The Deepest Secret (37 page)

Her mind is spinning. She isn’t prepared for this. She hadn’t seen it coming. She’s never even met Adrian’s parents. “Condoms aren’t enough. You know that, right? You need to get on birth control.” She doesn’t want her daughter having sex in the backseat of a car or somewhere where she might not take the time to be careful. “I’ll call my doctor and get you in right away. She’s very nice. You’ll like her.” She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t want to be talking to her little girl about going to the gynecologist. She wants to go back to when it was the pediatrician and stickers if Melissa was good and lollipops when there were shots.

“Just forget it.”

“Of course I can’t forget it.”

“I knew you’d be like this.”

“Do his parents know?” What do people do? Do they discuss this; does she tell them their son’s been sexually active?

“Oh, my God. You can’t call his mom. You can’t!” Something small and silvery falls onto Melissa’s jeans-clad thigh and darkens the denim.

“Oh, honey. I know you’re embarrassed …”

Melissa’s shaking her head, scrubbing her eyes with her fingers. “I thought he loved me.”

Her heart just sinks. “Who? Adrian?”

“He won’t even text me. What did I do wrong?” Her voice is so small. She sounds so lost and confused. Her head is bent, her hair falling forward to hide her face.

“Oh, my darling.” She takes her daughter’s hand in hers, warm and soft. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“He’s dating Sherry now. Sherry!”

“I know it hurts. I know.” She remembers all those moments that felt like the end of the world, when everything loomed so large.

Melissa looks at her. “I hate him.”

Eve nods. “I hate him, too.”

“He said I was special.”

“You
are
special. He’s a jerk.”

Melissa’s face crumples. “Don’t tell Dad.”

Eve leans across the console and pulls her daughter into her arms. There had been a time when it would have been unthinkable not to tell something so important to David. “I won’t,” she promises against the soft silkiness of Melissa’s hair. “I won’t say anything.”

Eve’s mother had worried the entire time Eve was pregnant with Melissa.
Are you taking your vitamins? Are you sleeping on your left side? What does the doctor say—is he worried about how little weight you’ve gained?
When Eve’s due date had come and gone, Eve’s mother went into a frenzy of phone calls.
Are you having any contractions? Can you feel the baby moving?
And Eve had smiled and reassured her mother.
The baby’s fine. I think it’s going to be a girl. We heard the heartbeat. She’ll come when she’s ready
. She’d never felt so at peace. It had been magical, the deep and intimate connection she’d felt to this tiny creature known only by a flurry of kicks and hiccups. And when Melissa finally arrived, eleven days late, Eve had cradled her infant daughter to her—her wide blue eyes and plump rosy cheeks, one hand beneath her chin, her perfect, tiny fingers grasping.
Here you are
, she’d whispered.

Now Melissa’s teetering on the verge of becoming a woman. She
needs her mother more than ever. Who else can help her navigate these treacherous waters and find her balance through all the emotional upheaval and heartache to come? All those times Eve didn’t see. All those moments she let slip by.

Melissa’s sobbing, her breath hot against Eve’s neck. Eve tightens her hold on her daughter. “I’m here,” she says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

DAVID

S
uspicion is an oily substance. It clings to him at night, soaks into his pores, fills his vision. It trails behind him as he talks to clients. It sloshes in his ears, dulling other noises, making him ask people to repeat things, until Renée looks at him with a worried frown and says, “You okay?”

He should call the police. That detective will tell him what’s going on. It wouldn’t seem suspicious for David to ask. After all, he has a vested interest. It’s his neighborhood, and his wife and Charlotte are best friends. But he doesn’t even know the man’s name. He tries to convince himself that he’s imagining things. Eve’s no coward. She would never lie to protect herself. She would never allow their daughter to be suspected for a crime she’d committed. He has no reason to doubt her, but still he finds himself going over and over
her description of how she’d damaged the fender, and try as he might, he just can’t see it.

He calls her on his cell phone. He’s standing in the stairwell. It’s a small landing, three paces by three, but it’s private.

“David?”

