glowing.”

He raises his head, and she feels hopeful. But all he says is, “Yeah, maybe.”

As he reaches for the syrup, she sees it—the red mark on the inside of his elbow. “What’s that?” she says. She can barely hear her own voice.

He shrugs, goes to pour the syrup, but she’s grabbed his wrist, taken the bottle from his hand. “Mom,” he protests, but she’s turning his arm over to peer at the skin. Maybe just an indentation from lying on something, maybe a simple scratch? She runs the side of her thumb gently across the area. It’s flat, warm to the touch.
Please, God. Let this be a normal, ordinary adolescent pimple
. But it’s not. She’d known it the moment she’d spotted it. It’s too big, maybe an inch long, and it has a definite boundary where a sleeve rode up, exposing the tender flesh. A sunburn. “When did this happen?”

“I don’t know, Mom. Come on.”

But he does know. Of course he does. Why won’t he admit it? She scans the kitchen for her cell phone, spots it lying on the counter beside the waffle maker, and goes to fetch it. “Hold out your arm, honey.”

Obediently, he stretches out his arm and she aims her phone, taps the button. The shutter clicks. She brings the phone closer and takes another picture, turns his wrist to let the light fall differently.
A third picture, a fourth. She’ll send the images to the doctor’s office right away, then wait the interminable hours until the office opens and the dermatologist can review them and get back to her.

“Can I eat now?” Tyler says and she nods, her mind elsewhere.

When was the last time her son wore short sleeves outside? When was the last time he was even out of her sight? Then she knows: Saturday evening. She’d run to the store, a quick trip, and returned to find David and Tyler collapsed on the couch, panting. They’d just come in from playing basketball, and as she unloaded the groceries, she’d been happy to know they’d spent that time together. “Dad let you take off your hoodie, didn’t he?”

“It was hot,” Tyler mumbles.

And then a car must have driven past, flashing its headlights across her son, trapping him. Fear sweeps over her, anger, and at the heart of it all, helplessness. She can’t even leave her son alone with her husband for thirty minutes.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Tyler says. “Dad covered me.”

But not quickly enough. Tyler’s watching her, his fork halfway to his mouth. He’s protecting his father, when it should be the other way around.

“Absolutely,” she says, but of course it’s not. It’s been almost a week; the burn should have faded by now. What does that mean? Not every exposure is equal. Some inflict damage; some can be benign. The terrible thing is not knowing which is which. She forces a reassuring smile on her face, and after a moment, Tyler forks off another bite of food.

She pours more batter and lowers the lid on the waffle maker. All’s quiet from Melissa’s room. Suspiciously quiet. “I’ll go get your sister,” she says.

Melissa lies tangled in her sheets, breathing through her mouth, the way she did as a baby, with her hand curled tight beneath her chin. When Melissa was tiny, she would rub her right foot back and forth to soothe herself to sleep, and Eve would later find the sock
wedged between the mattress and the crib.
Why the right foot?
Eve had mused, and David had replied,
I don’t know
, and they’d laughed.

Eve flips on the overhead light. Melissa groans and rolls over. “You don’t want to miss your ride,” Eve warns.

“I
know
.”

Back in the kitchen, she uncaps the bottle of vitamin D pills and shakes one into her palm. Tyler takes it and swallows it down with a big gulp of milk. “Want me to make you another waffle?” she asks.

“I’m okay,” he says.

Dr. Brien might ask her to take some more pictures, or he might tell her to bring Tyler in right away. She glances to the dark window. They were predicting rain, a blessing.

Melissa shuffles in. Her face is puffy, her hair hanging loose. This is her purest self, the one that’s just for family. She’s already in her jodhpurs and wearing the T-shirt with the name of the stable stitched across the front. It looks a little tight. She’s growing so fast. Eve’s always running her old clothes to the donation center, or passing them on to Charlotte for Amy.