His knees go weak at the perfect ordinariness of her voice. This will be okay. He’d made a mistake. Amy’s death has affected him more deeply than he’d realized. It’s pushed him into a very dark place. “Hey, I had a few minutes. I thought I’d check in, see if you’ve heard anything more from the police.”

“No, nothing. Charlotte came by last night. It was awful.”

“What happened?”

“She’d heard that Melissa lied about going out that night. I tried to talk to her, make her see, but she wouldn’t listen. The kids were so upset. And David—Melissa’s been drinking. I found empties in her room. Can you believe it? She won’t tell me where she got it from, but it must have been someone’s older brother or sister. I had no idea. Did you?”

“Well, no, but I’m not that surprised. All teenagers drink.”

“You sound like Melissa. But they don’t, you know. I didn’t. Not at sixteen.”

“I only meant it could be worse. You don’t think she has a problem, do you? Is that why she’s been acting out these past few months?” They haven’t talked like this in a long time, close, confiding, united in their concerns and on the same side.

“No, I think she was experimenting. She’s not hanging out with that crowd anymore. And now she knows we know. I can’t punish her. I’ve already taken away her phone, the car, Facebook. I hate to make her more miserable. I mean, she’s a good kid. She’s a really good kid. She’s just made a few mistakes.”

“Right,” he says. “Everyone makes mistakes. Like driving into the air pump.” He hears the soft intake of breath, a hiccup of surprise.

Silence. “I said I was sorry about that, David.” Her voice is suddenly cool. It helps to hear the change. It braces him to say, “Tell me again. How exactly did you run into it?” He wishes he could see her face.

“I took the turn too quickly. I was upset. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Did anyone see?”

“What are you getting at? Why are we talking about this?”

“You had to get the fender fixed.”

“Are you
kidding
me?” Her voice is pitched high, breathless. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

He can’t tell. He can’t tell. She’d embraced him at the airport. God help him, he thought it was because she’d been worried about him. “You were on that road around that time. You were wet.”
Tell me. Convince me
. “The police are looking for a hit-and-run driver.”

“And you think it’s me? Do you really? Do you really think I could do something like that and not tell you? That I could let Charlotte suffer the way she has? Is that what you think of me?”

A long, shocked second that holds everything weightless. He feels ashamed. She’d never allow their daughter to be suspected for something she’d done. What had he been thinking? He hadn’t been. All rational thought had left him. What kind of man would suspect his wife of killing a child and covering it up? “I’m sorry, honey.” And he is. He’s sorry for all the things that have gone wrong between them. Too many to count.

VANISHING POINT

I
t’s not Detective Irwin at the door but Albert, clutching a bunch of black-eyed Susans in a twist of waxed paper. “Hey, Tyler.” Tyler looks beyond Albert to the street. There’s no car headed toward him; there’s no tall man with square shoulders coming up the path in the darkness. Everything looks normal: the cars parked in driveways and the porch lights shining.

“Oh, Albert,” his mom says, taking the flowers. “They’re lovely. Thank you.”

She’d been talking loudly on the phone that afternoon, so loudly that the sound had pulled Tyler over to the vent in the floor of his room, where he’d kneeled and tried to hear what was going on. She wouldn’t tell him why when he came out of his room. She just waved a hand and said it was
a difficult time
, but he suspects it’s much more than that.
Is it Melissa?
he wanted to know.
Did the police arrest her?
That would be just like it, for something big like that to happen while he sat around trapped in his room, staring at the clock. His mom’s face had changed and she’d stopped and put her hands on his shoulders.
I don’t want you to worry about Melissa. Nothing’s going to happen to her. I promise
.

That’s what she’d said about Yoshi.

They sit around the patio table, the flowers standing stiff in a glass vase his mom pulled out from beneath the sink. Brittany’s over, which should make everything feel normal but now it just feels like an echo of how things used to be. No one’s laughing or talking, not even Albert, who likes to tell stories about when he was a kid. Tyler’s heard the one about how he had to walk three miles to school each day or how he used to deliver both the morning paper
and
the evening one. Brittany keeps sneaking looks at Melissa, who sits there with her chin in her hand.

“How was the barn?” his mom asks.

Melissa doesn’t say anything. Brittany glances at her, then answers. “We got to see the new foal. She looks exactly like Vi. She has the same spot on her nose and everything.”

“What did they name her?”

“They’re having a contest. I put in Polka Dot.”

“Oh, how cute.”

It’s not cute. It’s a stupid name.

“How’s photography going?” his mom asks him.

“Okay.” He’d spent hours trying to make that film-developing bag work. It’s not as easy as it had first appeared. He had to stick his hands through two sleeves and fumble around feeding the film onto the wire roll. For some reason, his hands didn’t want to do what his brain was telling them, and the film kept sliding out of his fingers. He had to keep putting it down and walking around to cool off. He’d wished he could call his teacher and ask for advice. But what would the dude do, drive over to take a look?

At last, he’d found the courage to pull his arms out of the sleeves
and open the bag to examine the closed black reel. He’d followed the directions his teacher had given the class, adding chemicals, agitating, pouring in the cold water rinse. When he unscrewed the top, the film had dropped into his hand, a slick brown coil.

A loud clatter from Holly’s house next door makes him jump. Everyone looks over. Holly’s bedroom light is on, shining through the window down onto his backyard.

“I ran into our new neighbor at the library yesterday,” Albert says in a low voice. “She was walking across the parking lot and her little boy was running after her, crying.”

“It’s hard when the kids are so young,” his mom says.

“You’d know better, of course, but the look on her face worried me. Her husband works all the time. I think she must be lonely.”

His mom looks over, but it’s quiet now.

“Maybe she needs a babysitter,” Albert says. “Why don’t you ask her, Melissa?”

Melissa slams her palm on the table, making them all jump. “Why did you have to say anything? You made everything worse!”

“Melissa,” his mom says.

“I didn’t know,” Albert says. “The detective asked me what I’d seen that night. I told him the truth.”

“It’s okay, Mel,” Brittany says. “The police just need to find the real person. Then they’ll leave you alone.”

Any moment now, the world will break apart, cleanly dividing the now that holds Melissa in it from the time when she’ll be gone. She didn’t mean to kill Amy, Tyler knows. It had been an accident, but that doesn’t matter. It’s criminal vehicular homicide. She’ll go to prison for years, and when she comes back, she won’t be the same. And he won’t be around to see it.

The point at which two parallel lines appear to meet at the horizon but don’t really is called the vanishing point. Tyler’s photography
teacher had been surprised none of them had heard the term before.
Imagine that you’re walking down a country road
, he’d said.
If you look straight ahead, you’ll see the sides of the road come together at a point. But that point doesn’t exist. It’s an optical illusion
. That’s their assignment this week, to take pictures of the impossible: a man holding up a building, fish swimming against the sky.
Have fun with it
, their teacher had said.

Tyler looks up at the velvety black sky, peppered with bright white dots. Stars are optical illusions, too. They all shine bright, but some of them are dead, just their dying light traveling through space to earth and fooling people. No one can tell which ones are still burning and which ones died hundreds of years ago.

Up at the corner, the gray pavement grows brighter. A car’s coming. He ducks behind a tree and throws up his arm to cover his face. The car growls to a stop nearby, silences. He hears the engine ticking. The slam of the door and the swift tapping of heels. It’s Sophie. He lowers his arm, peers around the tree. She clacks up onto her porch. She’ll let herself inside and start turning on her lights, and then Tyler can step out from his hiding place.

But the lights don’t come on. Instead, Sophie appears on her porch, holding onto the railing, her face pale in the dim light. Then she runs down the steps and right past Tyler, to Dr. Cipriano’s front door. Tyler leans forward and sees her reach for the heavy knocker. Over and over, she bangs it against the metal plate.

Lights flash on at Dr. Cipriano’s house. The front door opens, and Tyler ducks back. “Sophie?”

“I’m sorry to wake you, Neil.”

“You okay? What’s wrong?”

“Did you see anyone hanging around my house earlier tonight?”

“No.”

“I just got home … I know this sounds silly.”

“Go on.”

“My welcome mat’s turned around. It’s facing the wrong way.”